The Six Swans
"The Six Swans" (German: "Die sechs Schwäne") is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm in "Grimm's Fairy Tales" in 1812 (KHM 49). It is of Aarne–Thompson type 451 ("The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers"), commonly found throughout Europe. Other tales of this type include The Seven Ravens, The Twelve Wild Ducks, Udea and her Seven Brothers, The Wild Swans, and The Twelve Brothers. Andrew Lang included a variant of the tale in "The Yellow Fairy Book". Origin. The tale was published by the Brothers Grimm in the first edition of "Kinder- und  Hausmärchen" in 1812, and substantially rewritten for the second edition in 1819. Their source is Wilhelm Grimm's friend and future wife Henriette Dorothea (Dortchen) Wild (1795–1867). Synopsis. A King gets lost in a forest, and an old woman helps him, on the condition that he marry her beautiful daughter. The King has a bad feeling about this but accepts anyway. He has six sons and a daughter from his first marriage, however, and fears that the children will be targeted by his new wife; so he sends them away and visits them in secret. The new queen and now  stepmother, who has learned witchcraft from her mother, finds out about her six stepsons and decides to get them out of her way. She sews six magical shirts and goes to the hidden castle where the children are hidden for safety, then tosses the shirts over the boys and transforms them into swans. The brothers can only take their human forms for fifteen minutes every evening. They tell their still human younger sister that they have heard of a way to break such curses: she must make six magic shirts that will let her brothers turn back to normal out  of nettles and can't make a sound for six years, because if she does, the spell will never be broken and she will also transform into swan forever. The girl agrees to do this and runs away, hiding in a hunter's hut and dedicating herself solely to gathering the nettles and sewing in silence. Years later, the King of another country finds the girl doing this, is taken by her beauty, and takes her into the court with the intention of making her his queen. However, the King's snobbish mother hates her and does not consider her  fit to be a Queen. When she gives birth to their first child, the wicked mother-in-law takes away the child and accuses the queen of killing and eating him, but the King refuses to believe it. The young Queen gives birth to two other children, but twice again the mother-in-law hides them away and falsely claims that she has killed and eaten her babies. The King is unable to keep protecting her, and unable to properly defend herself, the queen is sentenced to be burned at the stake as a witch. All this time, she has  held back her tears and her words, sewing and sewing the nettle shirts no matter what. On the day of her execution, the Queen has finished making all the shirts for her brothers. When she is brought to the stake she takes the shirts with her and when she is about to be burned, the six years expire and the six swans come flying through the air. She throws the shirts over her brothers and they regain their human form, although in some versions, the youngest brother cannot reverse the transformation completely and his left arm remains a wing  due to the missing sleeve in the last shirt sewn by his sister. The queen is now free to speak, and she can defend herself against the accusations. She does so with the support of her brothers. In the end, the evil mother-in-law is the one who is burned at the stake as punishment. Analysis. Folklorist Stith Thompson points that the stories of the Aarne–Thompson–Uther ATU 451 tale-type follow a long literary history, beginning with the tale of the "Dolopathos", in the 12th century. The "Dolopathos", in medieval tradition, was later used as part of  the Knight of the Swan heroic tale. Fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes cites that the Brothers Grimm considered an origin in Greco-Roman times, with parallels also found in French and Nordic oral traditions. The Brothers Grimm themselves, on their annotations, saw a connection of "The Six Swans" tale with a story of seven swans published in the "Feenmärchen" (1801) and the swan-ride of the Knight of Swan (Lohengrin). They also saw a connection with the swan shirts of the swan maidens of the Volundarkvida. On his notes on "Children of Lir" tale, in his book "More Celtic Fairy  Tales", folklorist Joseph Jacobs wrote that the "well-known Continental folk-tale" of "The Seven Swans (or Ravens)" became connected to the medieval cycle of the Knight of the Swan. Variants. Distribution. The tale type is said to be "widely recorded" in Europe and in the Middle East, as well as in India and in the Americas. In Europe only, there exist "over two hundred versions" collected and published "in folktale collections from all parts" of the continent. French scholar Nicole Belmont identified two forms of the tale type in Europe: one "essentially" present in the Germanic area and Scandinavia , and another she dubbed "western version". She noted that in this western version, the youngest sister, after she settles with the brothers, asks for fire from a neighbouring ogre, and a tree sprouts on their yard and bears fruit that causes the transformation. Variants have also been collected in Japan with the name 七羽の白鳥 (Romanization: "Nanaha no hakuchō"; English: "The Seven Swans"). However, Japanese scholarship acknowledges that these tales are restricted to Kikaijima and Okinoerabujima. Japanese folklorist Keigo Seki also found variants in Kagoshima. Literary predecessors. A literary predecessor to the tale is "The Seven Doves" (Neapolitan: "Li sette palommelle ; Italian: I sette colombi"), in Giambattista Basile's "Pentamerone", where the brothers are transformed into doves. Number of brothers. In the tale from the Brothers Grimm, there are six brothers and they are transformed into swans. In other European variants, the number of princes/brothers alternates between three, seven or twelve, but very rarely there are two, eight, nine, ten or even eleven, such as the Danish fairy tale collected by Mathias Winther, "De elleve Svaner" (English: "The Eleven Swans"), first published in 1823, or Ligurian tale "Les onze cygnes". Hungarian folk tale collector Elisabeth Sklarek compiled two Hungarian variants , "Die sieben Wildgänse" ("The Seven Wild Geese") and "Die zehn Geschwister" ("The Ten Siblings"), and, in her commentaries, noted that both tales were related to the Grimm versions. A third Hungarian is titled "A tizenkét fekete várju" ("The Twelve Black Ravens"). Ludwig Bechstein collected two German variants, "The Seven Crows" and "The Seven Swans". Commenting on the Irish variant collected by Patrick Kennedy, Louis Brueyre indicated as another variant the Indian tale of "Truth's Triumph", or "Der Sieg der Wahrheit": in the second part of the tale, the youngest child, a girl, witnesses the transformation of her one hundred  brothers into crows. In a Lithuanian variant, "Von den zwölf Brüdern, die als Raben verwandelt wurden" or "The Twelve Brothers, Twelve Black Ravens", the witch stepmother asks for her husband to kill his sons, burn their bodies and deliver her the ashes. In the Hungarian variant "A tizenkét koronás hattyu és a csiháninget fonó testvérkéjük", the boys' poor mother curses her twelve sons into the avian form, while also giving an escape clause: after their sister is born, she should sew twelve shirts to save them. In a Sudanese tale, "The ten white doves", the titular white doves are ten  brothers transformed by their stepmother. Their sister has a dream where an old woman tells her the key to reversing the curse: weaving coats with leaves from the acacia tree she is placed on by her brothers after fleeing home. Results of transformation. The other variation is in the result of the avian transformation: in some versions they are ducks, in others ravens, and even eagles, geese, peacocks, blackbirds, storks, cranes, jackdaws or rooks. The eagle transformation is attested in the Polish tale "Von der zwölf Prinzen, die in Adler verwandelt wurden" (English: "The Twelve Princes who became Eagles"), translated  as "The Eagles". A similar transformation is attested in a Romanian tale, which was also compared to the Grimm's tale. The geese transformation is present in the Irish variant "The Twelve Wild Geese", collected by Irish folklorist Patrick Kennedy and compared to the German variants ("The Twelve Brothers" and "The Seven Ravens") and the Norse one ("The Twelve Wild Ducks"). In a tale attributed to Northern European origin, "The Twelve White Peacocks", the twelve princelings are transformed into peacocks due to a curse cast by a troll. The blackbird transformation is attested in a Central European tale ("The Blackbird ), collected by Theodor Vernaleken: the twelve brothers kill a blackbird and bury it in the garden, and from its grave springs an apple-tree bearing the fruit the causes the transformation. The avian transformation of storks is present in a Polish tale collected in Krakow by Oskar Kolberg, O siedmiu braciach bocianach" ("The Seven Stork Brothers"). The Hungarian tale "A hét daru" ("The Seven Cranes") attests the transformation of the brothers into cranes. The jackdaw transformation is attested in the Hungarian tale, "A csóka lányok" ("The Jackdaw Girls"), wherein a poor mother wishes her rambunctious twelve daughters would turn into  jackdaws and fly away, which was promptly fulfilled; and in the "West Prussian" tale "Die sieben Dohlen" ("The Seven Jackdaws"), collected by professor Alfred Cammann (). The transformation into rooks (a type of bird) is attested in Ukrainian tale "Про сімох братів гайворонів і їх сестру" ("The Seven Rook Brothers and Their Sister"): the mother curses their sons into rooks (also called "грак" and "грайворон" in Ukrainian). A sister is born years later and seeks her brothers. The tale continues with the motif of the poisoned apple and glass coffin of "Snow White" (ATU 709) and concludes as tale type ATU  706, "". Folklorists Johannes Bolte and Jiri Polivka, in their commentaries to the Grimm fairy tales, compiled several variants where the brothers are transformed into all sorts of beasts and terrestrial animals, such as deer, wolves, and sheep. Likewise, Georgian professor Elene Gogiashvili stated that in Georgian variants of the tale type the brothers (usually nine) change into deer, while in Armenian variants, they number seven and become rams.