I had to cheat a bit with the photo. There are really seven swans, five cygnets and the parents, in the original photo but no way I could get them completely in a square.

Just to show that I was only cheating a little bit, here is the photo with mum and dad cut in the middle:

Another non-Grimm fairy tale. After finding Little Thumbling by Charles Perrault I started looking around and found Die sieben Schwanen (The seven swans). This tale is one retold by Ludwig Bechstein, a German Romantic who also collected fairy tales like the Grimms. The story is similar to the one about the seven ravens except that in this case the seven brothers are babies born to the Prince’s wife. Mother-in-law hates the wife and replaces the babies with dog pups. She orders the babies killed but the servant tasked with the deed lets them live. They survive, their days split between being swans and boys. The mother-in-law is decidedly cruel against her daughter-in-law, has her buried in a hole up to her neck, only gives her dog food to eat and – quite unusual – has a fountain built close by so that people who come to wash their hands dry them afterwards on the woman’s hair. The swans carry gold chains around their necks, gifts from their mother. When the bad queen hears of this she has the swans caught and collects the chains as the boys can only become human again through the chains. She orders the chains to be melted down but after she has done this with one she is discovered and buried in the self-same hole the wife of the prince is freed from. Six of the swans turn permanently into boys but the seventh swan has to stay a bird and according to the storyteller has many adventures afterwards.

Seven for September #15

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