The Wild Swans

The Wild Swans (Danish: De vilde svaner) is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a princess who rescues her 11 brothers from a spell cast by an evil queen. The tale was first published on 2 October 1838 in Andersen's Fairy Tales Told for Children. New Collection. First Booklet (Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Ny Samling. Første Hefte) by C. A. Reitzel in Copenhagen, Denmark. It has been adapted to various media including ballet, television, and film.

For other uses, see Wild Swans (disambiguation).
"The Wild Swans"
"The Wild Swans" by E. Stuart Hardy
AuthorHans Christian Andersen
Original title"De vilde svaner"
CountryDenmark
LanguageDanish
Genre(s)Literary fairy tale
Published inFairy Tales Told for Children. New Collection. First Booklet (Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Ny Samling. Første Hefte)
Publication typeFairy tale collection
PublisherC. A. Reitzel
Media typePrint
Publication date2 October 1838
Preceded by"The Steadfast Tin Soldier"

It is categorized as an Aarne-Thompson type 451 ("The Brothers Who Were Turned into Birds").[1] Other type 451 variants include such as The Twelve Brothers, The Six Swans, The Seven Ravens, The Twelve Wild Ducks and Udea and her Seven Brothers.[2]

Synopsis
Illustration from 'the book Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1872

In a faraway kingdom, there lives a widowed king with his twelve children: eleven princes and one princess. One day, he decides to remarry, but marries a wicked queen who is a female wizard. Out of spite, the queen turns her eleven stepsons into beautiful swans (they are allowed to become human when the sunsets and day time is over.) and forces them to fly away. The queen then tries to bewitch their 15-year-old sister Elisa, but Elisa's goodness is not weak for this, so the queen has her banished. The brothers carry Elisa to safety in a foreign land where she is out of the reach of her evil stepmother.

There, Elisa is guided by the queen of the fairies to gather stinging nettles in graveyards to knit into shirts that will eventually help her brothers regain their human shapes. Elisa endures painfully blistered hands from nettle stings, and she must also take a vow of silence for the duration of her task (project management), for speaking one word will kill herself and her brothers. The handsome king of another faraway land happens to come across Elisa who cannot talk and falls in love with her. He grants her a room in his castle where she continues her knitting. Eventually he proposes to crown her as his queen and wife, and she accepts.

However, the Archbishop is chagrined because he thinks Elisa is herself a witch, but the king will not believe him. One night Elisa runs out of nettles and is forced to collect more in a nearby church graveyard where the Archbishop is watching. Ghoulish spirits that devour the bodies of the dead are also in the churchyard, and the archbishop believes that Elisa is in league with them. He reports the incident to the king as proof of witchcraft. The statues of the saints shake their heads in protest, but the Archbishop misinterprets this sign as confirmation of Elisa's guilt. The Archbishop orders Elisa put on trial for witchcraft. She can speak no word in her defense, and is sentenced to death by burning at the stake.

The brothers discover Elisa's plight and try to speak to the king but fail, thwarted by the rising sun. Even as the tumbril bears Elisa away to execution, she continues knitting, determined to continue up to the last moment of her life. This enrages the people, who are on the brink of snatching and ripping the shirts into pieces when the swans descend and rescue Elisa. The people interpret this as a sign from Heaven that Elisa is innocent while she finishes the last shirt, but the executioner still prepares for the burning. When Elisa throws the shirts over the swans, her brothers return to their human forms. tip: in some stories of the wild swans: (unfortunately, the youngest brother has a swan's wing instead of an arm, as Elisa did not have time to finish one sleeve of his shirt). Elisa is now free to speak and tell the truth but faints from exhaustion, so her brothers explain. As they do so, the firewood around Elisa's stake miraculously takes root and bursts into flowers. The king plucks the topmost flower and places it on Elisa's chest. She is revived by the white flower, and the king and Elisa are married.

Variants

Danish folktale collector Mathias Winther collected a similar tale named De elleve Svaner (English: "The Eleven Swans"), first published in 1823.[3][4]

Adaptations

See also

References
  1. Frankel, Valerie Estelle (2014). From Girl to Goddess: The Heroine's Journey Through Myth and Legend. McFarland and Co. pp. 15–17. ISBN 9780786457892.
  2. Ashliman, D. L. (2013). "The Twelve Brothers". University of Pittsburgh. Retrieved 2020-05-22.
  3. Winther, Matthias. Danske Folkeeventyr, samlede. (Gesammelte dänische Volksmärchen). Kjobehavn: 1823. pp. 7-11.
  4. Winther, Matthias. Danish Folk Tales. Translated by T. Sands and James Rhea Massengale. Department of Scandinavian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. 1989. pp. 5-11.

Further reading
  • Williams, Christy. "The Silent Struggle: Autonomy for the MaidenWho Seeks Her Brothers." The Comparatist 30 (2006): 81-100. www.jstor.org/stable/26237126.
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