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Home , The Six Swans, The Twelve Brothers

“Six ” Research Brenna Hay

Different Versions of the Story The story is Aarne-Thompson-Uther Type 451: The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers (formerly The Brothers Who Were Turned Into ). All other versions included in this research are also ATU 451.

Brothers Grimm, “The Six Swans” (Referred to as the ‘original’ hereafter) a. This was written in 1884. b. There isn’t immediately accessible research on this particular version indicating the original source material. c. The translation uses the older ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘thy’. The princess weaves with starwort. The princess isn’t allowed to speak or laugh while she breaks the curse. There are six princes. The princes can only become human again for 15 minutes a day. The woman who accuses the princess of cannibalizing her baby is the king’s step-mother. The youngest prince is left with a wing in place of his left arm. The princess meets her brothers in a robbers’ hut in the woods. d. I prefer the starwort. e. I don’t like that the king marries the princess while she is silent and unable to give consent. Citation: Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Translated by Margaret Hunt. http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/authors/grimms/49sixswans.html

1. , “The Six Swans” a. This was written in 1894. b. There isn’t immediately accessible research on this particular version indicating the original source material. c. The princess weaves with star-flowers. The woman who accuses the princess of cannibalizing her baby is the king’s mother.

d. I prefer the starwort/starflowers. e. I still don’t like that the king marries the princess while she is silent and unable to give consent. Citation: Lang, Andrew. “The Six Swans.” The Yellow Fairy Book. http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/047.htm

2. Alexander Afanasvey, “The Magic Swan-Geese” a. This was written in 1855-1863 b. There isn’t immediately accessible research on this particular version indicating the original source material. c. This version differs greatly from the others. The girl is not a princess. There is only one brother. The swan-geese carry the brother away. The girl runs off to find him and encounters an oven, a river of milk, and an apple tree that all talk to her. She rescues her brother from a witch, Baba Yaga, with the help of a mouse. d. Afanasyev explicitly modeled his collection Russian Fairy Tales after the Grimms’ collections. e. This version isn’t particularly useful to me. Citation: Afanasvey, Alexander. “The Magic Swan-Geese.” Russian Fairy Tales. http://www.fdi.ucm.es/profesor/fpeinado/projects/kiids/apps/protopropp/swan-geese.html

3. Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe, “The Twelve Wild Ducks” a. This was written in 1888. b. There isn’t immediately accessible research on this particular version indicating the original source material. c. The queen, mother of the princes and princess, is alive in this version. The queen wishes for a daughter and has her wish granted by a troll in exchange for her sons at the time of her daughter’s baptism. There are twelve princes. The queen has a silver spoon made for each of her children and this later helps them identify each other. The princes turn into ducks, not swans. The princess finds her brothers’ home in the woods. The princes at first want to kill the princess when she finds them. The princess is not allowed to weep as well as not speaking or laughing while she frees her brothers She weaves with thistle-down. The princes become human all night instead of just 15 minutes. When the king finds her at her work, he brings her work with them. The woman who accuses the princess of cannibalizing her baby is the king’s step-mother. The wicked step-mother throws the babies into a pit full of snakes. At the end, the step-mother is torn apart by twelve unbroken steeds. The freed princes and the princess go home to their parents at the end. d. I prefer that the freed princes and the princess go home to their parents at the end. e. I still don’t like that the king marries the princess while she is silent and unable to give consent. The three children were supposedly alive and well in that pit full of snakes for nearly two years. Citation: Asbjornsen, Peter Christen and Moe, Jorgen. “The Twelve Wild Ducks.” East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon. George Webbe Dasent, translator. Popular Tales from the Norse. Edinburgh: David Douglass, 1888. http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/sixswans/stories/twelvewilducks.html

4. Hans Christian Andersen, “” a. This was written in 1838 b. There isn’t immediately accessible research on this particular version indicating the original source material. c. This version is longer and more dreamlike than the others. The princess is named: her name is Eliza (or Elisa, or Elise, depending on the translation). Eliza is told how to free her brothers by a fairy. She has to weave using nettles. There is overbearing Christian influence (the archbishop, Eliza’s prayers, the hymns the brothers and sister sing together, etc.). The step-mother to Eliza and her brothers is cruel to them before she turns the boys into swans. The step-mother makes Eliza go and live with peasants. The step-mother makes Eliza unrecognizable to the king, which makes her flee into the woods to look for her brothers. The princes become human all night instead of just for 15 minutes. The princes are living in a far away land and they use a net to carry Eliza there with them. Eliza is only forbidden to speak, not to laugh or cry, but if she speaks before the task is done she will kill her brothers. It is the archbishop who accuses Eliza of after he sees her collecting nettles in the church cemetery at night where the ghouls are digging up bodies and eating them. The princes try to speak to the king at night but are barred from doing so before they turn back into swans. The execution pyre turns into a huge bush of roses. d. I prefer that the princess is forbidden only to speak, and that laughter and crying are not forbidden to her as self-expression. e. There is just too much happening in this version to make for a good short play. Citation: Andersen, Hans Christian. “The Wild Swans.” 1838. http://hca.gilead.org.il/wild_swa.html

5. , “” a. This was written in 1857. b. There isn’t immediately accessible research on this particular version indicating the original source material. c. The queen, mother of the princes and princess, is alive in this version. There are twelve princes in this version. The king wishes for a daughter and decides to kill all twelve of his sons if a daughter is born so she can inherit everything. The youngest son is named: Benjamin. The mother warns the princes that they are to die if their next sibling is a girl and that is why they go and live in the woods. When the princess is born, the princes swear revenge on any girl they meet because their sister would have been the cause of their deaths. Benjamin the youngest brother keeps their house in the woods. The house in the woods is bewitched. The amount of time the princes stay in the woods is specified: ten years. The princess picks the twelve lilies in the garden and accidentally is the one who curses them. The princes turn into ravens. When the princes are cursed and the house disappears, an old woman appears who tells the princess how to break the curse. The princes must remain silent for seven years while she endeavors to free her brothers; the first word she speaks during her efforts will kill them. She does not have to weave any clothing. The king who finds the princess climbs the tree himself instead of his huntsmen. The king’s mother slanders the princess until she is sentenced to death; there are no accusations of cannibalism specified. When the princess is about to be burned at stake, the seven years are up and her brothers return to human form and rip the fire apart to save their sister. The king’s mother is placed in a barrel of boiling oil and poisonous snakes and dies at the end. d. I prefer these plot points/points of interest in this version e. I still don’t like that the king marries the princess while she is silent and unable to give consent. There are too many princes for a short play.

Citation: Grimm, Wilhelm and Jacob. “The Twelve Brothers.” Children’s and Household Tales— Grimms’ Fairy Tales, 7th ed., vol. 1. 1857. http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm009.html

Scholarly Articles 1. Christy Williams, "The Silent Struggle: Autonomy for the Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers" a. “The girl is the only one who can save her brothers and the only one who will.” Pg. 84. “The “Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers” tale, in its many versions, illustrates the struggle of a girl trying to find her place in a world controlled by men.” Pg. 84. “[T]o argue that the heroine’s silence only shows her inferior status as a woman neglects her strong show of power. She decides on her own to perform great magic in order to save her brothers. Yet to say that silence illustrates her power is also inadequate, for that supposition ignores the isolation and stigma that silence produces…The silence of the heroine is more complicated than either interpretation because it contains elements of both power and powerlessness.” Pgs. 92-93. “The silence of the heroines in the classic tales and more traditional rewritings allows them to enact great magic, but the contemporary heroine who speaks her mind is able to enact great magic, free others from oppression, and maintain her autonomy in the process.” Pg. 98. b. All the things I made note of above I will be taking into account while adapting The Six Swans. Citation: Williams, C. "The Silent Struggle: Autonomy for the Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers." The Comparatist, vol. 30 no. 1, 2006, pp. 81-100. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/com.2006.0039

2. Cay Dollerup, “Translation as a Creative Force in Literature: The Birth of the European Bourgeois Fairy-Tale” a. I learned that Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm were alive and producing fairy tales during the same time. I also learned that they met at least once and Andersen sent them a copy of his fairy tales. The ideology of the Grimms trekking about the German countryside collecting fairy tales from little old ladies is inherently false. They only gathered two of their stories from an old peasant woman. The majority of their stories they collected from upper class young women of their sister’s social circle. Andersen actually benefitted more from someone walking around the Danish countryside collecting tales because a student of a scholar that the Grimms knew lived next door to Andersen during the time that this student, named Mathias Thiele, was walking around collecting stories from the oral tradition. Andersen’s stories are also much more upper class because of his standing in society. He would deliver the stories orally to people he know before he wrote them down and then, after being filtered through the ears of “mixed company,” as it were, they were shined up in a manner befitting the upper class. The Grimms knew German and Danish. Andersen knew Danish and German. b. There isn’t much that needs to be put directly into my adaptation, but I will certainly take note of the fact that Citation: Cay Dollerup. “Translation as a Creative Force in Literature: The Birth of the European Bourgeois Fairy-Tale.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 90, no. 1, 1995, pp. 94–102. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3733256.

3. Orrin Robinson, “Does Sex Breed Gender? Pronominal Reference in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales” a. I learned that the Grimms used a particular pattern of pronoun in their stories: in the German, ‘es’ referred to a female character who was young (a child), not yet marriageable/desirable, and/or good/nice; ‘sie’ referred to a female character who was older (of marriageable age/middle-aged and above), marriageable/desirable, and/or bad/naughty. In The Six Swans, the princess is referred to using ‘es’ until the king finds her desirable and decides to marry her, at which point she becomes ‘sie’ because she is now considered “sexed” and desirable. b. I found this dichotomy particularly interesting because I had already chosen the name ‘Essa’ for my princess and decided that she does not have a romantic interest nor get married, therefore, if I were to follow the Grimms’ structure, she would remain ‘es’ throughout. Citation: Robinson, Orrin W. "Does Sex Breed Gender? Pronominal Reference in the Grimms' Fairy Tales." Marvels & Tales 21.1 (2007): 107,123,184. ProQuest. Web. 21 Sep. 2017.

4. Carole Scott, “Magical Dress: Clothing and Transformational in Folk Tales” a. I learned that the theme of clothing as a transformational magic reflects “the inner drama of the developing human psyche.” The self-sacrificing struggle of the sister to create these shirts also reflects the struggle to attain balance of the masculine and the feminine within the psyche: she actively works to return her brothers, the male principle, to recognizable form. b. I will incorporate the theme that Scott states on page 154: “As the tales describe the transformative clothing that the women are making, they are sending significant messages about women’s ability not only to change the inner world of me and women, but also to have dramatic impact upon the outer world, the socioeconomic system itself.” Citation: Scott, C. "Magical Dress: Clothing and Transformation in Folk Tales." Children's Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 21 no. 4, 1996, pp. 151-157. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/chq.0.1186 Book Reviews 1. a. This review deals with a version of the story I was unable to find in the allotted time for the assignment, an adaptation by Robert D. San Souci written in 1989. This adaptation is intended for Grades 2-6, ages 7-12. The summary in the review provided me with some ideas as to how I can make the story more concise. b. I will take into consideration the way in with San Souci adapted The Six Swans and how his choices might influence my own in adapting this story. c. This review was done by Louise L. Sherman (Anna C. Scott School, Leonia, NJ) for Reed Business Information, Inc., to provide information for school use. Citation: Sherman, Louise L., et al. "The Six Swans (Book)." School Library Journal, vol. 35, no. 12, Aug. 1989, p. 138. EBSCOhost, ezproxy.unwsp.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=keh&AN =9371232&site=ehost-live&scope=site.