The Wild Swans

7-9 min read
16 pages

The wild swans by Hans Christian Andersen, to read aloud. Eleven brothers turned into birds, and a sister who must not speak a word.

A king had eleven sons and one daughter, Eliza. Then he married again, and the new queen sent Eliza away to a farm in the country and told the king things about his sons until he stopped asking after them.

One morning she turned the eleven of them into swans, and they flew out of the palace window over the wood and away, and nobody in the town could say afterwards what they had seen.

Eliza grew up at the farm with no one to talk to. When she was fifteen the queen had her brought back, and looked at her, and could not bear it, and rubbed her face with walnut juice until she was brown and knotted her hair, so that her own father did not know her at the door.

So Eliza walked out of the town and into the forest, and slept on the moss, and in the morning she found a pool in the wood and washed, and she was herself again.

An old woman with a basket of berries told her she had seen eleven swans with gold crowns on the river. Eliza followed the river down to the sea and found eleven white feathers on the sand and gathered them up.

At sunset the swans came in over the water. When the sun went down the feathers fell away from them, and there were her eleven brothers standing on the beach.

«We are men only from sunset to sunrise,» said the eldest. «We live across the sea, and we go there tomorrow. It is a long flight and there is one rock to rest on.»

They wove a net of willow bark and reeds, and Eliza lay in it, and in the morning the swans took it up between them and carried her over the sea. She woke once in the middle and saw the water a long way down.

In the country across the sea she dreamed of a fairy who told her how it could be undone: shirts of nettles, one for each brother, gathered with her bare hands from the churchyard, and woven, and thrown over them. «And from the moment you begin until the last is finished, you may not speak. Not one word. Your first word would go through their hearts like a knife.»

She began that day. The nettles burned her hands into blisters and she went on picking them, and she said nothing at all.

The king of that country found her in the cave with the nettles and took her home, and married her, because she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen and she could not tell him no.

She wove at night. When the nettles ran out she went to the churchyard for more, and she was seen there, and the archbishop told the king what he thought of a silent queen who walked among graves in the dark.

They took her to be burned. She took the ten finished shirts and the eleventh, which had no sleeve, into the cart with her, and she kept on working while the cart moved, and the people threw things at her and shouted, and she did not look up.

The pile of wood was lit at her feet. Then there was a noise in the air and eleven swans came down around the cart, and she stood up and threw the shirts over them.

Eleven princes stood there. The youngest had a swan's wing instead of one arm, because his sleeve was not finished.

«Now I may speak,» said Eliza, and fainted. Her eldest brother told the king everything while she was still out, and the stake they had built put out roots and came into flower, and the archbishop said nothing at all for the rest of the afternoon.

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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 Wild Swans

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