Seven swans a-swimming

Swans sing before they die— 't were no bad thing
Should certain persons die before they sing.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

This post is inspired by the swans on the river near where I live – serene and graceful beauties when on the water, grunting, hissing belligerents when on land. The word swan, cognate with German Schwan, Dutch zwaan and Danish svane, comes from Proto-Germanic *swanaz ‘swan’, which literally means ‘the singing bird’. Old English also had the related geswin ‘melody, song’, swinsian ‘to make melody’ and sweg ‘sound, noise’ (swei in Middle English). Little remains of these noisy Germanic sw- words in English, apart from swan and, bizarrely, swoon ‘faint’, the idea being that if you fall senseless, you are unable to utter a sound. *Swanaz is a descendant of the Proto-Indo-European root *swenh₂- ‘sing, create sound’, which produced Latin sonus ‘sound’ and thence sonar, sonic and French son ‘sound’, which was imported into Britain by the Normans. Son eventually acquired a redundant and unetymological -d, morphing into sound and displacing swei in the medieval period.

Swans are birds of the genus Cygnus, the Latin form of the Greek κύκνος (kýknos) ‘swan’. Cygnus became French cigne, borrowed by English (with the addition of the diminutive suffix -et) in cygnet ‘young swan’, a word which has supplanted the older swanling, a form analogous to duckling, gosling etc. Adult male swans are cobs, from Middle English cobbe ‘leader of a group, bully’ and adult females are pens, with pen in this context thought to be related to hen. Unlike many of the random collective nouns English has come up with for animals – a coalition of cheetahs anyone? – the collective nouns for swans have some logic. A group of flying swans is known as a wedge, due to their V formation in flight, while a group on the ground is called a bank – they tend to congregate on riverbanks, or more evocatively a bevy – their behaviour may sometimes resemble that of bickering pub regulars, though they aren’t exactly convivial socialites. Like other large migratory birds, such as geese, swans tend to pair up and mate for life, preferring to save energy for their long journeys rather than waste it on elaborate and energy-sapping courtship displays.

The swans commonly found in the UK are mute swans, which distinguishes them from other, louder species of the Cygnus genus, such as the trumpeter swan, native to North America, and its Eurasian counterpart, the whooper swan. As anyone who has witnessed their cacophonous honking will attest, mute swans are far from mute, but the ancient belief that the swan is ‘the singing bird’  may also come as a surprise. This stems from the concept of the swansong, which took hold in antiquity, i.e. the idea that swans would sing beautifully in the moments before their deaths. The swansong is mentioned by some of the giants of western culture, including Aristotle, Virgil, Ovid, Chaucer, da Vinci and Shakespeare, and they are not completely wrong. There is actually some basis for this legend because certain species of swan have an additional elongated tracheal loop. This feature causes a long, drawn-out series of notes to be produced when the swan’s lungs expel excess air as it collapses and dies.

Swan meat used to be considered a luxury food in Elizabethan times and recipes for baked swan have been passed down from this era. Swans farmed for human consumption were kept in swan pits – large artificial ponds where the swans were fattened up before they were slaughtered. Unmarked mute swans in the UK are now reserved for the British monarch as ‘Seigneur of the Swans’ to munch on, but marked swans in the Thames have been divided between the Crown and two of the ancient livery companies of London, the Worshipful Company of Dyers and the Worshipful Company of Vintners, for the best part of 600 years. The traditional practice of swan upping, whereby the cygnets on the River Thames are apportioned to the three owners, continues to this day. In the past, the swans’ wings were clipped and their bills were cut to show who they belonged to. The Crown’s swans were left unmarked, while the bills were nicked once for the Dyers and twice for the Vintners. Pubs across the UK associated with the Vintners named The Swan with Two Nicks (or the corrupted form The Swan with Two Necks) attest to this practice. Nowadays, the swans are ringed rather than being maimed with a metal implement, as swan uppers wearing distinctive uniforms travel up the Thames in skiffs to weigh, measure and ring the birds.

The mute swans that live in the moat of the Bishop’s Palace in the city of Wells, Somerset have been taught to tug bell-pulls attached to the walls of the gatehouse there to beg for food. This custom dates back to at least the 1850s when it is said the first swans were trained in this way by one of the Bishop’s daughters. The cob and pen who currently reside in the moat are named Gabriel and Grace. Every year, Gabriel teaches the cygnets how to ring the bells, and the swan family are accordingly well fed throughout the winter until the cygnets fly off and a new round of nest-building begins.

Swans figure prominently in the mythologies of many peoples. In Ancient Greece, the swan was a bird sacred to Apollo and the god is often painted riding a chariot either made of swans or being pulled by swans. Zeus disguised himself as a swan to seduce Leda, Queen of Sparta, a union which produced Helen of Troy, said to be the most beautiful woman in the world. (Zeus was an absolute scoundrel for turning himself into animals in his insatiable pursuit of unsuspecting gods, nymphs and mortals, assuming the form of a cuckoo to ravish Hera, that of a bull to abduct Europa, a serpent to rape his unfortunate mother, Rhea, an eagle to carry off Ganymede, and even an ant, which somehow enabled him to seduce Eurymedousa, a presumably very open-minded princess from the Thessalian kingdom of Phthiotis.) The black swan (Cygnus atratus) is of spiritual significance in the lore of many Aboriginal Australian peoples and the black swan is also the official emblem of the state of Western Australia. However, black swans were unknown in Europe and Asia until Dutch explorers reached Australia in the 17th century, so a black swan was seen as an impossibility or a figment of the imagination. The in-no-way-bitter Roman poet Juvenal (c.60-128 CE) writes in his Satires that the chastity of a good woman is: ‘rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cycno’ (a rare bird, rare on earth as a black swan), from which sour grapes the Latin phrase rara avis and its English calque rare bird originates: a poet who can cope with rejection is a rare bird. Black swans continued to be viewed more negatively in Europe than in Australia even after Europeans were aware of their existence. Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake can be reduced to a battle between good (the white swans) and evil (the black swans).

The surname Swan has nothing to do with swans, or people who swan about the place. Instead, it is usually a descendant of Old Norse sveinn ‘boy, servant’ or Old English swān ‘peasant; male servant; herdsman’ These forms are ancestors of the male given names Sweyn and Sven and Present-Day-English swain ‘boy, lad, servant’ respectively. Places which might appear to be named after swans are also often from these origins. Hence, the Welsh city of Swansea is not famed for a marine population of swans, but is instead named after Sweyn Forkbeard, King of Denmark (986-1014), and King of England for a grand total of five weeks. Swansea was originally a Viking trading post and is simply Sweyn’s ey – ‘island’ or ‘inlet’. Likewise, the town of Swanage on the Jurassic Coast in Dorset likely means ‘farm of the herdsmen’ and is thus more of an ugly duckling than a harbour frequented by birds of the genus Cygnus. This segues us nicely to the traditional English saying ‘all his swans are turned to geese’, used when a crestfallen male finds that his hopes are dashed and his dreams have turned to dust, a fitting anti-climax to this post. I’m swanning off!