Since Tithe is set in a modern faerieland, all of my current links have to do with faeries. Although there are a lot of other resources available on the Web, I have also given a short list of important faerie folklore books at the bottom of this page.

The word "changeling" is used both for the human child that is stolen and for whatever decoy is left behind. D. L. Ashliman, at the University of Pittsburgh, put together a collection of changeling legends and poems, including his essay on the subject.

The lines at the beginning of Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale are from the Ballad of Tam Lin. They are::

"And pleasant is the fairy land,
But, an eerie tale to tell,
Ay at the end of seven years,
We pay a tiend to hell,
I am sae fair and fu o flesh,
I'm feard it be mysel."

I substituted the word "tithe," a translation of the word "tiend." If you would like to learn more about Tam Lin, Abigail Acland has put together a comprehensive list of different versions of the ballad as well as related information. You might also want to look at the traditional ballad index for information on other popular faery ballads.

For an general outline of faerie society, Mika Loponen wrote a paper that includes a discussion on the various names for faeries, general types of faeries, faerie gentry, and faerie mortality.

For further reading, I would recommend William Butler Yeat's Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, W.Y. Evans-Wentz's The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries, and anything at all by Katharine Briggs. There are many, many more excellent books on faeries, but most, if not all, can be traced from the references of these books. If you don't mind reading online, Phillip J. Brown has put together a wonderful collection of source texts on his website, including Evans-Wentz and Yeats.