The Six Swans
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The Six Swans is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. It is tale number 49, and Aarne-Thompson type 451, the brothers who were turned into birds.
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[edit] Synopsis
Six brothers have been turned into swans by their evil stepmother. They can only take their human forms for fifteen minutes every evening. In order to free them, their sister must make six shirts out of starwort for her brothers, and neither speak nor laugh for six years. A king finds her doing this, is taken by her beauty and marries her. When the Queen has given birth to their first child, the King's wicked mother takes away the child and accuses the Queen, and again with the second and the third. The third time, the Queen is sentenced to be burned at the stake. On the day of her execution, she has all but finished making the shirts for her brothers; only the last shirt misses a left arm. When she is brought to the stake she takes the shirts with her, and when she is about to be burned, six swans come flying through the air. She throws the shirts over her brothers and they regain their human form, except for the youngest brother, who is left with a swan's wing instead of a left arm. The Queen, now free to speak, can defend herself against the accusations. Her mother-in-law is burned at the stake instead.
[edit] Commentary
The mother-in-law's hostility to her son's marriage is a motif in common with Perrault's version of Sleeping Beauty, and it is repeated in the variant The Twelve Wild Ducks, where the woman is modified to the king's stepmother.
[edit] Modern interpretations
Daughter of the Forest, the first part of Juliet Marillier's Sevenwaters Trilogy is a re-telling of the fairy tale, in an ancient Celtic setting.
