Leda, Apollo, and the Song That Is a Fiction

Greek myth gives the swan to Apollo, whose chariot it draws, and makes it the disguise of Zeus in his approach to Leda, a story with an enormous painting tradition behind it. The belief that a swan sings once, beautifully, at the point of death is classical: Plato has the dying Socrates invoke it in the Phaedo, arguing that the swan sings not from grief but from joy at going to the god it serves. It is also false, the whooper swan is vocal throughout its life, and the swan song is a poetic fiction that has nonetheless given English a lasting phrase. Irish tradition gives the Children of Lir, transformed into swans for nine hundred years, a tale of endurance and eventual release.

In England the mute swan carries a genuine legal history apart from its myths: by ancient prerogative the Crown holds rights over all unmarked mute swans in open water, a right now shared with the Vintners' and Dyers' livery companies, and every July an annual census called Swan Upping counts and marks the cygnets on a stretch of the Thames, a ceremony documented since at least the twelfth century and still carried out today by the King's Swan Marker in traditional scarlet uniform. The mute swan of Greek and English tradition also anchored a famous argument about certainty: for two thousand years European writers used all swans are white as a stock example of a claim proven beyond doubt, John Stuart Mill cited it as such in his 1843 System of Logic, until the Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh found black swans in Western Australia in 1697, a discovery that took over a century to fully unseat the proverb.