5,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Pushkin Children's Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
A princess has eleven brothers. The twelve siblings live happily and well, until their father decides to remarry. Their new stepmother is a wicked woman, and she turns all the brothers into swans and banishes the princess from the palace. And so it is left to Elisa to endure countless hardships alone in order to save her beloved brothers from the spell.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
Ähnliche
Contents
The Wild Swans
Far, far away, in a land where the swallows fly when it’s winter here, there lived a King who had eleven sons and one daughter, Elisa. The eleven brothers—princes, of course—went to school, each of them with a star on his chest and a sabre at his side. There they wrote on golden slates with diamond chalks, and they could read out loud just as well as they read to themselves. You could hear right away that they were princes. Meanwhile, their sister Elisa sat on a stool of mirrored glass and gazed at a picture book that cost half the kingdom.
Yes, the children led a splendid life—but things didn’t stay that way!
Their father married an evil Queen, and she wasn’t nice to the children at all. They could already tell the very first day. There was a huge party everywhere in the castle, and the children played Mysterious Stranger. They had always been allowed to have all the cakes and baked apples they wanted for the game, but the new Queen only let them have a teacup of sand and told them to pretend.
The next week she sent the little sister out to the countryside to live among poor farming people. And before long, the Queen got the King to believe so many things about the unfortunate princes that he no longer liked them.
“Fly away, out into the world, and look after yourselves!” shouted the evil Queen. “Fly like great birds with no voices!” But she wasn’t able to make their lives as hard as she wanted, for they turned into eleven magnificent wild swans. And with a strange cry they flew out of the castle windows and across the lawns and woods.
It was still early in the morning when they reached the farmer’s cottage where Elisa lay sleeping in the front room. They hovered over the roof, twisting their long necks and beating their wings, but no one heard or saw them. So they had to go on, flying high up to the clouds and beyond into the great wide world, until at last they came to an immense dark forest that stretched all the way to the sea.
Poor little Elisa stood in the farmer’s front room, playing with a green leaf—the only toy she had. She pricked a hole in the leaf and looked through it, up at the sun. It was as if she could see her brothers’ clear eyes, and every time the sunlight touched her cheek she would remember their kisses.
Each day passed just like the day before. When the wind blew through the big hedge of roses around the house, it would whisper to the roses, “Who could be prettier than you?” But the roses just shook their heads and said, “Elisa is.” And if the old farmwoman sat in the doorway on Sunday, reading her hymnal, the wind would turn the pages and ask the book, “Who could be more virtuous than you?” “Elisa!” the hymnal would say. And what the roses and the hymnal said was the full and utter truth.
When she turned fifteen, Elisa had to go back home. But when the Queen saw how beautiful Elisa had become, she grew angry and spiteful. She wanted to turn her into a wild swan, just like her brothers, but the Queen didn’t dare to do that just yet—because first the King wanted to see his daughter.
Early the next morning the Queen went into the bathroom, which was made of marble and decorated with soft cushions and the finest carpets. She took three toads and kissed them, telling one of them, “Sit on top of Elisa’s head when she gets into the bath, so she becomes sluggish and slow, just like you. And you sit on her forehead,” she told the second toad, “so she becomes ugly and foul, just like you, and her father can’t recognize her. And you,” she whispered to the third toad, “you sit on her heart. Let her become nasty and mean, so that it causes her pain!”
She placed the toads in the clear water, and right away it turned greenish. Then she called for Elisa, undressed her and let her get into the bath. As the girl slid down in the water, the first toad sat in her hair, the second on her forehead and the third on her chest. Yet Elisa didn’t seem to notice. And when she stood up, there were three poppies floating on the water. If they hadn’t been poisonous, and kissed by a witch, the toads would have become red roses. But they still turned into flowers when they sat on her head and heart. Elisa was simply too innocent and good for witchcraft to have any power over her.
When the evil Queen realized this, she rubbed walnut oil into Elisa’s skin so that it turned blackish-brown, rubbed a stinky ointment into her beautiful face and tangled up her lovely hair. No one would recognize her now as the beautiful Elisa.
And so when her father saw her, he grew quite frightened and declared that she was not his daughter. No one else could see who she really was either, except the chained dog and the swallows—and they were just animals with nothing to say.
Poor Elisa wept then, thinking of her eleven brothers who had all disappeared. Downcast, she slipped out of the castle and started to walk. She walked for an entire day, over field and moor and on into the great forest. She had no idea where she was going; she only knew that she was deeply unhappy and missed her brothers terribly. She supposed that, just like she had, they had been driven off from the castle, out into the great wide world. And so she resolved to search for them and find them.
