Wild Swans: Original Tale Summary

So I’ve been getting a lot of comments between Amazon reviews and goodreads that people are hoping I will keep writing adaptions of fairy tales, as I did with Beauty and the Beast. I have news for you B&B fans, I am planning to do another fairy tale. A whole bunch of fairy tales, actually. I was going to keep it secret for a bit longer, but I’m bursting to share, so the next fairy tale I will be writing (after I finish Embittered) is a retelling of….

This is an illustration by Anne Anderson. She is a Scottish illustrator who died in 1930.

The Wild Swans

There’s actually two versions of this fairy tale, the Wild Swans (by Hans Christian Anderson) and the Six Swans (by the Brothers Grimm). The stories are nearly identical, the only thing that varies is the number of brothers and some of the details of when the sister gets married. The basic story is this: A king with many sons and one daughter is bewitched by a wicked witch and marries her–being that his wife is dead. This wicked witch wants to rule after the king dies, so she curses the sons to take on the shape of swans–although they can briefly turn human for 15 minutes (or an hour according to some versions) every night. The witch tries to curse the daughter too, but she fails and the girl flees with her brothers to a far away land.

The sister learns (typically through a fairy queen) that if she knits stinging nettles into a shirt and makes a shirt for every brother while never speaking a single word the curse will be broken. She decides to do the task–even though her brothers assure her it is impossible–and while she spends months knitting the king of the country they are staying in finds her. The king, naturally, falls in love with her at first sight. Being that she is mute and doesn’t fight back, the king is able to carry her off to the palace, intending to marry her. (My version of the story is going to stray from that line, though, as I am not a big fan of love at first sight.) One day, while the king is off riding around again, the king’s mother accuses the sister of witchcraft–because she’s always knitting and she’s got these big swans that like to flock around her–and tries to have her burned at the stake. The daughter finishes the last shirt just as the villagers are lighting the wood on fire (talk about a tight deadline) and she throws the shirts on her swan brothers, turning her royally ticked off brothers back into humans. (Let’s just say they don’t take too kindly to the whole almost burning their sister thing.) Now that she is freed from rescuing her brothers the sister is able to speak and defend herself against the claims of witch craft, which she does so just as the king returns. The king’s mother gets whacked, and the brothers and sister live happily ever after in the king’s kingdom, apparently abandoning their bewitched father.

There are several versions of this story beyond the Wild Swans and the Six Swans, but all of them follow the basic plot of the brothers getting cursed and their sister knitting shirts of stinging nettles and almost being burned at the stake. (Who accuses the sister of witch craft and why she is accused of witch craft typically varies from version to version.)

I’ve been looking forward to this story for a while because it’s one of the few fairy tales where the girl not only rescues herself, but her brothers as well. I will put my own spin on it of course, as I mentioned the plot line with the king falling in love with the mute sister is going to see some big changes because I want to use this fairy tale to illustrate the sacrifices we make for love.

Finally, as one extremely sharp eyed reader in an Amazon review has already guessed, the main cast of this fairy tale will be the seven princes and the adopted princess of Arcainia–the little country Prince Lucien was gung-ho to take over before Severin told him off. (I LOVE foreshadowing!)

I’m not the only perfectionist

Greetings, Champions. Enchanted (book 2 of King Arthur and her Knights) has a splendid new cover! Myrrhlynn spruced it up a little bit and most notably added the dark, forbidding clouds. (I think it matches the mood of the castle when the Knights of Camelot realize Morgause is visiting.)

Embittered is halfway finished. (Well over, actually.) By the end of today I should have roughly a third of it left to write. But today I wanted to talk a little bit about Enchanted. For those Champions who haven’t read it, King Arthur and Her Knights is about Britt, a college grad who gets pulled back into King Arthur’s time after she touches a rusty sword while vacationing in Britain. When she arrives Merlin explains to her that the real Arthur has run off with a shepherdess, and that the Sword in the Stone has chosen Britt to rule in Arthur’s place-while in disguise as the real Arthur. Enthroned (book 1) is all about Britt winning her throne and defeating those who will not acknowledge her. In Enchanted Britt is forced to defend her throne against Morgause, the wife of King Lot–the King who led the forces against Britt in Enthroned–who has come to stay at Camelot with her four sons.

The idea for Enchanted was birthed from a single page of Sir James Knowles “King Arthur and His Knights” as well as the traditional stories Knowles based that page off of. In this single page (It’s really more of a long paragraph) Knowles states that Lot’s wife came to Camelot to spy on Arthur. However, while there she basically is charmed by Arthur and tells him what her husband charged her with doing before she goes home–leaving her four kids with Arthur so Arthur can use them as hostages.

The traditional stories have something similar–again it is barely touched upon–and in a great deal of tales it’s generally agreed that Gawain, Lot’s oldest son, comes to Arthur’s court because his mother leaves him behind to serve as a hostage. This didn’t sit very well with me, first of all because King Lot is Arthur’s biggest threat for the first few months/years of Arthur’s rule. He’s a smart dude, so I find it hard to believe that he would send his wife when it’s fairly obvious she doesn’t have the stomach for cloak and dagger missions. In the stories that don’t have Lot’s wife fall for Arthur, Lot’s wife is Morgause–a witch who is even more twisted than her husband. Morgause is the kind of person you would want to send on a spying mission, so I decided to combine the stories and send Morgause to Camelot.

I wanted to go into detail on a part of Arthur’s life that storytellers mostly brush over because I feel often we take it for granted that when Arthur was crowned everyone loved him and BAM his Kingdom was huge and perfect from the start. I also wanted a chance to give a more satisfying explanation as for why Lot’s wife would come with the mission to spy and then give her husband’s greatest enemy the tools to defeat him. (Aka: his kids.) I have a lot of fun writing King Arthur and Her Knights books because it’s so much fun to try and explain things that are typically glossed over. In this case I got to write out Morgause’s character, and greatly enjoyed it!

Thanks for reading, Champions. I will see you on Wednesday.

Writing Tips: Picturing Places

For those of you who didn’t know, Myrrhlynn was able to get the final cover of Beauty and the Beast to me earlier this weekend, and here it is!

Myrrhlynn (pronounced like Merlin) is my cover artist who is a regular wizard with Photoshop. (Hence the nickname.) I apologize to those of you who suffered through viewing the previous place holder covers I whipped up. Myrrhlynn did another great job with this cover, I’m so glad she reads my books before I release them because she makes the images very meaningful. This cover depicts Elle in a dark cloak (Which is very fitting, as those who have finished the book will agree with me.) in a snowy forest. Chanceux Chateau–Aka the beast’s castle–is in the middle of a woods, making the setting in the cover perfect. Myrrhlynn chose to use a winter scene because about half to a third of the book takes place in winter. Snow is something of a plot device in certain parts of the story.

Keeping Myrrhlynn’s reasoning for the cover design in mind, today I thought I would reveal a bit of my writing/inspiration process. When I’m writing a story I try to get clear pictures in my head to make the places and characters feel more real. For Life Reader I mapped out the library building design and had a folder on my computer that had dozens of photos from incredible libraries. For King Arthur and Her Knights I viewed A LOT of armor photos, and looked at A LOT of castle blueprints. For beauty and the beast I collected a lot of different garden photos/art images–Each part of the gardens (like the rose garden, the walking hedge area, and the fountain in the flower garden) were inspired by different images. The same goes for the Chateau. I originally planned for Severin to have a castle, but as I looked for images and photos of french castles I learned more about chateaus and decided that was a more appropriate setting. I even collected photos of papillons, mirrors, and roses.

My point is that the pre-writing footwork isn’t just research, it’s also imagining. Granted I changed a lot as I went because I needed to mold the scenery for the sake of the story, but if I ever got stuck or bored I went back through and looked at my pictures for inspiration.

Thanks for reading Champions, and an extra big thank you to Myrrhlynn for another spectacular cover!