#dolopathos

[adarkrainbow]

When looking at witches in fairytales, I formed a little space for the witch in "The maiden who seeks her brothers" fairytale, bird-subtype.

By this I mean the most famous take/type of this fairytale type, about a girl who discovers that her older brothers are now birds lost somewhere in the world, and she must undergo various trials to save them. While sometimes the transformation of the older brothers is due to something else entirely, quite frequently it is due to a witch being involved and setting a curse upon them.

The brothers Grimm made this story famous by collecting various takes on this tale: The Seven Ravens, The Six Swans, The Twelve Brothers. Andersen also wrote his own take on it, "The Wild Swans". Asbjornsen and Moe also made it popular thanks to their Norwegian version, "The Twelve Wild Ducks". In recent media the Storyteller TV show created its own variant, with The Three Ravens.

I see on the Internet people talk a LOT about "The Children of Lir" as the ancestor and predecessor of this story-type. Is it true that it was Joseph Jacobs who first highlighted the link between this Irish legend and the fairytale-type? I don't know, but the Internet LOVE the Children of Lir.

However I want to say: spare some love for the... I hate to say "actual", but clearly more direct ancestor to this story. The tale of the swan-children, from Dolopathos.

I was thinking back about this because right now I am reading a collection of medieval tales, and this story is within it. Checking out some articles, I see that Stith Thompson was apparently the one who most famously pointed it as the ancestor of the fairytale-type.

If you don't know, "Dolopathos" is a medieval romance (Latin/French) that forms a European variation of the "Seven Sages" book-type, and it contains this fascinating history of the swan-children which is... You know how often you discover that the literary ancestors of fairytales we know today actually compile many stories we think of today as separate? When you look back at Perrault or madame d'Aulnoy or Basile, etc, you see how fairytales used to be multi-parters and much longer, and they were broken into separate types and stories throughout time? Dolopathos' swan-children story is one of those.

The story begins with one of those stories of "A man forces an otherwordly woman to marry her by stealing an item of hers when she bathes" (you know, it is a story famous, be the woman a swan-maiden or a selkie). Then you have the sequence so recurring in various European fairytales of "The evil mother in law makes her son believe his wife gave birth to animals, so that the real children are on their own elsewhere and the mother is banished to live with animals and mistreated". THEN you finally get to the "Maiden who seeks her brothers" story, as the evil mother-in-law makes sure the kids are stuck in swan shape.

Reading this story after reading many variations of these fairytale type (especially in France), it makes sense why they are so often inter-connected and intertwined from region to region

[giucomix]

read an english version of a 12th century latin novel(?) yesterday. apparently its a story of which the earliest version we know is from india and it reached europe somehow

which is very problematic we should cancel iohannes de alta silva for cultural appropriation cool to me. thats not the point though

the plot is actually a framing device to tell short fables which vary depending on the version. the protagonist is returning to his father's kingdom after years and his teacher (here roman poet virgil) orders him to never speak in the kingdom until they meet again. the protag is loyal and does so, but in the kingdom he is accused of a crime and since he can't speak up to defend himself he's sentenced to death. he's about to be executed when a wandering "wise man" shows up and tells a story about how it's bad to rush to conclusions and asks to delay the execution by one day. the next day another wise man shows up during the execution and tells another story and asks the same thing. this goes on for 7 days until finally the teacher arrives and the protag can finally speak up to defend himself. good ending!

now you'd think, finally the teacher will explain why he asked the protag to make such a weird vow of silence. right? he (and many other people) almost died for it but surely the teacher had a moral lesson to teach him through it. right?? well no. he tells a story about how all women are evil and that's it, the story ends here. no reason given for why any of this happened at all

is he stupid?

...there's an additional section after this where the protag becomes king and converts to christianity, i wonder if that was mandatory

[schafpudel]

Swan Maidens, Swan Princes

So Duck is the ugly duckling and Tutu is Odette but in her entirety she's the little mermaid. A water-creature falls in love with a prince and would do anything to be with him as a human girl (but also there's the implication that her reasons are deeper than infatuation - the mermaid looks sadly at her fish's tail and is interested in humanity long before meeting the prince; the duck complains about her looks and voice, and you can imagine a human cradling a throat the wrong shape) and makes a faustian deal with a witch or sorcerer. Her fate is said to be to dissolve into sea-foam/turn into a speck of light and vanish, leaving neither soul nor body behind.

(Hans Christian Andersen was in love with a man. "I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench… my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery." He mailed a copy of The Little Mermaid to the man. The man was engaged to a woman. The love was doomed.)

Tutu is also a swan maiden. The typical narrative for the swan maiden is this: there is a woman who is also a swan. Naked, she is human, but when she puts on her cloak or shirt of feathers, she is a swan, and she prefers to live as a swan, taking off the garment mainly to bathe. A man finds her human form beautiful, steals her skin, and coerces her into a heterosexual marriage and a human life. She may even be forced to bear his children. Eventually, though, she finds her swan skin stashed away, and makes her escape, never to be seen again.

(I imagine many people can sympathise with the swan.)

But there are exceptions to this narrative, that lend themselves to different subtext. One intriguing one is found in the Dolopathos. In this version, the swan-woman's naked form is that of a swan, and she turns into a human by the means of a golden chain-necklace. Her marriage to the human man is consensual. Their children, explicitly, inherit the swan-maiden nature: they are born as human babies, but with gold chain-necklaces like their mother. The schemes of a wicked stepmother lead to the boy children immediately having their gold chains revoked, forcing them into their swan forms. The sister (whose chain was never stolen, and thus grew up human while still being able to join her brothers on the lake), later, manages to steal back her brothers' gold chains, and they take human form for the first time since birth.

Except one swan-boy continues to be denied his human form, for his gold chain is damages. He goes on to be the animal companion of Lohengrin, the Knight of the Swan, pulling the knight's boat-chariot through water with his golden chain.

In both the typical "human into swan via clothing" narrative and Dolpathos' "swan into human via a necklace" narrative, the naked form is not the shapeshifters preferred form. Being denied that which allows their transformation, whether into swan or man, is an act of coercion and violence, a denial of identity and bodily autonomy.

The heart shard necklace is what lets the duck become a girl and a swan-maiden ballerina. When returned to the prince, Mythos gains magical powers - and some of these, such as the summoning of flurries of pink petals, are exactly the same as Tutu's.

And yet duck is able to invoke Tutu's form and power, if only briefly, without the pendant. Duck is also written a lot less animalistically than other animal characters, and the obvious Doylist reason is that the show frames animalistic behavior as weird/creepy and Duck is supposed to be relatable to the human audience by contrast, but. She was literally conceptualized as human girl before Itoh developed the idea to make her a duck, and she is no more strange or inhuman than any other clumsy, ditzy, goodhearted mahou-shoujo heroine. She's just a quacking girl.

Yet the show says, "you were born in a duck's body. Back to a duck you must go."

Mytho is returned to his full princehood, but is still bound into a marriage by obligation. Intriguingly, for such an amatonormative show, Princess Tutu suggest to the audience that Mytho's obsession with Tutu was something other than (romantic) "love" all along; rather, the "feeling that burned in my breast when i thought of tutu" was Hope. It was simply construed as romantic by everyone around him.

(There's a brief shot of a younger Siegfried, presumably pre-heart-shattering, being told about Princess Tutu by an old man, within the pages of The Prince and The Raven. Siegfried expresses the desire to marry the fairy-creature. I wonder if that could be read as a displaced, misunderstood emotion as well, articulated as heterosexual love because a fairy tale character has no other way to understand a boy being mesmerized by a girl.)

Anyways it's literally not in the text but if you pointed at Mytho and told me he's actually the same kind of being as Princess Tutu - some sort of swan maiden fairy being - but was just raised as a human boy I'd like, buy it. It's a headcanon I can accept. If some birds want to be girls then some boys can long to be birds? hashtag gender envy

Also Fakir can't understand Duck's gender b/c hes the only tutu character who unambigiously isnt a bird in any way. Itoh and Sato put princess tutu in the public domain so the transgender furries can poop and twist it up. what was that. goodnight

[adarkrainbow]

Given I have the story right under my eyes, I thought of doing a brief recap so you see how this tale, present in literary form since the 12th century, might have inspired later tales. Here is "The tale of the swan-children", "seventh tale of the Dolopathos":

Our story begins with a young man heavily praised by the text. He is noble, he is virtuous, he is galant, and more than anything he LOVES hunting. He loves everything about the hunt, and every forms of hunt - and one day he went with his dogs and his servants in the forest. Soon, they saw a ten-year-old white stag and started tracking it down... However, anyone familiar with medieval literature will tell you that hunting a white animal in the forest, ESPECIALLY a stag, is the beginning of troubles for you.

The stag fled and the hunt for it was long and arduous - so much so that the man lost sight of his servants, found himself all alone, and even lost his hunting dogs. It was just him and his horse, and no matter how much he blew his horn, no man nor beast answered him in the forest. Running around, he ended up discovering a beautiful fountain of clear water (fountain in the oldest sense of the term - a spring, a small piece of running water), and in it was a naked fairy of incredible beauty taking a bath. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, and immediately the young nobleman fell in love with her, forgetting all about his lost hunting party. Bewitched by her beauty, burning with desire, he spied on her while the fairy, who had not noticed the man, placed on the fountain's side a chain of gold that belonged to her. The young man, "mad with his passion", snatched the chain away - it contained all the strength and all the power of the fairy within. Surprised and defenseless, she obeyed as the young man told her to get out of the water and put on her clothes. He then asked her to give him her love, promising to marry her, and make her a wealthy noble lady. The fairy, in return, had the man swear that he would indeed marry her and make her a proper lady if she loved him. As the narrator humoristically comments "In this time, you didn't need more: when two young people made promises, they behaved towards each other with loyalty, faithfulness and great love". (There's a lot of irony in this text, playing on the supposed galantness of the story which hides the not-so-elegant subtext)

The two slept on the grass by the fountain's side, they spent the night there, and "because the woman was wise and intelligent, not at all stupid or naive", the fairy, upon looking at the stars, knew that on this night she had conceived six sons and one girl. This frightened her, as she told her husband about it, but he was simply joyful and comforting. The young man took the fairy back to his castle, where she was celebrated (another joke of the text: they became husband and wife by passing the night by the fountain. You see the type of subtext there). There was only one person unhappy with this: the widowing mother of the young man.

The mother delighted in having all powers over her son and being his "sole mistress". She feared that her daughter-in-law would gain ascendance over him, and take power within the castle. She was so sad and pained at the idea of losing dominion over her son she fell sick with disdain and hatred, almost died... But then decided to get rid of the fairy-woman. First she tried to make her son doubt his love for her, tried to tell him she wasn't a woman for him, but he wouldn't listen to her, and said he would never part from his wife. The mother, realizing she could not change her son's mind, worked on gaining the trust and love of the fairy. Cunning, wicked and a true hypocrite, she acted in a courtly, pleasant, friendly, loving way towards her daughter-in-law, obtaining her favors and her support... Until it was time for the delivery, as the fairy was pregnant with her seven children.

The mother arranged things so that she was alone with the fairy, in a lonely room of the castle: the mother acted as the midwife. As the fairy knew and prophesized, after a VERY, very painful birth process, she delivered seven children, six boys and a girl, all incredibly beautiful and each wearing around the neck a chain of gold. It was something "natural" to them, identical to the chain their own mother used to have. The fairy was sick and exhausted by her extra-large pregnancy and the very painful birth process, so she paid no attention to what her mother-in-law was doing... which was switching the babies for the seven babies of a hunting dog. She had a servant take the babies away to the forest, to there be drowned or strangled in secret. The servant however couldn't kill such beautiful babies, and he was still faithful to his lord, so rather he left them under a tree, hoping some savage beast would do the job for him.

Here comes one of the religious moments of the text: God who created the earth and mankind to his image is full of empathy, he created everything and takes care of everything, but he is much more careful towards the misfortune of mankind because he created man in his image. He knows all, he can do all, and so he knew what happened to the children, and he worked to protect them so they wouldn't die. [Aka: all of that just to say "Somehow they survived. Why? Ehh... God wanted it. There.]

In the forest lived an old man, a very wise and knowledgeable philosopher who had fled from cities and towns because he wanted to meditate alone in peace. He spent his life studying in a cavern he had turned into his house, and as he was walking around the forest meditating he discovered the seven children under the tree - he took them to his cave, and treated them with kindness, keeping them and feeding them for seven whole years, considering them as hiw own children. He used the milk of a doe to feed them, a doe that was basically the philosopher's pet as he domesticated and tamed her during his life in the forest.

Back at the castle, the evil mother-in-law told her son how "Indeed, your wife IS a fairy, just look at what she gave birth to!". When the son saw his wife, sick and wasted away, holding seven pups, he was struck and he believed the words of his mother that indeed, his wife could only give birth to monsters. He had the seven dogs drowned and then his wife punished. The text here displays again its irony here, as it begins with a long passage about how women are experts at lying and deceiving, how she can trick and cheat even with the wisest men, how nobody can resist their illusions and falsehood if they want to be wicked, all of that supposedly to put the blame on the mother-in-law for how the son's behavior changed... While also casually saying later how sudden and abrupt the son's change of heart was, mentionning how his great loved "seemed now to all be gone", and comparing before, when he served and admired her more than anyone and loved her as his lady, mistress, queen, and after, when he was overtaken by a deep hatred for her.

Anyway, all of that to say, influenced by his mother the son became the biggest jerk ever: not allowing his wife to say anything or explain anything, not even letting her get out of bed, he had her buried up to the chest in her courtyard (with her tits out, of course, it's a medieval text after all), ordered that nobody should respect or be kind to her, and added that she could only be fed the food prepared for the dogs, PLUS... that everybody had to wash their hands over her head, and use her hair like a towel. As I said, we are in full medieval times. And the fairy was so kind and so sweet she allowed this torment to happen for SEVEN YEARS. She wore rotten clothes, her skin was somehow both pale and darkened, her blond hair had turned black with dirt, she had turned very skinny, she was just skin and bone... "Her shining beauty was come, and it was a miracle she was not dead yet".

Meanwhile her children were in the forest, having a good time, wandering in the woods, catching wild beasts and animals they brought to the philosopher. The philosopher raised them, taught them, educated them. One day, their father came to hunt in the forest: he saw the seven children playing in the forest, with gold chains around their neck. He spied on them, as seeing them gave him some sort of joy, but when they noticed him they fled - he tracked them, "hoping to catch at least one" (again, irony of the text, as the terms chosen evoke an ambiguity, he almost treats them like beasts to hunt), but they escaped his hunt. The father returned to his castle and told his mother the strange adventure he had. The old woman understood what it meant, and had the servant confess that he didn't actually kill the children... The wicked mother simply told the servant it was all his fault for not killing them straight away, threatened him with how if the lord found out they would both be punished, and it was now his job to get rid of them... By bringing them her chains. "Take it from them, convince them to gave it away or take it by force, but if you return without the chains you won't live for long!"

Fearing for his life, the servant searched days and nights in the forest, wandering everywhere in the woos. On the fourth day of his quest he found a deep and clear river where the six brothers where swimming, but under the shape of swans (yeah, it's apparently a sort of fairy-power they naturally have). They were having fun in the water, while their sister was sitting by the river-side, guarding their six chains of gold. The servant snuck on the girl, too busy watching her brothers play, and snatched the six chains of gold - but he could not get hers, as she fled in the forest. The servant returned to the castle, and the wicked mother had the six chains turned into a drinking cup (a hanap to be precise). Or she thought she had... truth was that the blacksmith entrusted with the task could not damage or break the chain by fire or hammer, so rather he made the cup with a different piece of gold and hid the chains. The mother hid the cup in a box and never had anyone use it or know about it - not knowing she had failed in her project.

The six brothers were now turned into swan form permanently, unable to regain their humanity (the power to do so was in the chains). For a very long time they just swam down the river screaming their sorrow and frustration, and even grew to hate the river and flew away from it. Their sister followed them in their travel, for she could still turn into a swan whenever she liked thanks to her chain. All seven of them flew into the sky, and reached a deep and clear pond where they made their new home... and the pound was just right next to the walls of their father's castle.

There's a segment where the construction and architecture of the castle is explained in details, to say it is a castle nobody could damage with any weapon and that can't be forced open - as long as there's food in there, they can support a siege for as long as they like. The passage is VERY long and the narrator constantly has to justify himself for why he spends so much time speaking about this castle. After this LONG fanboying over the castle, we finally get into the key point: the window of the lord's rooms gave directly towards the pond. He was in a quite sad mood, but whenever he looked at the pond and saw the beautiful swans, he felt joyful and appeased. He ordered his men to go feed and take care of the swans, but without attacking or threatening them. Thus the swans became sort of the lord's pet, being regularly fed by the castle people with bread, fish and meat. Everybody in the castle loved them and treated them as their mascot, so to speak, enjoying the show they put on as they swam, played and did all sort of tricks for them.

The sister, who could still become human, regularly took her human shape to go near the castle and there beg for some bread like... well, like a beggar, which she pretended to be. While her brothers were fed by the people, she had only to survive on the leftovers of the castle and the extras of the lord's table. And of course, she could not know the lord of this castle was her own father... Nor could she know that the woman she saw abused in the castle's courtyard, the woman she kept crying over and feeling distress for, the woman she felt pain for, was her own mother.

Hopefully she could find back joy and comfort by returning to her brothers - and she always had enough food given to her that she could share it with her siblings. The girl could not get the abused woman out of her head, and if there wasn't her brothers to take care of she would have stayed by her side always, though she could not know why. "She obeyed to her nature" as the texts comments. The people of the castle saw her several times join the swans and feed them, and them hugging her and sleeping with her. They noticed she looked a lot like the fairy before her punishment, and when the lord heard all these talks, he had her summoned. He asked the girl who she was, where she came from, who her family was, and the girl told him while crying her entire life-story.

The evil mother was in the room as the girl told her story, and so was the servant who commited the crimes. Hopefully the girl wasn't accusing them, and nobody suspect they could be related to this wild tale, but they were still scared and uneased enough [Cut to another religious moment where the narrator rambles about how God knows all, chooses to punish rarely but always switfly and harshly, and how he chooses when to reveal certain truths]. The old woman summoned the servant later, and told him to girl the girl as soon as he could, to avoid her discovering their identity. As one day the girl left the castle to see her brothers in the pond, the servant attacked her and tried to kill her with a sword - but the lord, who was around, defended the girl and ordered the servant to tell him why he actd like this. The servant , despaired, revealed everything, and swore that he only acted by the lord's mother's orders.

The lord, furious, returned at the castle and threatened his mother with a sword to tell him the truth. She confessed, but added that if he killed her he would commit a great son, and that it wouldn't bring back the chains, now turned into a cup. However, as the lord summoned the smith who did the job, the worker revealed how he had preserved the chains - the lord of the castle rewarded him handsomly. The little girl took the chains and gave them back to the swans, who returned to being human... Except one. When the smith had tried to destroy the chains, he had only managed to damage one of them, breaking a little part of it - but it had taken him so much effort he gave up the idea of destroying the chains altogether. The boy who owned this chain could not actually return to a human face, and had to live as a swan forever. However the narrator mentions that he became famous, as he was the swan of the famous legend of the Swan Knight: the Swan Knight himself was one of the six boys, and so when stories told of this heroic knight on a ship pulled by a swan with golden chains, it is just the two brothers having their adventures.

Everybody in the castle was happy with the curse being lifted, and they soon dug up the fairy, healed her, clothed her, and cared for her so much that she soon regained her colors, and the beauty of her body. Her lord loved her once more, in fact he was said to love her even more than before. But when it came to punish the cruel and perfidious old mother, she pretended she was sorry, she begged him to spare her, she told him he couldn't kill his own mother. The lord had a quite badass answer "I do not know if you are my mother, because I can't believe that, had you been indeed my mother, you would have done such a horrible thing. And, even if you are my mother, I swear by the soul of my father that you won't be forgiven." She was condemned to be buried just like the fairy used to, and to stay there until her death. She had to undergo the same treatment her daughter-in-law had to endure, and when she finally died, she was buried in the same hole, "because it was only justice".

The end ~

When looking at witches in fairytales, I formed a little space for the witch in "The maiden who seeks her brothers" fairytale, bird-subtype.

By this I mean the most famous take/type of this fairytale type, about a girl who discovers that her older brothers are now birds lost somewhere in the world, and she must undergo various trials to save them. While sometimes the transformation of the older brothers is due to something else entirely, quite frequently it is due to a witch being involved and setting a curse upon them.

The brothers Grimm made this story famous by collecting various takes on this tale: The Seven Ravens, The Six Swans, The Twelve Brothers. Andersen also wrote his own take on it, "The Wild Swans". Asbjornsen and Moe also made it popular thanks to their Norwegian version, "The Twelve Wild Ducks". In recent media the Storyteller TV show created its own variant, with The Three Ravens.

I see on the Internet people talk a LOT about "The Children of Lir" as the ancestor and predecessor of this story-type. Is it true that it was Joseph Jacobs who first highlighted the link between this Irish legend and the fairytale-type? I don't know, but the Internet LOVE the Children of Lir.

However I want to say: spare some love for the... I hate to say "actual", but clearly more direct ancestor to this story. The tale of the swan-children, from Dolopathos.

I was thinking back about this because right now I am reading a collection of medieval tales, and this story is within it. Checking out some articles, I see that Stith Thompson was apparently the one who most famously pointed it as the ancestor of the fairytale-type.

If you don't know, "Dolopathos" is a medieval romance (Latin/French) that forms a European variation of the "Seven Sages" book-type, and it contains this fascinating history of the swan-children which is... You know how often you discover that the literary ancestors of fairytales we know today actually compile many stories we think of today as separate? When you look back at Perrault or madame d'Aulnoy or Basile, etc, you see how fairytales used to be multi-parters and much longer, and they were broken into separate types and stories throughout time? Dolopathos' swan-children story is one of those.

The story begins with one of those stories of "A man forces an otherwordly woman to marry her by stealing an item of hers when she bathes" (you know, it is a story famous, be the woman a swan-maiden or a selkie). Then you have the sequence so recurring in various European fairytales of "The evil mother in law makes her son believe his wife gave birth to animals, so that the real children are on their own elsewhere and the mother is banished to live with animals and mistreated". THEN you finally get to the "Maiden who seeks her brothers" story, as the evil mother-in-law makes sure the kids are stuck in swan shape.

Reading this story after reading many variations of these fairytale type (especially in France), it makes sense why they are so often inter-connected and intertwined from region to region

[themousefromfantasyland]

@ariel-seagull-wings @princesssarisa

When looking at witches in fairytales, I formed a little space for the witch in "The maiden who seeks her brothers" fairytale, bird-subtype.

By this I mean the most famous take/type of this fairytale type, about a girl who discovers that her older brothers are now birds lost somewhere in the world, and she must undergo various trials to save them. While sometimes the transformation of the older brothers is due to something else entirely, quite frequently it is due to a witch being involved and setting a curse upon them.

The brothers Grimm made this story famous by collecting various takes on this tale: The Seven Ravens, The Six Swans, The Twelve Brothers. Andersen also wrote his own take on it, "The Wild Swans". Asbjornsen and Moe also made it popular thanks to their Norwegian version, "The Twelve Wild Ducks". In recent media the Storyteller TV show created its own variant, with The Three Ravens.

I see on the Internet people talk a LOT about "The Children of Lir" as the ancestor and predecessor of this story-type. Is it true that it was Joseph Jacobs who first highlighted the link between this Irish legend and the fairytale-type? I don't know, but the Internet LOVE the Children of Lir.

However I want to say: spare some love for the... I hate to say "actual", but clearly more direct ancestor to this story. The tale of the swan-children, from Dolopathos.

I was thinking back about this because right now I am reading a collection of medieval tales, and this story is within it. Checking out some articles, I see that Stith Thompson was apparently the one who most famously pointed it as the ancestor of the fairytale-type.

If you don't know, "Dolopathos" is a medieval romance (Latin/French) that forms a European variation of the "Seven Sages" book-type, and it contains this fascinating history of the swan-children which is... You know how often you discover that the literary ancestors of fairytales we know today actually compile many stories we think of today as separate? When you look back at Perrault or madame d'Aulnoy or Basile, etc, you see how fairytales used to be multi-parters and much longer, and they were broken into separate types and stories throughout time? Dolopathos' swan-children story is one of those.

The story begins with one of those stories of "A man forces an otherwordly woman to marry her by stealing an item of hers when she bathes" (you know, it is a story famous, be the woman a swan-maiden or a selkie). Then you have the sequence so recurring in various European fairytales of "The evil mother in law makes her son believe his wife gave birth to animals, so that the real children are on their own elsewhere and the mother is banished to live with animals and mistreated". THEN you finally get to the "Maiden who seeks her brothers" story, as the evil mother-in-law makes sure the kids are stuck in swan shape.

Reading this story after reading many variations of these fairytale type (especially in France), it makes sense why they are so often inter-connected and intertwined from region to region

[maimoncat]

"how did the children survive?"

" A wizard God did it"

When looking at witches in fairytales, I formed a little space for the witch in "The maiden who seeks her brothers" fairytale, bird-subtype.

By this I mean the most famous take/type of this fairytale type, about a girl who discovers that her older brothers are now birds lost somewhere in the world, and she must undergo various trials to save them. While sometimes the transformation of the older brothers is due to something else entirely, quite frequently it is due to a witch being involved and setting a curse upon them.

The brothers Grimm made this story famous by collecting various takes on this tale: The Seven Ravens, The Six Swans, The Twelve Brothers. Andersen also wrote his own take on it, "The Wild Swans". Asbjornsen and Moe also made it popular thanks to their Norwegian version, "The Twelve Wild Ducks". In recent media the Storyteller TV show created its own variant, with The Three Ravens.

I see on the Internet people talk a LOT about "The Children of Lir" as the ancestor and predecessor of this story-type. Is it true that it was Joseph Jacobs who first highlighted the link between this Irish legend and the fairytale-type? I don't know, but the Internet LOVE the Children of Lir.

However I want to say: spare some love for the... I hate to say "actual", but clearly more direct ancestor to this story. The tale of the swan-children, from Dolopathos.

I was thinking back about this because right now I am reading a collection of medieval tales, and this story is within it. Checking out some articles, I see that Stith Thompson was apparently the one who most famously pointed it as the ancestor of the fairytale-type.

If you don't know, "Dolopathos" is a medieval romance (Latin/French) that forms a European variation of the "Seven Sages" book-type, and it contains this fascinating history of the swan-children which is... You know how often you discover that the literary ancestors of fairytales we know today actually compile many stories we think of today as separate? When you look back at Perrault or madame d'Aulnoy or Basile, etc, you see how fairytales used to be multi-parters and much longer, and they were broken into separate types and stories throughout time? Dolopathos' swan-children story is one of those.

The story begins with one of those stories of "A man forces an otherwordly woman to marry her by stealing an item of hers when she bathes" (you know, it is a story famous, be the woman a swan-maiden or a selkie). Then you have the sequence so recurring in various European fairytales of "The evil mother in law makes her son believe his wife gave birth to animals, so that the real children are on their own elsewhere and the mother is banished to live with animals and mistreated". THEN you finally get to the "Maiden who seeks her brothers" story, as the evil mother-in-law makes sure the kids are stuck in swan shape.

Reading this story after reading many variations of these fairytale type (especially in France), it makes sense why they are so often inter-connected and intertwined from region to region