Shetland Islands
The Shetlanders believe in two kinds of trows, as they call the Scandinavian trolls, those of the land and those of the sea. The former, whom, like the Scots, they also term the guid folk and guid neighbors, they conceive to inhabit the interior of green hills. Saining (blessing oneself) is the grand protection against them; a Shetlander always sains himself when passing by their hills. They have all the picking and stealing propensities of the Scandinavian trolls.
Lying-in women and "unchristened bairns" they regard as lawful prize. The former they employ as wet nurses, the latter they of course rear up as their own. Nothing will induce parents to show any attention to a child that they suspect of being a changeling. But there are persons who undertake to enter the hills and regain the lost child.
A tailor, not long since, related the following story. He was employed to work at a farm house where there was a child that was an idiot, and who was supposed to have been left there by the trows instead of some proper child, whom they had taken into the hills.
One night, after he had retired to his bed, leaving the idiot asleep by the fire, he was suddenly waked out of his sleep by the sound of music, and on looking about him he saw the whole room full of fairies, who were dancing away their rounds most joyously. Suddenly the idiot jumped up and joined in the dance, and showed such a degree of acquaintance with the various steps and movements as plainly testified that it must have been a long time since he first went under the hands of the dancing master. The tailor looked on for some time with admiration, but at last he grew alarmed and sained himself.
On hearing this, the trows all fled in the utmost disorder, but one of them, a woman, was so incensed at this interruption of their revels, that as she went out she touched the big toe of the tailor, and he lost the power of ever after moving it.
Abstracted from Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology (1850), pp. 164-166. Keightley's souce: Dr. Hibbert, Description of the Shetland Islands (1822).
