The Six Swans
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The Six Swans is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm.[1] It is tale number 49, and Aarne-Thompson type 451, the brothers who were turned into birds. Andrew Lang included a variant in The Yellow Fairy Book.[2]
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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 (in some versions she does not finish the sixth shirt in time, and the youngest brother is left as a swan.) 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,[3] and it is repeated in the variant The Twelve Wild Ducks, where the woman is modified to the king's stepmother.
This tale, like The Twelve Brothers, The Seven Ravens, and Brother and Sister, features a woman rescuing her brothers. In the era and region in which it was collected, many men were drafted by kings for soldiers, to be sent as mercenaries. As a consequence, many men made their daughter their heirs; however, they also exerted more control over them and their marriages as a consequence. The stories have been interpreted as a wish by women for the return of their brothers, freeing them from this control.[4] However, the issues of when the stories were collected are unclear, and stories of this type have been found in many other cultures, where this issue can not have inspired them.[5]
Some folklorists connect this tale to the more general practice of ultimogeniture, in which the youngest child would inherit.[6]
[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.
[edit] See also
- The Seven Ravens
- The Raven
- Udea and her Seven Brothers
- The Wild Swans
- The Twelve Brothers
- Retelling in Jim Henson's The Storyteller
[edit] References
- ^ Jacob and Wilheim Grimm, Grimm's Fairy Tales, "The Six Swans"
- ^ Andrew Lang, The Yellow Fairy Book, "The Six Swans"
- ^ Maria Tatar, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, p 230 W. W. Norton & company, London, New York, 2004 ISBN 0-393-05848-4
- ^ Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World, p 72, ISBN 0-312-29380-1
- ^ Jack Zipes, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World, p 75, ISBN 0-312-29380-1
- ^ Jack Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, p 641, ISBN 0-393-97636-X
