Swan maiden

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In the Völundarkviða, Wayland Smith and his brothers marry valkyries who dress in swan skins. They turn out to be hard to keep.

The Swan Maiden is a mythical creature who shapeshifts from human form to swan form.^[1]^[2] Despite the name, males are found in a small number of legends. The key to the transformation is usually a swan skin, or a garment with swan feathers attached.

1 Typical legend
2 Animal wife motif
3 Fiction
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Typical legend

The folktales usually adhere to the following basic plot. A young, unmarried man steals a magic robe made of swan feathers from a swan maiden so that she will not fly away, and winds up marrying her. Usually she bears his children. When the children are older they sing a song about where their father has hidden their mother's robe, or one asks why the mother always weeps, and finds the cloak for her, or they otherwise betray the secret. The swan maiden immediately gets her robe and disappears to where she came from. Although leaving the children may grieve her, she does not take them with her.

If the husband is able to find her again, it is an arduous quest, and often the impossibility is clear enough that he does not even try.

[edit] Animal wife motif

This is a common motif in folk tales across the world, though the animals vary. The Italian fairy tale "The Dove Girl" features a dove. There are the Orcadian and Shetlandic selkies, that alternate between seal and human shape. A Croatian tale features a she-wolf. In Africa, the same motif is shown through buffalo maidens. In East Asia, it is also known featuring maidens who transform into various bird species. In Russian fairy-tales there are also several characters, connected with the Swan-maiden. In the Japanese legend of Hagoromo, it is a heavenly spirit, or Tennin, whose robe is stolen.

Another related tale is the Chinese myth of the Cowherd and Weaver Girl, in which one of seven fairy sisters is taken as a wife by a cowherd who hid the seven sisters' robes; she becomes his wife because he sees her naked, and not so much due to his taking her robe.

One notablly similar Japanese story, "The crane wife" is about a man who marries a woman who is in fact a crane disguised as a human. To make money the crane-woman plucks her own feathers to weave silk brocade which the man sells, but she become increasingly ill as she does so. When the man discovers his wifes true identity and the nature of her illness she leaves him. There are also a number of Japanese stories about men who married kitsune, or fox spirits in human form (as women in these cases), though in these tales the wife's true identity is a secret even from her husband. She stays willingly until her husband discovers the truth, at which point she abandons him.

[edit] Fiction

The swan maiden has appeared in numerous items of fiction, starting with the ballet Swan Lake and continuing in modern novels of the fantasy genre such as Three Hearts and Three Lions and television such as Astroboy Episode 5. A notable recent appearance is of the swan-men in the Anita Blake series, including Kaspar Gunderson. They are also called swan mays or swanmays in fantasy fiction and Dungeons and Dragons.