Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

Author:Hans Christian Andersen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2021-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Wild Swans

Hans Christian Andersen

Far away from here, where the swallows fly when we have winter, there lived a king who had eleven sons and one daughter, Elisa. The eleven brothers—they were princes, of course—went to school with stars upon their breasts and swords by their sides: they wrote upon golden slates with diamond slate-pencils, and said their lessons off by heart just as well as they could read them from a book—you could see at once that they were princes. Their sister Elisa sat on a little stool made of looking-glass, and had a picture-book which had cost half a kingdom.

Oh, yes, the children had a very good time, but it was not always to be so.

Their father, who was king over the whole land, married a wicked queen, who was not at all kind to the poor children. This was made clear to them from the very first day: a great celebration was held throughout the palace, and so the children played at visiting, but instead of getting all the cakes and baked apples that were left over, as they used to do, they were given nothing but sand in a tea-cup, and told to make believe with that.

The week after, the queen sent the little sister, Elisa, away to the country to live with a peasant family, and it was not long before she turned the king so much against the poor princes that he would have nothing more to do with them.

‘Fly out into the world and shift for yourselves!’ said the wicked queen. ‘Fly away like great birds without voices!’ She had not the power, however, to do them all the evil she would, and they became eleven beautiful wild swans. With a strange harsh cry, they flew out of the palace windows away over the park and the woods.

It was still quite early in the morning when they passed by the peasant’s cottage where their sister Elisa lay asleep; they hovered over the roof, craned their long necks this way and that, and beat their wings, but no one heard them or saw them. Off they had to go again, high up towards the clouds, far away into the wide world, where they flew over a great dark forest which stretched right down to the sea-shore.

Poor little Elisa stood in the peasant’s living-room and played with a green leaf—she had no other toys. She stuck a hole in the leaf, peeped through it up at the sun, and it was just as if she saw her brothers’ clear eyes; and every time the warm sun-beams shone upon her cheeks, she thought of her brothers’ kisses.

One day went by just like another. Whenever the wind blew through the great rose-hedge outside the cottage, it would whisper to the roses, ‘Who could be more beautiful than you?’ But the roses would shake their heads and say, ‘Elisa!’ And whenever the old woman sat in the doorway on Sundays reading her hymn-book, the wind would turn the

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