The Wild Swans (1993, Grandreams, ret. Grace De La Touche, illus. Pam Storey)

The Wild Swans
Illustrated by Pam Storey
Story re-told by Grace De La Touche
© 1993 Grandreams Limited
Published by Grandreams Limited
Jadwin House, 205/211 Kentish Town Road, London, NW5 2JU
Printed in Italy
ISBN 1-85830-113-0

This retelling of 'The Wild Swans' by Grace De La Touche, illustrated by Pam Storey, was copyrighted to Grandreams in 1993. It was published as part of Grandreams' Goodnight, Sleeptight Storybook series, as part of a quartet alongside retellings of 'The Tinderbox', 'The Princess and the Pea', and 'The Emperor's New Clothes', likely in a boxed set, as all share the same ISBN.

For an overview of the Goodnight, Sleeptight Storybook collection, with links to my reviews of the other books in the series, see Goodnight, Sleeptight Storybook Series (Grandreams, 1990s).

Book details

The front cover shows two swans wearing crowns, one with a gold-haired princess riding on his back, among the clouds. This is quite a different image from the same scene illustrated in the book – in the book, a princess in a pale gown rides on a red and gold net carried by the swans.

The inside of the front cover features a princess with golden hair, clothed in white, embracing a swan wearing a crown. The princess is kneeling on green grass beneath a tree, and there is a pond/lake/river in the foreground, with lily pads and reeds. The image is framed by leaves. (This image rather reminds me more of images of Leda and the Swan).

The title page features a crown and a feather on a bed of grass, inside another leafy frame, with publication details below. 

The story takes place over 20 pages, beginning on the back of the title page and ending on the inside of the back cover.

The story – retold by Grace De La Touche

As with the other stories in this series, the story begins "Long ago and far away..." It places the King forefront and centre: 

Long ago and far away there lived a King. He was very proud of his eleven sons and one daughter. All of his children were good, kind and wise, even young Eliza who was still only a baby.

Although he marries to provide his children a mother, she is jealous of them all and sends Eliza to the country to be raised on a farm, then she poisons the king's mind against his sons by telling lies about them. "Soon the King cared nothing for his sons." She turns them into swans with golden crowns upon their heads and "[a]way they flew".

Eliza, now fifteen, returns to the palace and the Queen is furious at "how pretty Eliza had become". She tries to turn her ugly by placing three toads in her bath, and when that doesn't work she uses walnut juice to darken her skin and mats her hair with fat so that the king doesn't recognise her as his daughter.

With the help of an old woman, she finds her eleven brothers in the form of swans and they carry her in a net to the other side of the sea. There a fairy comes to her in a dream and tells her how to save her brothers, by making them shirts of nettles and meanwhile never speaking until the task is done, or else her brothers will die. A king sees and falls in love with her when she is at her work and takes her back to his palace, where he makes her his queen and provides her with "all [her] familiar things" (prepared nettles and shirt) and she continues her work. But when she runs out of nettles she needs to sneak out at night to fetch these, and is seen by the Archbishop, who is suspicious of her. 

She is judged a witch, and though her brothers come at night to talk to the king, they are unable to speak to him and the next day she is taken to the stake, still busily working on her shirts. At the last moment, her brothers-as-swans descend and she throws the shirts over them and is able to speak again.

This is a fairly faithful retelling of the plot of Han Christian Andersen's 'The Wild Swans', although much reduced in length and detail, meaning some of the elements are merged together or removed. For example, in the Andersen tale there is much more detail about the three toads added to the bathwater, and a lengthy poetic description of what in this retelling becomes a single sentence: "For many days she walked, looking for her brothers."

Additionally, this retelling adds explanatory details that aren't in the original (the idea that the king married to provide his children a mother) and simplifies some of the concepts - for example, the vampires in the graveyard are replaced with witches. The retelling also improves old-fashioned stereotypes from the original (the queen is not simply 'wicked' but 'jealous' of her stepchildren; when Eliza sees her face in the stream she is not "horrified to find it so brown and ugly" but thinks "No wonder my father did not know me".)*

The illustrations – Pam Storey

Pam Storey's illustrations bring small details of the story to life – the opening illustration shows her father (dressed in typical royal coronation robes - red with ermine trim) and brothers fondly watching over baby Eliza in her cradle, and the next scene shows Eliza living a rural life, complete with chicks, cow, and pig. The period costume of the story is 17th-18th century, with white wigs, jabots, and frock coats for the men.

Eliza does look very different in the scene with her hair matted with fat and skin darkened by walnut juice, and her father is waving his hands and pointing, clearly sending her away. An image of Eliza's encounter with the helpful old woman who tells her of the swans shows this woman's kindness, offering Eliza an apple. I particularly liked the scene with Eliza flying through the air with her brothers on a royally red and gold net. 

The nettles first enter the illustrations with Eliza dreaming of the fairy who delivers instructions to save her brothers (illustrated with a sleeping Eliza and a thought bubble containing a miniature fairy with wings and wand, above a tangle of nettles). We see several scenes of Eliza working with the nettles – in a stone room as a queen with a white high top hairdo, sitting on a stool working on a shirt, with tangled nettles on the floor and a finished shirt on a valet stand; then we see her in prison, kneeling on the ground amongst the tangles with a mouse looking on; then finally in a cart on the way to the stake, serenely working on a shirt, despite being surrounded by angry peasants.

One image I quite liked was of the Archbishop, watching with fright as Eliza runs through a graveyard filled with typical black-hatted witches. The Archbishop often comes across villainous in this story, but this image makes him seem genuinely scared. In a previous image we see the witches close up, all stereotypical old women with bristly chins, long noses with warts on them, and fierce, crafty expressions on their faces.

The final images are of the brothers returned to human form, all smiling apart for the youngest brother, who looks rather glum as he stands with one wing for an arm, then of Eliza as a grandly dressed queen, surrounded this time by happy peasants, one throwing confetti (?), representing their happily ever after.

* Quotes from Hans Christian Andersen's "The Wild Swans" are from the translation by Jean Hersholt available online at the Hans Christian Andersen Centre.