"The Six Swans" (German: Die sechs Schwäne) is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm in Grimm's Fairy Tales in 1812 (KHM 49). It is of Aarne–Thompson type 451 ("The Maiden Who Seeks Her Brothers"), commonly found throughout Europe. Other tales of this type include The Seven Ravens, The Twelve Wild Ducks, Udea and her Seven Brothers, The Wild Swans, and The Twelve Brothers. Andrew Lang included a variant of the tale in The Yellow Fairy Book. Origin The tale was published by the Brothers Grimm in the first edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1812, and substantially rewritten for the second edition in 1819. Their source is Wilhelm Grimm's friend and later wife Henriette Dorothea (Dortchen) Wild (1795–1867). Synopsis A King gets lost in a forest, and an old witch helps him, on the condition that he marry her beautiful daughter. The King suspects the mysterious maiden to be wicked, but agrees to marry her. He has six sons and a daughter from his first marriage, however, and fears that the children will be abused by his new wife; so, he sends them away to a hidden castle and visits them in secret. The new queen, who has learned witchcraft from her mother, finds out about her stepchildren and decides to get rid of them. She sews six magical white shirts, goes to the hidden castle, and tosses the shirts over the boys, transforming them into swans. The princes' still human sister runs away, finding her brothers in a hunter's hut. The princes can only take their human forms for fifteen minutes every evening. They tell their sister that they have heard of a way to lift the curse: for six years, she mustn't speak while making six shirts out of star-flowers for her brothers. On the other hand, if she speaks before the end of the sixth year, the spell will never be broken. The Princess agrees to do this and, taking shelter in a tree, dedicates herself solely to gathering the star-flowers and sewing in silence. At the beginning of the fourth year, the King of another country finds the Princess sewing, is taken by her beauty, and takes her into the court with the intention of making her his queen. However, the King's snobbish mother hates her and does not consider her fit to be a queen. When she gives birth to their first