The archbishop, who had hidden himself to watch her intrusion, reports this to the king as proof of her witchcraft. When Elisa runs out of nettles, she is forced to collect more from the church graveyard. The king refuses to believe this, however. The archbishop, however, suspects Elisa of witchcraft.

He gives her a room in his palace in which she continues her knitting, and eventually proposes to her, to which she agrees. She endures the pain from handling the nettles with bare hands.Įarly 20th century illustration for 'The Wild Swans' by Arthur Joseph Gaslin.Įventually, the king of this far away land happens across Elisa and falls in love with her. Should she speak while knitting the shirts, her brothers will instantly die.

The Queen of Fairies instructs Elisa to gather nettles from graveyards and knit them into eleven shirts for her brothers, while maintaining a vow of silence during the task, if she wishes to return them to human form. Her brothers carry her out of the land to protect her from the with-queen's wrath. She attempts to curse the princess, the fifteen year old Elisa, but the princess is too pure of heart to fall vicim to the witch-queen's dark magic, so instead she is banished. He remarries, but the new queen is in fact an evil witch, who, purely out of spite, curses the princes so that by day they are transformed into swans. He has twelve children eleven sons and one daughter. In a distant kingdom there lives a king whose wife has died. Three very similar fairy tales, called ' The Twelve Brothers', ' The Seven Ravens' and ' The Six Swans', are included in Children's and Household Tales, the anthology of German folktales compiled by the Brothers Grimm. The story is based on Scandinavian folktales. It was first published on October 2, 1938, along with ' The Steadfast Tin Soldier' and ' The Daisy', as part of the anthology Fairy Tales Told to Children New Collection First Booklet 1838. 'The Wild Swans' (Danish: 'De vilde svaner') is a short children's fantasy story by Hans Christian Andersen. 'The Wild Swans', as illustrated by Marcia Brown

The wild swans hans christian andersen