Swans_Swan_Maidens_and

Swans, Swan-Maidens, and Swan-Knights

Even the normally objective Oxford English Dictionary uses value terms in defining the swan: it is "characterized by a long and gracefully curved neck and a majestic motion when swimming." Men see the sway with awe and wonder, as in Yeats' "The Wild Swans at Coole":

But now they glide on the still water

Mysterious, beautiful . . .

This sense of a mysterious beauty, a kind of enchantment, as if the creatures were from another world, is expressed in Hans Christian Andersen's "The Ugly Duckling," in the scene when the awakward, ungainly creature, trying desperately to get along in this common world, first sees beings of another order:

One evening, just as the sun was setting in splendor, a great flock of large, handsome

birds appeared out of the reeds. The duckling had never seen birds so beautiful. They

were dazzling white with long graceful necks. They were swans. They uttered a very

strange cry as they unfurled their magnificent wings . . . They went up so high, so very

high, that the ugly little duckling felt a strange uneasiness come over him as he

watched them. (1)

This essay is not mine, but Jim Doubleday's. It is one of several we created while working together on a book about myth. I am including it here partially on its own merits, but also because it makes a useful reading assignment for my internet course, Myth and Erotica.--Jack Hart

The swan has no song to match its size, beauty, and power. But men imagined a voice for it, one that the swan never used until immediately before its death, when it would burst forth into the most beautiful song that any bird ever sung--the dying song of the swan. This swan song, heard only in the imagination, is so central a characteristic of our ideal of the bird that its very name comes from its song. The word swan goes back to an Indo-European root swen, meaning meaning something like "sound, music, melody." (Cognates are Sanskrit avanti "(it) sounds," Latin sonit "(it) sounds," Irish sennain "I make music," and Old English geswin "melody, song," swinsian "to make melody.") (3)

Perhaps because of the figure of the swan as preeminent singer, the swan was sacred to Apollo. (It was also sacred to Venus, because of its beauty and grace--and for another reason that we will come to.) (40) From the association of the swan with song and with Apollo the god of poetry, poets were called swans. This notion is particularly a classical one; in English it is only in authors who imitate the classics, as in Ben Jonson's apostrophe to Shakespeare as "Sweet Swan of Avon!" And it seems rather frigid.

The theme of the swan's bursting into song once immediately before dying has a great imaginative power. Sometimes the theme appears directly, especially in poems that have a traditional form, such as the complaint or the catalogue. In Chaucers Anelida and Arcite, 346, the heroine compares her song to the swan's who "Ayeins his deth shal singen his penanuce" (this traditon goes back at least to Ovid's Heroides, Vii, 3 ff., where Dido compares her lament to a swan-song). In Chaucer's Parlement of Fowles, 342, we have "the jealous swan ayens his deth that syngeth," and in Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle" the swan is a necessary member of the funeral personae:

Let the priest in surplice white

The defunctive music can,

Be the death-divining swan,

Lest the requiem lack his right. (13-16)

The theme can also appear directly in song, as in the "Isles of Greece" section of Byron's Don

Juan (Canto III), "There, swan-like, let me sing and die."

But since the Renaissance, the theme has commonly appeared somewhat obliquely. For example, the lines "I will play the swan/ And die in music" in Othello are given to Emilia, not to Desdemona, though it was Desdemona who had been singing immediately before her death, as Emelia (and the audience) remember. The theme can be given a wry twist--for example, Coleridge's "Epigram on a Volunteer Singer":

Swans sing before they die--'twere no bad thing

Did certain persons die before they sing.

And sometimes the swan's song is present only in the allusion, as in the famous lines from Tennyson's Tithonius:

And after many a summer dies the swan.

(This line was perhaps more famous after being borrowed as a novel title by Aldous Huxley.) The power of the line comes from the underlying romantic paradox of the poem, that it is only death (or rather the knowledge that death will come) that is the source of creativity: the swan singing at its death embodies this paradox. (5)

Next only in importance to the figure of the swan as dying singer is the figure of the swan as a type of faultlessness or excellence, in reference to its pure white plumage. The phrase in which the swan is compared to the goose, a type of foolishness, "All his geese are swans," has become a proverb. The swan is in the same way contrasted to the crow, as in Romeo and Juliet, I, ii, 72:

Compare her face with some that I shall show,

And I will make thee think thy swan a crow.

The whiteness of the swan is so much a part of its meaning to human beings that its name in Latin and Greek (cycnus, cygnus, and kuknos) goes back to the Indo-European root keuk-, "to be white, to be bright, to shine." Ever since Juvenal's Satire VI on the ways of woman, the black swan, rara avis in terris, has become proverbial for something non-existent, or at least extremely rare. In fact, black swans have been discovered in Australia, and are by no means uncommon. (See later in this discussion the black swan in Swan Lake, where the black swan has changed its meaning.)

The whiteness of the swan makes it also a figure of purity and chastity. It may even be the symbol of a cold, inhuman purity, as it often is in the work of the Decadents. So Phillipe Jullian comments, with reference to the swan swimming indifferently by the anguished lonely figure of Munch, "The swan is the symbol of an innocent beauty as cold as the water on which it glides." (6) One grotesquely effective example of this attitude towards the swan is Leon Frederic's Le Torrent, a part of the trypych Tout est mort, in which swans are swimming among a mass of dead children. (7)

But, in line with the general principle of opposites in mythology, the swan can and does have exactly the reverse meaning: hot sexual lust, even with violence. The major example of the swan with this meaning is the story of Leda and the Swan, in which Zeus takes the form of a swan to ravish and impregnate Leda (Helen is the daughter of this union.). This event has been imagined vividly and sensually by artists and poets, especially by Michelangelo in his painting of "Leda and the Swan" and by Yeats in his "Leda and the Swan." Leonardo da Vinci's "Leda and the Swan" is a more decorous picture, with Leda as its central figure, standing nude full-fronted with her head turned to the left with a demure smirk, and the swan standing on her right with a serpentine neck and its beak pursed up to her and looking lovesick. Pollux, Helen, Castor, and Clytemnestra are skimming around their shells at her feet to the left of the picture. (8)

Sometimes a poet may even juxtaposition the two opposite significances of the swan. This juxtaposition of thesis and antithesis may be expected to produce a new synthesis, a concordia discordis. For instance, in Spenser's Prothalamion, the two lovers--the married couple to be--are seen as "two swans of goodly hue" swimming "softly" down towards the speaker: "Two fairer Birds I yet did never see." And "fairer" in this line means whiter as well as more beautiful, as is shown in the next two lines:

The snow which doth the top of Pindus strew,

Did never whiter show.

So far, the swan seems obviously a type of purity, premarital chastity. But in the very next lines, Spenser refers to the love of Jove and Leda, and emphasizes the whiteness of both the god and the woman. The whiteness of the swan, as well as the swan itself, becomes ambiguous, presumably having the sense of a pure white-hot passion. Spenser is attempting to make the swan a symbol of married chastity, of a love that does not exclude passion but does exclude ceceit and changing. (9) The synthesis may work. I do not think it works in Spenser's poem, but the love of Jove and Leda is very dimly and conventionally imagined there. The sense that does come powerfully through the rhythm is of the two gliding smoothly together to a destined end: "Sweet Thames, runne softlie, till I end my songe."

In story (as distinguished from poetry), the human feeling that the swan is a beautiful, mysterious, half-supernatural creature, that it has a constant shadow-self, lies behind the world-wide type of folk tale of the metamorposis of a swan into a human form. The commonest kind of swuch tale is that of the swan-maiden. A young man--a hunter or fisherman--sees a flock of swans gliding down to the shore at dusk. Alighting, they shed their feather-skins and become beautiful young maidens. The young man watches where they pile their feather-robes, and while they are bathing he steals the robes of the most beautiful of the maidens. Her change to the swan-form depends on her possession of this robe (or, in other versions, of a ring, crown, or golden chain); without it, she must remain in human form. Weeping, she sees her comrades flying off; but she marries the youth who stole and hid her swan-skin. And she remains with him in human form until, sometimes years later, she finds the enchanted feather-dress. Then she puts it on and again flies away to rejoin her kin. (10)

Commenting on a story much like this one, the Chines mysterious housekeeper story, R. D. Jamison remarks that the story "is a special variant of the general conviction that things, animals, and wives are mysterious and never to be counted on. If you can get control of something that belongs to them, they may serve you for a time; but at some unexpected moment they may again become foxes or seals or swans and escape forever." (11) This feeling no doubt is in the back of the story, but there are other and deeper sources. The sense of the double nature of the swan combines with the notion (as old as Egypt, found in Pythagorus, and also among the Plains Indians) that the soul is a bird and soars to the sky in bird form. The swan in its lifetime goes through a metamorphosis from an ugly, awkward, ungainly chick to a beautiful, graceful, majestic adult. (This transformation, of course, is the central theme of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Ugly Duckling.") This metamorphosis suggests another, from human to bird/soul. So, in the swan-maiden story, the change from bird to human is seen as a loss, and the motif of loss (of the feather-garment, ring, etc.) is central to the story.

But the attitude can be the direct opposite: the change from human to bird can be seen as a loss, a decline from superior to inferior being. In stories with this attitude, the change is generally caused by an evil magician or enchanter. (The characters are often swan-men, rather than swan-maidens.) Let us examine one of the best known of this kind, "The Six Swans" from Grimm's Fairy Tales. (12)

A king has seven children, six sons and one daughter. He marries again, but his new queen is a wicked witch who changes all six sons into swans. But the king's daughter is not changed along with her brothers. She wanders sadly through the wood looking for them. Just at sunset one night six swans come flying in at the window of the rude hut where she is staying, strip off their swan-skins, and reveal themselves as her brothers.

The maiden finds out that she can change them back into human form again, but that it will be extraordinarily difficult. She cannot speak or laugh for six years, and during that time she must make six little shirts out of asterflowers.

While she is engaged in this task, the king of that country comes by hunting. He sees the maiden; and since she is very beautiful, he falls in love with her, carries her off to his castle, and marries her. She still remains dumb, however, since the spell on her brothers is not yet broken. Three times she brings children into the world; three times the wicked queen-mother carries the children away, smears the mother's mouth with blood, and accuses her of having eaten her child. The third time the king reluctantly gives her up to justice, and she is sentenced to die by fire. She is to be burned on the very last day of the six years; the shirts are all ready, except that one of them still lacks the left sleeve. As she is being led to her execution, six swans come flying through the air to her. She throws the shirts over them, and their swan-skins fall off; they stand up in human form, except that t he youngest has a swan's wing instead of his left arm. Now she can speak and declare her innocence. The wicked stepmother is burnt instead of her, and all ends happily. (13)

The maiden is given a number of the qualities of the swans, her brothers: their innocence, their beauty, and their muteness. (The taboo against speaking during the working of a charm is not unique to this story, of course, but it seems particularly at home here.) But the story is about the maiden, not her brothers. As J. R. R. Tolkien points out in "On Fairytales," the inhabitants of fairyland are not as a rule the central characters in a fairy story; the humans who become involved, usually by accident, with the inhabitants and the rules of that land, are. (14) So in this story, the wild swans, the creatures of mystery and wonder, are the reason for their sister's actions; but the story follows the sister, the human, the one we can identify with. It needs something other than prose to bring us, even in imagination, into that other world. That closeness to another world, that involvement of ourselves as humans in another order of being, can best come about perhaps in dance. This suggestion can be tested if there is a ballet that has as its central character a swan-maiden, and of course there is such a ballet, Swan Lake.

Swan Lake is one of the best known ballets, especially in its one-act version. Its center is the emotion of awe and wonder at the transformation, or better the double nature, of swan and woman. The plot is very like that of the swan-maiden stories, except that the swan-maiden here is under enchantment. Prince Siegried has gone into the forest to hunt wild swans. (15) There he meets the beautiful Swan Queen, Odette, under the spell of the magician Rothbart; only at night can she resume her human shape. She tells Siegried that only when a man lovesw her to the exclusion of all other women will the spell be broken. Siegfried swears undying love before she is drawn away by the magician. In some versions, she flies away across the skies at the end.

The longer version (four acts) of the ballet has many other kinds of interest, particularly the double role Odette-Odile, danced by a single dancer. Odile is the beautiful but evil daughter of the magician, who has assumed the exact appearance of Odette, and who in the third act wind Siegfried's oath that he will marry her and her alone. The dance of Odile in this third act is known as the dance of the Black Swan. The black swan has developed a new significance, that of the shadow-side of the personality, the darker twin. The dance is full of evil beauty and ominous grace and pretended innocence. This doubling embodies the human imaginative dilemma about the swan: is this mysterious creature good or evil, innocent or treacherous? The insistence on one aspect--good, innocent, betrayed--brings about as if by a natural process the other aspect--evil, experienced, treacherous.

But still the instinct of ballet companies and the ballet public, which has made the single-act version the most popular, seems to be right. For its central emphasis is on our wonder and half-frightened delight at the double nature of the swan, half in this world and half other-worldly, and this emphasis seems to go to the deepest emotional roots of the swan symbol. In this ballet, the ballerina has to transform herself into a swan. She must all but become a smooth, gliding, aquatic creature, losing her human angularity. For this reason, Swan Lake seems to many the epitome of the ballet. In may (perhaps most) ballets, normal human movements are heightened, exaggerated, developed into structures; the body is seen in postures that are recognizably human. But to dance Swan Lake as it should be danced, the dancer must half-transmute herself beyond the ordinary human limits. Otherwise she may seem like a posturing doll.

The knight of the swan motif is far more limited than the swan-maiden motif; it is a genuine version of the archetype, but a specialized one. In fact, there are only two examples that concern us: a brief sketch at the end of Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, and a fully developed treatment (based in part on Wolfram) in Richard Wagner's Lohengrin.

The story of Loherangrin (Lohengrin) first appears in print almost at the end of Parzival, but it may have existed in oral tradition for quite some time before. Wolfram suggests that it did, though one cannot always take such a suggestion at face value from a medieval writer; he even localizes the tradition to Brabant. (16) The whole story in Wolfram is not ong (only three sections, 824-826), and it is difficult to see how it could be long; for, although there is a clear beginning and end to the tale, there is no middle. (17)

The story runs as follows, in summary: a lady (the princess of Brabant) ruled over her land alone. She had no husband and would take none of those who sued for her hand, "wishing only him who God would indicate and whose love she would prize." A prince arrived at Antwerp drawn by a swan. When he first appeared to her from the sea, he demanded a promise of her: "Never ask me who I am; then I shall be able to remain with you. But if I am subjected to your question you will lose my love." She gave her pledge, and they were married the same night. Now the prince ruled, and ruled rightly and strongly; and the two remained together long enough to have children. But later on she broke her pledge "because of love," and the prince had to leave. "His friend the swan again brought him a dainty little boat." He left a sword, a horn, and a ring behind as remembrances. (18)

This story has its problems, though perhaps not as many as other parts of Wolfram's great and difficult romance. The problem for us now to consider is: What is the swan doing in the story? There are two possible answers, neither entirely satisfactory.

First, the story is very much like the swan-maiden stories, except that the sexes are reversed. There is the sudden appearance on the shore; the marriage, and the couple living together happily for a while (in the swan-maiden stories, the couple often has children); and the sudden disappearance. In this story, the disappearance is caused by a broken promise. The importance of the promise and the disasters caused by breaking a promise are all through folklore (for two examples, the story of Bluebeard and that of "Cupid and Psyche," the latter very like the story of Lohengrin and the countess of Brabant). The swan seems to be, in some sense deeper than appearance, Lohengrin's double.

Second, the swan as a symbol of purity and chastity, especially married chastity (as in Spenser), is particularly appropriate to Lohengrin. For in Wolfram's poem Lohengrin is the son of Parzival and serves the Grail after him. He gave up Munsalvaesche when he married the countess, but after the broken promise he travelled back to the Grail, although against his will. Wolfram implies that the Grail-knoight had been sent to the countess; he was the one "whom God had chosen for her." Why she was prohibited from asking him who he was is not clear, but neither are any of the questions to be asked concerning the Grail or its keepers, either in Chretien de Troyes or in Wolfram. The whole notion of narrative cause-and-effect goes by the board when the Grail is in question.