Technically not a fairy tale but rather a “funny tale”, however The Seven Swabians appeared in the collection of the Brothers Grimm. The people in the photo might not be born Swabians or even Germans some of them but they lived long enough in the Stuttgart area and identify as Stuttgarter and therefore Swabians.
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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.
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I lied before. There is one fairy tale that I snug in that is not from the Brothers Grimm but by Charles Perrault called Le Petit Poucet, Little Thumb or Little Thumbling. The tiny son of a woodcutter, sometimes also called Hop-o’-My-Thumb, has six brothers. The parents abandon their seven (!) sons and Little Thumbling makes up for his size with cleverness and wisdom. He ends up stealing the seven-league boots from an ogre who was trapping and planning to eat the boys.
This picture is from my favourite fairy tale books as a child, it was Die schönsten Märchen der Welt für 365 und einen Tag (The most beautiful fairy tales of the world for 365 and one day, edited by Lisa Tetzner). It consisted of four volumes and I can’t find the one with this particular picture in it. It must come from a different fairy tale but the boots are definitely seven-league boots.
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The title is The Brave Little Tailor. The story is about a puny tailor who is so bothered by flies while eating his bread and jam that he swats them with a rag and kills seven of them. He then stitches SEVEN AT ONE BLOW on his belt and emboldened by his story leaves to find his fortune in the world. The characters he meets all think that the inscription refers to seven men, rather than flies.
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The Seven Ravens – not quite as well known, also by the Brothers Grimm. It’s the story of seven brothers who are magicked into ravens and their sister goes through many hardships to break the spell.
Okay, technically these are crows or possibly rooks but it’s close enough, I think. And there is seven of them.
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Another Grimm fairytale (Who am I kidding? I only have Grimm fairytales in this series).
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. These are from the Märchenwald (fairytale forest) in the Obrunner Schlucht, near Höchst im Odenwald.
And here is the potted version:
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This is the beginning of my mini series within Seven for September. 7 was always an important number in western cultures. It is often considered a lucky number (not so in some East Asian countries, though). It is the addition of 3 and 4 (3 in Christian culture signifying the Holy Trinity, 4 signifying the four elements: fire, earth, water, and air). According to the Hebrew bible the world was created in 7 days, we still organise our modern life in weeks of 7 days. Adding the facing sides of a die always makes 7, and we had the 7 wonders of the ancient world (the modern wonders are only a copy).
And of course, 7 is often found as a special number in fairytales. I decided to have this series directly after yesterday’s seven-year-old. Although fairy tales were not originally created for children they soon became the main audience for them.
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My first illustration of a Grimm fairytale is the story of The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats as depicted on a half-timbered house in Michelstadt im Odenwald which houses a toy store on the groundfloor.
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She was seven then. A very serious seven. I’m glad to report that she is now a happy 14 year old teenager, well, as happy as teenagers can be.
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pictures imperfect blog 