The Wild Swans

"The Wild Swans"
Illustration by Vilhelm Pedersen, Andersen‘s first illustrator (1850)
Author	Hans Christian Andersen
Original title	"De vilde svaner"
Country	Denmark
Language	Danish
Genre(s)	Fairy tale
Published in	Fairy Tales Told for Children. New Collection. First Booklet. 1838.
Publication type	Fairy tale collection
Publisher	C. A. Reitzel
Media type	Print
Publication date	2 October 1838
Preceded by	"The Steadfast Tin Soldier"

The Wild Swans is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a princess who rescues her eleven brothers from a spell cast by an evil queen. The tale was first published on 2 October 1838 as the first installment in Andersen's Fairy Tales Told for Children by C. A. Reitzel in Copenhagen, Denmark. It has been adapted to various media including ballet, television, and film.

In a faraway kingdom, there lives a widowed king with his twelve children: eleven princes and one princess. One day, he decides to remarry. He marries a wicked queen who was a witch. Out of spite, the queen turns her eleven stepsons into swans (they are allowed to become human by night) and forces them to fly away. The queen then tries to bewitch their 15-year-old sister, Elisa, but Elisa's goodness is too strong for this, so the queen has Elisa banished. The brothers carry Elisa to safety in a foreign land where she is out of the reach of her stepmother.

There, Elisa is guided by the queen of the fairies to gather stinging nettles in graveyards to knit into shirts that will eventually help her brothers regain their human shapes. Elisa endures painfully blistered hands from nettle stings, and she must also take a vow of silence for the duration of her task, for speaking one word will kill her brothers. The king of another faraway land happens to come across the mute Elisa and falls in love with her. He grants her a room in his castle where she continues her knitting. Eventually he proposes to crown her as his queen and wife, and she accepts.

However, the Archbishop is chagrined because he thinks Elisa is herself a witch, but the king will not believe him. One night Elisa runs out of nettles and is forced to collect more in a nearby church graveyard where the Archbishop is watching. Ghoulish spirits that devour the bodies of the dead are also in the churchyard, and the archbishop believes that Elisa is in league with them. He reports the incident to the king as proof of witchcraft. The statues of the saints shake their heads in protest, but the Archbishop misinterprets this sign as confirmation of Elisa's guilt. The Archbishop orders to put Elisa on trial for witchcraft. She can speak no word in her defense and is sentenced to death by burning at the stake.