Once there was a king, who had eleven sons and
one daughter. When they were just getting big, his queen died.
He sorrowed so greatly over this that he thought he would never
recover from his grief. But when the twelve children had grown
up, he remarried. This woman, however, was an ugly troll witch.
She didn't like the twelve children at all, so she sent the daughter
out as a servant, and transformed the eleven sons, so that they
were swans by day and men by night. They then flew far away, and
the father sat alone with this evil woman, sighed, and thought
often about his good wife of blessed memory. But when a year had
passed, the sister came home and asked about her eleven brothers;
but she could get no answer. She wondered where they might be,
and always wept, and wished to be with them. Finally, she asked
her father for some money, took all her brothers' clothes, and
their eleven silver spoons; and then she went out into the wide
world to look for them.
When she had wandered for many days, she finally came to a large,
dense forest. There she walked around for a long time, until she
came to a cottage where an old troll witch sat and spun. She asked
the witch if she had seen eleven boys, each larger than the next.
But the witch said that she had only seen eleven lovely swans today,
swimming on the river. So the daughter followed along the river,
with hope in her heart, until she came to a little straw hut. In
it were eleven beds and eleven pots with eleven wooden spoons. She
took the wooden spoons out of the pots, and put the eleven silver
spoons there instead, and then went away.
As evening drew near, there came eleven snow-white swans swimming
up the river, and when they arrived at the hut they turned into
human beings; they were her brothers. When they came inside, they
recognized their spoons, and thought of their sister and looked
for her. The next day they again turned into lovely swans, and flew
away over the wood. But their sister had knotted three nets in the
meantime, and when she later found the eleven swans Iying between
the reeds, she threw the nets over them and caught them all. Then
she asked how she should break their spell, but they could give
her no answer. She wept bitterly, and walked with them through the
wood to their hut, and, when thorns and bushes lay in their way,
lifted them carefully over these, so that they would not be harmed.
She stayed with them that night, and the eleven swans lay their
heads in her lap and fell asleep, because they would only turn into
humans later in the night. But that night the oldest brother dreamed
that they could be saved, if their sister picked thistles from the
fields, and, without saying a single word, hackled them into flax,
spun and wove the flax, and made eleven shirts from the cloth.
So she went out into the fields, and plucked the thistles with
her soft fingers. Then she hackled them into flax, and spun away,
so that her brothers could become human again. One day the weather
was so nice that she took her spinning wheel in her hand, and went
out into the woods, where she sat under a large tree and spun, while
the birds around sang for her. Her brothers were again swans, swimming
far out on the river. But as she sat there and spun, the king came
riding by, and when he saw her, he thought he had never seen a more
lovely woman, so he took her home with him and married her. The
old king had died a short while before.
Now a message came to this king, that he would have to go to war.
While he was gone, his queen gave birth to two lovely children,
but the old queen took them away from her, and commanded a swain
to kill them, and to put two mottled puppies in their place. All
the while the young queen sat and spun and wove, thinking about
her brothers and where they could be.
When the king came home, and heard that his queen had given birth
to two dogs, he was so angered that he condemned her to death. By
that time she had almost completed all of the shirts; only the eleventh
lacked one arm. She wept bitterly again, and only wished that she
had finished the eleventh one. But as she was driven in the cart
to the gallows, there came eleven snow-white swans flying after
it, and they flew circling around her and finally lighted on the
cart and flapped their wings. She threw one shirt after the other
to them, and when they got the shirts they became human beings.
But the eleventh, who got the shirt with one arm, kept one of his
swan wings. Then she told the king the whole story. The swain was
fetched; he had not killed the two princes, but only hidden them,
out of pity. The stepmother was put into a spiked barrel and rolled
to her death.
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