Cygni
The Swans
A young man out hunting sees a white stag, and chases it into a deep forest until he is lost. He comes to a fountain where a naked nymph is bathing, whose virginity is protected by a golden necklace. Enraptured by her, the young man takes the necklace, and the two have (questionably consensual). The nymph learns that she will give birth to six sons a daughter. They return to his castle betrothed, but his mother-in-law secretly objects to his choice of wife. When the seven children are born (all wearing golden necklaces), the mother-in-law takes them away and replaces them with newborn puppies. She gives the children to a servant with orders to kill them, and he abandons them in the woods. An old man finds them and fosters them for seven years. Meanwhile, the nymph is accused of birthing monsters; her husband believes the accusations, and orders her buried alive up to the breast in the courtyard. He tells everyone to wash their hands above her and to dry their hands on her hair, and she is fed only scraps. She is horribly transformed by exposure, clothes and flesh rotted, hair and skin blackened and foul. One day, while hunting, the king sees the children wearing golden necklaces; they vanish before he can approach, however. He tells his mother-in-law, who in turn tells the servant to finish the job properly. The servant hunts and hunts, and at last finds the children: the boys had removed their necklaces, transformed into swans, and were swimming in bird form while their sister watched. The girl runs away, but servant steals the boys’ necklaces and returns to the queen. She gives the necklaces to a goldsmith to have them melted down and made into a goblet. However, neither fire nor iron can damage them (except one ring, which bends a little); to fool the old queen, the goldsmith makes a goblet of the same weight and gives it to the mother-in-law. The six swans and their sister flew far and long looking for a lake to live; they settle on the lake beside their father’s castle, which was perched high on steep cliffs. The king ordered food be thrown to the beautiful birds. The girl, now in human form, comes to the castle as an beggar; she shares her food with her mother, the nymph (not knowing their relationship) and with the swans. The king grows curious about her (and her necklace), and asks about her parentage. She says she does not know, and tells her story; the mother-in-law and the servant overhear the story, and decide to kill the girl. The servant tries to stab her, but the king intervenes, and the servant tells the whole truth. The king forces his mother to reveal the story, and summons the goldsmith who brings the necklaces. All the swans are restored, except one, whose necklace had the bent ring. The king welcomes his children, digs up his wife, and her beauty is restored with baths and ointments while the mother-in-law is made to take her place.
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Nishimura notes motif index parallels and analogues: TMI B652.1: Marriage to swan-maiden; D536.1 Transformation to swans by taking chains off neck; H71.7 Children born with chain around neck: sign of royalty; K1335 Seduction (or wooing) by stealing clothes of bathing girl (swan maiden); K2115 Animal-birth slander; N711.1 King (prince) finds maiden in woods (tree) and marries her; T16 Man falls in love with woman he sees bathing; ATU 451 The maiden who seeks her Brothers; TU1884 Mother-in-law of Elf. Some key analogues: The stories about Lohengrin are Konrad’s Der Schwanritter; Grimm’s Deutsche Sagen, 535 ‘Das Schwanschiff am Rhein’; 536 ‘Lohengrin zu Braband’; 538 ‘Der Schwanritter’, and Grimm’s Fairy Tales, KHM 49, ‘Die sechs Schwäne’ (slightly different, but probably related). Reference stories, etc.: The story of the wife/queen who is made to suffer the misfortune of having given birth to a different kind is told in Straparola, Le piacevoli Notti, 4.3; Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ‘The Man of Law’, Part II; Gower, Confessio Amantis, 2.3 ‘Constance’s Tale’; Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, Il Pecorone, 10.1; Grimm’s Fairy Tales, KHM 31, ‘Das Mädchen ohne Hände’; Pentamerone, 3.2, ‘The Handless Girl’; Calvino, Fiabe Italiane, 87, ‘The Little Green Bird’; French Folktales, 26 ‘The Handless Girl’ (for the first half, see the reference story in ‘121. tentamina’); ‘The Queen in the Forest’ in Basque Kibun-shu; Afanasjew, Russian Folktales, 283-287 ‘Die Sonne auf der Stirn, den Mond auf dem Nacken’ and 288-289 ‘Der sprechende Vogel’; 18 ‘Two Blonde Young Men’ in Ortutay’s Hungarian Folktales; The World Folktales, vol. 2, p. 334 ‘The saying Bird’; Italian Folktales, 22 ‘The saying Parrot’; ‘The Little used charcoal Girl’ in Welsh Gypsy Folk-Tales, p. 168; ‘The Seven Princesses’ in Espinosa’s Cuentos Populares Españoles, 43 (original story 119); Konjaku Monogatri-shu, 4.3 ‘The King Aiku kills the queen and builds eighty-four thousand pagodas’; Nihon Mukashibanashi Tsukan, 28, ‘Type Index’ 178 ‘The handless Girl’; Choi In Hak, A Study on Korean Folktales…, 452 ‘Handless Daughter’ (without the motif of having given birth to a different kind); Sankyo Gogi (Sanxiao Wuyi), 1 (replacing a baby with a cat and tricking one of the queens); Hagen, Gesamtabenteuer, II, Anhang 7, ‘Des Reussenkönigs Tochter’. See Nishimura (2001). |
| Critical Literature |
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| Nishimura (2001), Gilleland (1981) |
| Cygni appears in the following versions and secondary versions |
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| Cygni is narrated in the following occurrences | ||||
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| Cygni appears in the following manuscripts |
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| This inset story appears in no manuscripts of the database |