She had always been quiet and thoughtful, but now she became even more so. Her sisters asked her what she had seen on her first trip to the surface, but she didn’t tell them anything.
Many evenings and mornings she swam up to the place where she had left the prince. She saw how the fruits in the garden ripened and were picked. She saw how the snow melted on the high mountains, but she didn’t see the prince, and so she always returned home sadder than before. Her only consolation was to sit in her little garden with her arms around the marble stature who looked like the prince, but she neglected her flowers. They grew as in a wilderness, over the pathways, and braided their long stems and petals into the tree branches so it became quite dark there.
Finally she couldn’t stand it any longer and told one of her sisters. So, immediately the other sisters knew about it, but no one else, except a couple other mermaids, who didn’t tell anyone but their closest friends. One of them knew who the prince was. She had also seen the festivities on the ship and knew where he was from and where his kingdom was.
“Come, little sister,” the other princesses said, and with their arms around each other’s shoulders, they swam in a long row up in the water in front of the prince’s castle, which was built of a pale yellow shiny type of rock with big marble staircases; one went way down into the water. There were magnificent gilded domes rising from the roof, and between the pillars that went all around the building there were life-like marble carvings. Through the clear glass in the tall windows, you could see into the most marvelous rooms, where expensive silk curtains and tapestries were hanging, and all the walls were decorated with large paintings that were a pleasure to look at. In the middle of the main chamber, a large fountain was spraying; the jets of water rose high up to the glass cupola in the roof, through which the sun shone on the water and on all the lovely plants that were growing in the big basin.
Now that she knew where he lived, she swam in the water there many nights and evenings, and swam much closer than any of the others had dared to do. She even went way into the narrow channel under the magnificent marble balcony that cast a long shadow over the water. She sat there and watched the young prince, who thought he was all alone in the clear moonlight.
Many evenings she saw him sailing in his fine boat with music playing and flags waving. She peeked out from between the green rushes, and if the wind caught her long silvery veil, anyone seeing it would think it was a swan stretching its wings.
Many a night when the fishermen were at sea in the torchlight, she heard them tell so many good things about the young prince that it made her happy she had saved his life when he was tossed half-dead in the waves, and she thought about how firmly his head had rested against her breast, and how fervently she had kissed him. But he knew nothing about it and couldn’t even dream about her.
She became more and more fond of human beings, and more and more she wished she could live among them. She thought their world was much bigger than her own because they could sail on the oceans in ships and climb on the high mountains over the clouds, and the lands they owned with forests and fields stretched farther than her eyes could see. There was so much she wanted to know, but her sisters couldn’t answer everything she asked, so she asked her old grandmother, who was well acquainted with the higher world, which is what she quite correctly called the lands above the sea.
“If people don’t drown,” asked the little mermaid, “do they live forever? Don’t they die like us down here in the sea?”
“Oh yes,” said the old woman, “they must also die, and their lifetime is shorter than ours too. We can live for three hundred years, but when we cease to exist, we become only foam on the water and don’t even have a grave amongst our dear ones down here. We have no immortal soul, and can never live again. We are like the green rushes that can’t become green again once they are cut down. Human beings, on the other hand, have a soul that lives forever. It lives after the body has become dust and rises up through the clear air, up to the shining stars! Just as we surface from the sea and see the human’s land, so they surface to unknown lovely places that we can never see.”
“Why didn’t we get an immortal soul?” asked the little mermaid sadly, “I would give all the three hundred years I have to live for just one day as a human and then to share in the world of heaven!”
“You mustn’t think about that!” said her old grandmother. “We are much happier and much better off than the people up there.”
“So I shall die and float as foam on the sea, not hear the music of the waves, nor see the lovely flowers or the red sun! Isn’t there anything at all I can do to win an immortal soul?”
“No!” said the old queen. “Only if you became so dear to a human that you meant more to him than his father and mother, if he clung to you with all his mind and heart, and if you let the minister lay his right hand in yours with promises of faithfulness here and for all eternity, then his soul would flow into your body and you would share in the happiness of humanity. He would give you a soul and yet keep his own. But that can never happen! What is so lovely here in the sea—your fish tail—they find ugly up there on earth. They don’t know any better because there you must have two clumsy props that they call legs to be considered beautiful!”
The little mermaid sighed and looked sadly at her tail.
“Let’s be satisfied with what we have,” said the old grandmother. “We’ll spring and skip about during the three hundred years we have to live. It’s a good long time. Later we can so much the better rest in our graves.1 This evening we are going to have a court ball!”
That was also a splendor you never see on the earth. The walls and ceiling of the big dance hall were made of thick clear glass. Several hundred colossal sea shells, rosy red and grass green, stood in rows on each side with burning blue fire that lit up the whole hall and shone out through the walls so that the sea outside was quite illuminated. You could see all the countless fish, big and small, swim towards the glass walls. On some of them the scales glistened a purplish red, on others silver and gold. Straight through the hall a wide stream flowed, and mermen and mermaids were dancing on it to their own lovely song. People on the earth do not have such beautiful voices. The little mermaid sang more beautifully than all the others, and they clapped for her so that she felt joy in her heart for a moment because she knew she had the prettiest voice on earth or in the sea! But soon she began thinking of the world above once again, and she couldn’t forget the charming prince and her sadness over not having an immortal soul like he did. So she sneaked out of her father’s castle, and while there was nothing but joy and song inside there, she sat sad and alone in her little garden. She heard a horn sound down through the water, and she thought, “Now I guess he’s sailing up there, he whom I love more than my father and mother, he who holds all my thoughts, and in whose hands I would place my happiness in life. I would risk everything to win him and an immortal soul! While my sisters are dancing there in father’s castle, I’ll go to the sea witch. I’ve always been so afraid of her, but maybe she can advise and help me.”
Then the little mermaid went out from her garden to the roaring whirlpools; the sea witch lived behind them. She had never gone this way before. There were no flowers growing there, no sea grass, only the bare gray sand bottom that stretched towards the whirlpools, where the water swirled around like roaring mill wheels and pulled everything they grasped down into the deep. She had to walk right between these crushing eddies to enter the sea witch’s property, and for most of the way there was no other approach than over a warm bubbling mud that the witch called her bog moss. Her house lay behind it in a strange forest. All the trees and bushes were polyps, half animal and half plant. They looked like snakes with hundreds of heads growing out of the ground. The branches were long slimy arms with fingers like supple worms, and from joint to joint they moved from the root to the outermost tip. They wrapped themselves around everything they could grasp in the sea and never released them. The litt
le mermaid was terrified as she stood outside. Her heart beat fast from fear, and she would have turned around, but then she thought about the prince and about the human soul, and these thoughts gave her courage. She tied her long streaming hair tightly to her head so the polyps couldn’t grasp it, folded her arms across her chest, and darted ahead. She moved as fish swim through the water, in between the awful polyps, who stretched out their elastic arms and fingers after her. She saw how they all had something they had caught with their hundreds of small arms holding on like strong bands of iron. People who had died at sea and sunk deep down to the sea bottom peered as white skeletons from the polyps’ arms. They were holding fast to ship rudders and chests, skeletons of land animals, and a little mermaid, whom they had caught and strangled. That was almost the most frightful for her.
Then she came to a big slimy clearing in the forest, where large, fat water grass snakes slithered around and showed their ugly whitish-yellow bellies. In the middle of the clearing there was a house built from the white bones of shipwrecked people. The sea witch was sitting there, letting a toad eat from her mouth, much like people let little canaries eat sugar. She called the hideous fat grass snakes her little chicklets and let them squirm around on her large, swampy breast.
“I know what you want,” said the sea witch. “It’s stupid of you! Nevertheless, you’ll get your way because it will just lead to catastrophe for you, my lovely princess. You want to be rid of your fish tail, and instead have two stumps to walk upon just like people do so that the young prince will fall in love with you, and so that you can win him and gain an immortal soul!” Then the sea witch laughed so loudly and dreadfully that the toad and the snakes fell down writhing on the ground. ”You came just in time,” said the witch. ”After sunrise tomorrow, I wouldn’t have been able to help you for a year. I’m going to fix you a drink, and before the sun rises, you are to swim to land with it, sit on the bank there, and drink it. Then your tail will separate and turn into what people call lovely legs, but it will hurt. It will be as if a sharp sword were cutting through you. All who see you will say that you’re the most beautiful child of man they’ve ever seen. You’ll keep your floating gait; no dancer will float like you, but every step you take will be like stepping on a sharp knife so the blood flows. If you’ll suffer all this, I’ll help you.”
“I know what you want, ” said the sea witch.
“Yes!” said the little mermaid with a trembling voice as she thought about the prince and about winning an immortal soul.
“But remember,” said the witch, “when you have taken a human shape, you can never again become a mermaid. You can never sink down through the water to your sisters and to your father’s castle, and if you don’t win the prince’s love, so that he forgets his father and mother for your sake, thinks of you constantly, and has the minister place your hands in each other’s as man and wife, you won’t gain an immortal soul! The first morning after he marries someone else, your heart will break, and you’ll become foam on the water.”
“I want to do it!” said the little mermaid, pale as death.
“But you’ll have to pay me too,” the witch said, “and it’s not a small thing I demand. You have the most beautiful voice here on the ocean floor, and you think you’re going to bewitch him with it, but you must give that voice to me. I want the most precious thing you have for my priceless drink. After all, I have to add my own blood so the drink will be as sharp as a double-edged sword!”
“But if you take my voice,” said the little mermaid, “what will I have left?”
“Your beautiful appearance,” said the witch, “your graceful gait, and your expressive eyes. You should be able to capture a human heart with those. Well, have you lost your courage? Stick out your little tongue so I can cut it off in payment, and then you’ll get the potent drink.”
“Let it happen,” the little mermaid said, and the witch prepared the kettle to cook the potion. “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” she said and scrubbed the kettle with the snakes, which she tied into a knot. Then she slashed her breast and let her black blood drip into the kettle. The steam made the most remarkable figures so that you had to be anxious and afraid. The witch kept putting ingredients into the kettle, and when it was boiling rapidly, it sounded like a crocodile crying. Finally the drink was done, and it looked like the clearest water!
“There you are,” said the witch as she cut out the tongue of the little mermaid, who now was mute and could neither sing nor speak.
“If the polyps should grab you when you go back through my forest,” the witch said, “just throw a single drop of this drink at them, and their arms and fingers will crack into a thousand pieces.” But the little mermaid didn’t have to do that because the polyps pulled back in fear when they saw the drink shining in her hand like a sparkling star. So she quickly made it through the forest, the moss, and the roaring whirlpools.
She could see her father’s castle. The lights were out in the big dance hall, and they were probably all sleeping in there, but she didn’t dare seek them out since she was mute now and was leaving them forever. She felt as if her heart would break in two from grief. She crept into the garden, and took one flower from each of her sister’s flowerbeds, blew a thousand kisses towards the castle, and then rose up through the dark blue sea.
The sun wasn’t up yet when she saw the prince’s castle and crept up the marvelous marble steps. The moon was shining beautifully clear. The little mermaid drank the sharply burning drink, and it was as if a sharp double-edged sword cut through her fine body so that she fainted from it and lay as if dead. When the sun shone over the sea, she woke up and felt a stinging pain, but there in front of her was the wonderful young prince. He fastened his coal black eyes on her, and she cast hers downward and saw that her fish tail was gone, and that she had the finest little white legs any girl could have, but she was quite naked, so she wrapped herself in her thick, long hair. The prince asked who she was and how she had gotten there, but she just looked mildly and sadly at him with her dark blue eyes. After all, she couldn’t speak. Then he took her by the hand and led her into the castle. As the witch had warned, she felt like she was stepping on sharp awls and knives with each step, but she gladly tolerated it. Holding the prince’s hand, she moved as lightly as a bubble, and he and everyone else marveled at her charming, floating gait.
She was dressed in precious clothes of silk and muslin, and she was the most beautiful one in the castle, but she was mute, could neither sing nor speak. Beautiful slave girls dressed in silk and gold came out and sang for the prince and his royal parents. One sang more sweetly than the others, and the prince clapped his hands and smiled at her. This made the little mermaid sad because she knew that she herself had sung much better! She thought, “Oh, if he only knew that I gave my voice away for all eternity to be with him!”
The slave girls danced in a lovely floating dance to the most marvelous music, and then the little mermaid raised her beautiful white arms, stood on tiptoe, and floated across the floor, and danced as no one else had danced. Her loveliness became more evident with every movement, and her eyes spoke deeper to the heart than the songs of the slave girls.
Everyone was delighted with it, especially the prince, who called her his little foundling, and she danced more and more, even though every time her feet touched the floor, it was like stepping on sharp knives. The prince said that she must always be with him, and she was allowed to sleep outside his door on a velvet pillow.
He had a man’s outfit sewed for her so she could go horseback riding with him. They rode through the fragrant forests, where the green branches hit her shoulders and the small birds sang behind the new leaves. She climbed up the high mountains with the prince, and even though her fine feet bled so all could see, she laughed at it and followed him until they saw the clouds sailing below them, as if they were a flock of birds flying to distant lands.
She floated across the floor, and danced as no one else had danced.
/> At home at the prince’s castle, when the others slept at night, she went down the wide marble steps, and cooled her burning feet in the cold sea water, and then she thought about those down in the depths of the sea.
One night her sisters came arm in arm and sang so sadly, as they swam across the water, and she waved at them, and they recognized her and told her how she had made all of them so sad. They visited her every night after that, and one night far out at sea she could see her old grandmother, who hadn’t been to the surface for many years, and the sea king, with his crown on his head. They stretched their arms out to her, but didn’t dare come so close to land as her sisters did.
Every day she became dearer to the prince, who loved her as one would a good, dear child, but it certainly didn’t occur to him to make her his queen, and his queen she had to become, or she wouldn’t gain an immortal soul, but would turn to sea foam the morning after his wedding.
“Don’t you love me most of all?” the little mermaid’s eyes seemed to ask, when he took her in his arms and kissed her lovely forehead.
“Yes, I love you best,” said the prince, “because you have the kindest heart of all of them. You’re the most devoted to me, and you look like a young girl I once saw, but will never find again. I was on a ship that sank. The waves drove me ashore to a holy temple, where several young girls were serving. The youngest found me on the shore and saved my life. I only saw her twice, but she’s the only one I could love in this life. You look like her and have almost replaced her memory in my heart. She belongs to the holy temple, and so good fortune has sent you to me. We’ll never part!”
“Oh, he doesn’t know that I saved his life,” thought the little mermaid. “I carried him through the sea to the temple by the forest, and I hid behind the foam and watched for someone to come. I saw the beautiful girl whom he loves more than me,” and the mermaid sighed deeply, since she couldn’t cry. “He said that the girl belongs to the holy temple, and she’ll never leave there so they won’t meet again. I’m with him and see him every day. I’ll take care of him, love him, and offer him my life.”