Cygnets, Young Swans

The Irish legend the Children Lir is about a stepmother transforming her children into swans for 900 years. In the legend The Wooing Etain, the king the Sidhe (subterranean-dwelling, supernatural beings) transforms himself and the most beautiful woman in Ireland, Etain, into swans to escape from the king Ireland and Ireland's armies. The swan has recently been depicted on an Irish commemorative coin.
In Norse mythology, there are two swans that drink from the sacred Well Urd in the realm Asgard, home the gods. According to the Prose Edda, the water this well is so pure and holy that all things that touch it turn white, including this original pair swans and all others descended from them. The poem Volundarkvida, or the Lay Volund, part the Poetic Edda, also features swan maidens.
In the Finnish epic Kalevala, a swan lives in the Tuoni river located in Tuonela, the underworld realm the dead. According to the story, whoever killed a swan would perish as well. Jean Sibelius composed the Lemminkäinen Suite based on Kalevala, with the second piece entitled Swan Tuonela (Tuonelan joutsen). Today, five flying swans are the symbol the Nordic Countries and the whooper swan (Cygnus cygnus) is the national bird Finland.
In Latin American literature, the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío (1867–1916) consecrated the swan as a symbol artistic inspiration by drawing attention to the constancy swan imagery in Western culture, beginning with the rape Leda and ending with Wagner's Lohengrin. Darío's most famous poem in this regard is Blasón - "Coat Arms" (1896), and his use the swan made it a symbol for the Modernismo poetic movement that dominated Spanish language poetry from the 1880s until the First World War. Such was the dominance Modernismo in Spanish language poetry that the Mexican poet Enrique González Martínez attempted to announce the end Modernismo with a sonnet provocatively entitled, Tuércele el cuello al cisne - "Wring the Swan's Neck" (1910).