The Ugly Duckling

7-9 min read
16 pages

The ugly duckling by Hans Christian Andersen, to read aloud. He is too big, too grey and wrong all over, and he is not a duck at all.

It was summer in the country, and a duck was sitting on her nest in the burdock leaves by the moat, waiting for her eggs. Sitting is dull work, and she had been at it a long time.

One by one they cracked, and out came the ducklings, yellow and quick and delighted with everything. But the biggest egg lay there whole.

An old duck came to look. «That's a turkey egg,» she said. «Leave it. Turkeys can't be taught to swim.» But the mother had sat on it that long already, so she sat a while more.

It broke at last, and what came out was large, and grey, and nothing like the others. «He is very ugly,» said the mother, «but look at how he holds himself in the water.»

In the poultry yard they pecked him. The ducks pecked him, the hens pecked him, the girl who fed them kicked at him, and his own brothers said they wished the cat would get him.

His mother said at first that she wished he were far away. Then she stopped saying anything, which was worse.

So he went over the fence. The little birds in the bushes flew up when they saw him, and he thought: that is because I am so ugly. And he kept walking.

He came to the great marsh where the wild ducks lived. They looked him over. «You're frightful,» they said, «but it's nothing to us, as long as you don't marry into the family.»

Two wild geese made friends with him, and three days later there were guns over the reeds, and the geese fell, and a dog came through the water past his face and did not touch him. «I am so ugly,» he thought, «that even the dog won't bother.»

That autumn he found a cottage with an old woman, a hen and a cat. They asked him whether he could lay eggs, or arch his back and purr. He could not. «Then what use are you?» said the cat, and he left again.

Then one evening at sunset a flock of great white birds came out of the bushes by the water — long-necked, wonderfully white, with a cry he had never heard. He did not know what they were. He only knew that he turned round and round in the water after they had gone, and that he had never in his life felt about anything the way he felt about them.

The winter was very hard. The water froze tighter round him every night and he had to keep paddling to keep a hole open, and in the end he was frozen fast, and a farmer broke the ice with his shoe and carried him home.

The children wanted to play with him. He thought they meant harm, went into the milk pan, then the butter tub, then the flour barrel, and out through the open door into the snow, and lay in the reeds until spring.

When the sun came back it came back warm. He felt his wings, which were stronger than they had been, and he flew — and the flying carried him into a garden with apple trees in flower and a pond at the bottom of it.

And there were the three white birds from the autumn, swimming towards him. He put his head down to the water and waited for the pecking to start.

And in the water he saw what was underneath him: not a grey lumpish bird at all, but a swan. The others came round him and stroked him with their beaks. Children threw bread and said he was the finest of them. He remembered the poultry yard, and he was not proud about it — only very glad that he had gone over the fence.

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Text source: Plot by Hans Christian Andersen, public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

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The Ugly Duckling

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