Swan maiden
The swan maiden is a mythical creature who shapeshifts from human form to swan form. The key to the transformation is usually a swan skin, or a garment with swan feathers attached. In folktales of this type, the male character spies the maiden, typically by some body of water, then snatches away the feather garment, which prevents her from flying away, forcing her to become his wife.
There are parallels around the world, notably the Völundarkviða and Grimms' Fairy Tales KHM 193 "The Drummer". There are also many parallels involving creatures other than swans.
Legend
Typical legend
The folktales usually adhere to the following basic plot. A young, unmarried man steals a magic robe made of swan feathers from a swan maiden so that she will not fly away, and marries her. Usually she bears his children. When the children are older they sing a song about where their father has hidden their mother's robe, or one asks why the mother always weeps, and finds the cloak for her, or they otherwise betray the secret. The swan maiden immediately gets her robe and disappears to where she came from. Although the children may grieve her, she does not take them with her.If the husband is able to find her again, it is an arduous quest, and often the impossibility is clear enough so that he does not even try.
In many versions, although the man is unmarried, he is aided by his mother, who hides the maiden's magical garment. At some point later in the story, the mother is convinced or forced to give back the hidden clothing and, as soon as the swan maiden puts it, she glides towards the skies - which prompts the quest.
Germanic legend
The stories of Wayland the Smith describe him as falling in love with Swanhilde, a Swan Maiden, who is the daughter of a marriage between a mortal woman and a fairy king, who forbids his wife to ask about his origins; on her asking him he vanishes. Swanhilde and her sisters are however able to fly as swans. But wounded by a spear, Swanhilde falls to earth and is rescued by the master-craftsman Wieland, and marries him, putting aside her wings and her magic ring of power. Wieland's enemies, the Neidings, under Princess Bathilde, steal the ring, kidnap Swanhilde and destroy Wieland's home. When Wieland searches for Swanhilde, they entrap and cripple him. However he fashions wings for himself and escapes with Swanhilde as the house of the Neidings is destroyed.Another occurrence of the maiden with the magic swan-shirt that allows her avian transformation is the story of valkyrie Brynhild. In the Völsunga saga, King Agnar withholds Brynhild's magical swan shirt, thus forcing her into his service as his enforcer.
Other fiction
The swan maiden has appeared in numerous items of fiction, including the ballet Swan Lake, in which a young princess, Odette and her maidens are under the spell of an evil sorcerer, Von Rothbart, transforming them into swans by day. By night, they regain their human forms and can only be rescued if a young man swears eternal love and faithfulness to the Princess. When Prince Siegfried swears his love for Odette, the spell can be broken, but Siegfried is tricked into declaring his love for Von Rothbart's daughter, Odile, disguised by magic as Odette, and all seems lost. But the spell is finally broken when Siegfried and Odette drown themselves in a lake of tears, uniting them in death for all eternity. While the ballet's revival of 1895 depicted the swan-maidens as mortal women cursed to turn into swans, the original libretto of 1877 depicted them as true swan-maidens: fairies who could transform into swans at will. Several animated movies based on the ballet, including The Swan Princess and Barbie of Swan Lake depict the lead heroines as being under a spell and both are eventually rescued by their Princes.. Illustration by Boris Zvorykin.
The magical swan also appears in Russian poem The Tale of Tsar Saltan, by Alexander Pushkin. The son of the titular Tsar Saltan, Prince Gvidon and his mother are cast in the sea in a barrel and wash ashore in a mystical island. There, the princeling grows up in days and becomes a fine hunter. Prince Gvidon and his mother begin to settle in the island thanks to the help of a magical swan called Princess Swan, and in the end of the tale she transforms into a princess and marries Prince Gvidon.
Another occurrence of the motif in Russian folklore exists in Sweet Mikáilo Ivánovich the Rover: Mikailo Ivanovich goes hunting and, when he sets his aim on a white swan, it pleads for its life. Then, the swan transforms into a lovely maiden, Princess Márya, whom Mikail falls in love with.
In the Irish Mythological Cycle of stories, in the tale of The Wooing of Étaine, a similar test involving the recognition of the wife among lookalikes happens to Eochu Airem, when he has to find his beloved Étaine, who flew away in the shape of a swan. A second tale of a maiden changing into a swan is the story of hero Óengus, who falls in love with Caer Ibormeith, in a dream.
A version of the plot of the Swan Maiden happens in Swabian tale The Three Swans : a widowed hunter, guided by an old man of the woods, secures the magical garment of the swan-maiden and marries her. Fifteen years pass, and his second wife finds her swan-coat and flies away. The hunter trails after her and reaches a castle, where his wife and her sisters live. The swan-maiden tells him that he must pass through arduous trials in the castle for three nights, in order to break the curse cast upon the women. The motif of staying overnight in an enchanted castle echoes the tale of The Youth who wanted to learn what Fear was.
A variant of the swan maiden narrative is present in the work of Johann Karl August Musäus, a predecessor to the Brothers Grimm's endeavor in the early 1800s. His Volksmärchen der Deutschen contains the story of Der geraubte Schleier. A French translation can be found in Contes de Museäus. In a short summary: an old hermit, who lives near a lake of pristine water, rescues a young Swabian soldier; during a calm evening, the hermit reminisces about an episode of his adventurous youth when he met in Greece a swan-maiden, descended from Leda and Zeus themselves - in the setting of the story, the Greco-Roman deities were "genies" and "fairies". The hermit explains the secret of their magical garment and how to trap one of the ladies. History repeats itself as the young soldier sets his sights on a trio of swan maidens who descend from heavens to bathe in the lake.
Flemish fairy tale collections also contain two tales with the presence of the Swan Maiden: De Koning van Zevenbergen and Het Zwanenmeisje van den glazen Berg. Johannes Bolte, in a book review of de Cock and de Mont's publication, noted that their tale was parallel to Grimms' KHM 193, The Drummer.
In a Iberian tale, a fisherman spots a black-haired girl combing her hair in the rocks. Upon the approach of two pigeons, she finishes her activity and turns into a swan wearing a crown on her head. When the three birds land on a nearby ship, they regain their human forms of maidens.
's tale Svanhammen.
The character of the swan-maiden also appears in an etiological tale from Romania about the origin of the swan, and a ballad with the same theme.
Swedish writer Helena Nyblom explored the theme of a swan maiden who loses her feathery cloak in Svanhammen, published in 1908, in Bland tomtar och troll, an annual anthology of literary fairy tales and stories.
The usual plot involves a magical bird-maiden that descends from heavens to bathe in a lake. However, there are variants where the maiden and/or her sisters are princesses under a curse, such as Vaino and the Swan Princess. A German tale collected by Johann Wilhelm Woof, a hunter in France sights a swan in a lake who pleads not to shoot her. The swan also reveals she is a princess and, to break her curse, he must suffer dangerous trials in a castle.
Other example of multiple swan princesses can be found in the Finnish tale of prince Tuhkimo who marries a shapeshifting frog, but, when he burns her enchanted skin, his wife, now human, metamorphoses into a swan and flies away with her eight swan sisters.
Male versions
The fairytale The Six Swans could be considered a male version of the swan maiden, where the swan skin isn't stolen but a curse, similar to The Swan Princess. An evil step-mother cursed her 6 stepsons with swan skin shirts that transform them into swans, which can only be cured by six nettle shirts made by their younger sister. Similar tales of a parent or a step-parent cursing their children are the Irish legend of The Children of Lir, and The Wild Swans, a literary fairy tale by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen.An inversion of the story can be found in the Dolopathos: a hunter sights a maiden bathing in a lake and, after a few years, she gives birth to septuplets, born with gold chains around their necks. After being expelled by their grandmother, the children bathe in a lake in their swan forms, and return to human form thanks to their magical chains.
Another story of a male swan is Prince Swan, an obscure tale collected by the Brothers Grimm in the very first edition of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen, but removed from subsequent editions.
Brazilian tale Os três cisnes, collected by Lindolfo Gomes, tells the story of a princess who marries an enchanted prince. After his wife breaks a taboo, he turns into a swan, which prompts his wife on a quest for his whereabouts, with the help of an old woodcutter.
Folklore motif and tale types
Established folkloristics does not formally recognize "Swan Maidens" as a single Aarne-Thompson tale type. Rather, one must speak of tales that exhibit Stith Thompson motif index "D361.1 Swan Maiden", which may be classed AT 400, 313, or 465A. Compounded by the fact that these tale types have "no fewer than ten other motifs" assigned to them, the AT system becomes a cumbersome tool for keeping track of parallels for this motif. Seeking an alternate scheme, one investigator has developed a system of five Swan Maiden paradigms, four of them groupable as a Grimm tale cognate and the remainder classed as the "AT 400" paradigm. Thus for a comprehensive list of the most starkly-resembling cognates of Swan Maiden tales, one need only consult Bolte and Polívka's Anmerkungen to Grimm's Tale KHM 193 the most important paradigm of the group.Each of them using different methods, i.e. observation of the distribution area of the Swan Maiden type or use of phylogenetic methods to reconstruct the evolution of the tale, Gudmund Hatt, Yuri Berezkin and Julien d'Huy independently showed that this folktale would have appeared during the Paleolithic period, in the Pacific Asia, before spreading in two successive waves in America. In addition, Yuri Berezkin and Julien d'Huy showed that there was no mention of migratory birds in the early versions of this tale.
Animal wife motif
Antiquity and origin
It has been suggested the romance of apsara Urvasi and king Pururavas, of ancient Sanskrit literature, may be one of the oldest forms of the Swan-Maiden tale.The antiquity of the swan-maiden tale was suggested in the 19th century by Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, postulating an origin of the motif before the separation of the Proto-Indo-European language, and, due to the presence of the tale in diverse and distant traditions, there was a possibility that the tale may be even older. Another theory was supported by Charles Henry Tawney, in his translation of Somadeva's Kathasaritsagara: he suggests the source of the motif to be old Sanskrit literature; the tale then migrated to Middle East, and from there as an intermediate point, spread to Europe.
According to Julien d'Huy, such a motif would also have existed in European prehistory and would have a buffalo maiden as a heroine. Indeed, this author finds the motif with four-legged animals in North America and Europe, in an area coinciding with the area of haplogroup X.
The swan maiden also serves an ancestress for peoples and tribes of Siberia and Central Asia, as attested in ethnogenetic myths of the Buryat people.
Professor Hazel Wigglesworth, who worked with the many languages of the Philippines archipelago, stated that the character of the mortal male is sometimes named Itung or Beletamey, and he represents a cultural hero or ancestor of the Manobo people.
Distribution and variants
The motif of the wife of supernatural origin shows universal appeal, being present in the oral and folkloric traditions of every continent.ATU 402 group of folktales are found across the world, though the animals vary. The Italian fairy tale "The Dove Girl" features a dove. There are the Orcadian and Shetland selkies, that alternate between seal and human shape. A Croatian tale features a she-wolf. The wolf also appears in the folklore of Estonia and Finland as the "animal bride", under the tale type ATU 409 "The Girl as Wolf".
In Africa, the same motif is shown through buffalo maidens. In East Asia, it is also known featuring maidens who transform into various bird species. In Russian fairy-tales there are also several characters, connected with the Swan-maiden, as in The Sea King and Vasilisa the Wise, where the maiden is a dove. In the Japanese legend of Hagoromo, it is a heavenly spirit, or Tennin, whose robe is stolen.
Professor Sir James George Frazer mentions a tale of the Pelew Islands, in the Pacific, about a man who marries a shapeshifting maiden by hiding her fish tail. She bears him a daughter, and, in one occasion, happens to find her fish tail and returns to the ocean soon after.
A tale from Northeastern Asia, collected among the Chukchi people also attests the motif of the bird-wife.
In many tales from the Inuit, the animal bride is a goose, who, at the end of the tale, departs with her child. The character of the Goose Wife also appears in tales from the Haida and the Tlingit. Similar bird-wife tales have been attested from Kodiak Island.
Some tales from the Algonquin also tell of a young, unmarried hunter who approaches a lake where otherworldly women come to bathe in order to acquire the supernatural spouse.
In a tale from Oceania, a man named Tagaro spies on women with bat-like wings who descend to bathe in a lake. The man takes the wings of one of them. In a similar story from Aurora Island, in Vanuatu, the hero's name is Qat.
In a tale attributed to the Toraja people of Indonesia, a woman gives birth to seven crabs that she throws in the water. As time passes, the seven crabs find a place to live and take their disguises to assume human form. In one occasion, seven males steal the crab disguises of the seven crab maidens and marry them. A second one is close to the Swan maiden narrative, only with parakeets instead of swans; the hero is called Magoenggoelota and the maiden Kapapitoe.
In mythology
One notably similar Japanese story, "The crane wife", is about a man who marries a woman who is in fact a crane disguised as a human. To make money the crane-woman plucks her own feathers to weave silk brocade which the man sells, but she became increasingly ill as she does so. When the man discovers his wife's true identity and the nature of her illness, she leaves him. There are also a number of Japanese stories about men who married kitsune, or fox spirits in human form, though in these tales the wife's true identity is a secret even from her husband. She stays willingly until her husband discovers the truth, at which point she must abandon him.The motif of the swan maiden or swan wife also appears in Southeast Asia, with the tales of Kinnari or Kinnaree and the love story of Manohara and Prince Sudhana.
Siilar tales were collected from North Sulawesi and Minahasa Peninsula. One is the tale of Kasimbaha and Utahagi: Kasimbaha fetches the garments of Utahagi, who was bathing in a lake, and, later, after his wife returns to her celestial abode, he climbs a special tree to ascend to the heavens and find her again.
A second tale is interesting in that it differs: instead of bathing in a lake, the heavenly maidens descend to Earth and steal the yams of a human farmer.
Professor and folklorist James George Frazer, in his translation of The Libraries, by Appolodorus, suggests that the myth of Peleus and Thetis seems related to the swan maiden cycle of stories.
In folklore
Europe
A tale from Tirol tells of prince Eligio and the Dove-Maidens, which bathe in a lake. Doves also appear as the form three princesses are cursed under by an evil magician, who also transformed a prince into a giant, in a Portuguese folktale.Waldemar Kaden collected a tale from South Italy, although he does not credit the source. It tells of a man who climbs a mountain and, aided by an old woman, fetches the garment of one of 12 dove-maidens who were bathing in the lake. Kaden also compared it to Musäus version in his notes.
A Hungarian tale tell about an orphan who catches a magical fish that reveals itself as a lovely maiden. A second Magyar tale, "Fairy Elizabeth", is close to the general swan maiden story, only dealing with pidgeon-maidens instead.
A compilation of Central European folktales lists four variants of the Swan Maiden narrative: "The Three White Doves"; "The Maiden on the Crystal Mountain"; "How Hans find his Wife" and "The Drummer". Theodor Vernaleken, in the German version of the compilation, narrated in his notes two other variants, one from St. Pölten and other from Moldautein.
In an Armenian folktale, a prince seeks the titular Kush-Pari, a Houri-Pari or "Fairy-Bird", as a present to the king he serves. After being captured, the Kush-Pari reveals to the king she transforms into a maiden after undonning her feather cloak and proposes she becomes his queen after his servant rescues her maid and brings back the fiery mares. Kush-Pari intends to use the fiery mares' milk for a special ritual: the king dies, but the prince survives, who she marries. At the end of the story, her new husband tells his wife that his father is blinded, but she reveals she was the cause for his blindness.
A Bulgarian folk song features a Samodiva: three girls, not related to each other, doff their magical garments to bathe, but are seen by a shepherd that takes their clothing. Each girl separately try to plead and convince the youth to return the clothing. He does so - but only to the first two; the third maiden he chose to wed after she revealed she was an only child. After the wedding, the village insists she dances for the amusement of everyone else, but the samodiva says she cannot dance without her garment. Once her husband delivers her the clothing, she flies away.
Middle East
The tale of the swan maiden also appears in the Arab collection of folktales The Arabian Nights, in "The Story of Janshah", a tale inserted in the narrative of The Queen of the Serpents. In a second tale, the story of Hasan of Basrah, the titular character arrives at a oasis and sees the bird maidens undressing their plumages to play in the water.A third narrative is the tale of Mazin of Khorassan, supposedly not included in Antoine Galland's translation of the collection: an orphaned dyer, Mazin is invited to a castle where there is a magnificent garden. One afternoon, he rests in the garden and sees the arrival, through the air, of seven maidens wearing "light green silk" robes. He is later informed the seven are sisters to a queen of a race of female genii who live in a distant kingdom. The story of Mazin was noted to be quite similar to Hassan of Bassorah, albeit with differences during the quest.
South Asia
A story from South Asia also narrates the motif of the swan maiden or bird-princess: Story of Prince Bairâm and the Fairy Bride, whe the titular prince hides the clothing of Ghûlab Bânu, the dove-maiden.East Asia
In ancient Chinese literature, one story from the Dunhuang manuscripts veers close to the general Swan Maiden tale: a poor man named T'ien K'un-lun approaches a lake where three crane maidens are bathing.A tale from Southeastern China and near regions narrates the adventures of a prince who meets a Peacock Maiden, in a tale attributed to the Tai people. The tale is celebrated amongst the Dai people of China and was recorded as a poem and folk story, being known under several names, such as "Shaoshutun", "The Peacock Princess" or "Zhao Shutun and Lanwuluona".
Africa
A tale collected from the Swahili also falls under the widespread tale of the Bird Maiden.The celestial maiden or heavenly bride
A second format of the supernatural wife motif pertains to tales where the maiden isn't a shapeshifting animal, but instead a creature or inhabitant of Heaven, aCelestial Realm, or hails from the place where the gods live. Japanese folklorist Seki Keigo names this story "The Wife from the Upper World", in his index of "Types of Japanese Folktales". Professor Alan L. Miller calls it "The Divine Wife", which can also refer to the Swan Maiden tales.
Western works commonly translate the characters in question as "fairies" or "nymphs".
India and South Asia
The motif of the swan maiden is also associated with the Apsaras, of Hinduism, who descend from Heaven or a Celestial Realm to bathe in an earthly lake. One example is the ancient tale of apsara Urvasi and king Pururavas.A folk song collected from the state of Chhattisgarh, The Ballad of flower-maid Bakaoli, contains the episode where a male is informed by a sadhu about the seven daughters of Indra Rajá who bathe in a lake.
A tale of Dravidian origin tells the story of Prince Jagatalapratapa, who has an encounter with the daughter of Indra and her maids in a grove in forest. A second story of The Dravidian Nights Entertainment, by Natesa Sastri, shows the episode of the prince stealing clothes from a celestial maiden, as part of the prince's search for a special flower.
Southeast Asia
The plot of a male character spying on seven celestial maidens bathing in an earthly lake also happens in a tale from Indonesian history, titled Jaka Tarub and Seven Apsaras, from the island of Java, starring legendary Javanese hero Jaka Tarub who marries the heavenly nymph Dewi Nawang Wulan.Other similar tales are attested in the many traditions of the archipelago: from the Island of Halmahera, the episode of "stealing maiden's clothing while in a bath" occurs as part of the quest of the youngest of seven brothers for a remedy for his father.
Other variants from Southeast Asia can be found in Filipino folklore: The Seven Young Sky Women, a tale from the Philippines, and Kimod and the Swan Maiden, a tale from the Mansaka. A version of the tale was also found in the oral narratives of the Agta people of the Philippines.
A tale from Laos is also parallel to the widespread narrative of the Swan-Maiden.
East Asia
n folkloric traditions also attest the occurrence of similar tales about celestial maidens, such as the Korean folktale of The Fairy and the Woodcutter.James Danandjaja relates the Japanese tale of Amafuri Otome, as a similar tale of the unmarried mortal man who withholds the kimono from a bathing lady in exchange for her becoming his wife. He also compares it to the Swan Maiden and to the myth of The Cowherd and the Weaver.
Professor Hazel Wigglesworth wrote that there were 46 versions of the tale collected in Japanese oral sources, and the oldest register of the tale is present in the Fudoki, an ancient book on provincial and oral accounts. Tales collected from
Ōmi Province and Suruga Province are close to the human husband/swan spouse narrative, whereas in a story from Tango Province it is an elderly couple who strand the celestial maiden on Earth and she becomes their adopted daughter to keep them company.
Another related tale is the Chinese myth of the Cowherd and the Weaver Girl, in which one of seven fairy sisters is taken as a wife by a cowherd who hid the seven sisters' robes; she becomes his wife because he sees her naked, and not so much due to his taking her robe. Chinese literature and mythology attest at least two similar stories: Tian Xian Pei, and a untitled version in Soushen Ji, as the fifteenth tale in Volume 14.
A tale from "Lew Chew" sources tells of a farmer who owns a pristine fountain of the purest water, when he sights a maiden fair bathing in the water source and possibly soiling it.
Africa
Southeast Africa
The narrative of the Sky-Maiden was collected in song form from the Ndau people, titled Legend and Song of the Sky-Maiden: the daughter of a powerful chief who lived in the sky and her attendants go down to Earth to bathe, and it becomes a dare amongst the royal princes to see who can fetch her plume/feather - the symbol of her otherwordliness. The victor is a poor man who, as a subversion of the common narrative, gets to live with his sky-wife in her abode. A version of the tale in narrative form was given as The Sky-People by Frans Boas and C. Kamba Simango in the Journal of American Folk-Lore.Madagascar
In a Malagasy tale, obtained from Vàkin-Ankarãtra, the hero Adrianoro is informed that three maidens bathe in a lake, and tries to set a snare for them by shapeshifting into fruits or seeds.The Star Wife or Star Women
A third occurrence of the supernatural spouse from above is the Star Women, a motif that scholar see a possible relation with the Swan Maiden motif.Native American
The motif of the Star Maiden can be found in Native American folklore and mythology, as the character of the Star Wife: she usually descends from heaven in a basket along with her sisters to play in a prairie or to bathe in a lake, and a mortal male, entranced by her figure, plans to make her his own. It is later discovered that she is a maiden from the stars or a star herself who came down to Earth.Philippines
In a tale collected from the "Nabaloi" , an indigenous ethnic group in the Philippines, the stars themselves descend from heaven and bathe in a lake in Batan. The local males hide the stars' clothing, which allow the stars to fly, and marry them. Eventually the men grow old, but the stars retain their youth, regain their clothings and return to the skies.Popular culture
Pop culture appearances include modern novels of the fantasy genre such as Three Hearts and Three Lions, television such as Astroboy Episode 5, and video games such as Heroine's Quest. And recently, swan-men in the Anita Blake series, including. They are also called swan mays or swanmays in fantasy fiction and Dungeons and Dragons. In the Mercedes Lackey book, Fortune's Fool, one swan maiden from a flock of six is kidnapped by a Jinn. Elven princess Eärwen in The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien was referred to as the "swan maiden of Alqualonde". The animal bride theme is explored in an animated film called The Red Turtle. Princess Pari Banu from the 1926 German silhouette animation film The Adventures of Prince Achmed appears very similar to a swan maiden, having a peacock skin that transforms her and her handmaids, though she is referred to as a fairy or genie, in the original 1001 Nights.The anime/manga Ceres, Celestial Legend by Yu Watase is a similar story about an angel whose magic source is stolen as she bathes and she becomes wife to the man who stole it. The story follows one of her descendants now carrying the angel's revenge-driven reincarnated spirit inside her.
The manhwa Faeries' Landing translates the Korean folktale of The Fairy and the Woodcutter to a modern setting.
An episode of children's television programming Super Why adapted the tale of the Swan Maiden.
The eleventh installment of hidden object game series Dark Parables, published by Eipix mixes the motif of the swan maidens and the medieval tale of The Knight of the Swan.