The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen

  53. A large cauldron of soup was boiling. From Shakespeare’s Macbeth to Goethe’s Faust, the cauldron functions as a sign of witchery, a vessel of plenty that would seem to nourish life but that may in fact be bubbling with toxic substances.

  54. “Kiss it!” she shouted. The bandit girl may be the youthful progeny of the old robber woman, but, in her connection with animals, she resembles Artemis or Diana, the “Lady of the Wild Things,” a virgin goddess who is also the huntress of the gods. Diana roved the hills with her maidens and hunting dogs, and any man who approached her risked being torn to bits. The little robber girl, alternately compassionate and sadistic, threatens to chop Gerda into pieces and takes some rather appalling liberties with her. Her intimacies are aggressively sensual—she heats her hands in Gerda’s “beautiful muff,” which is soft and warm. Her aggressive moves are charged with sexual overtones—she threatens to poke Gerda in the stomach with her knife if she does not lie still in bed.

  55. “bound for Lapland.” Also known as Sápmi, Lapland is a region inhabited by the Sami people. It includes the northern regions of Scandinavia, Finland, and the Kola peninsula in Russia.

  56. “Spitsbergen!” The largest island in the Svalbard archipelago, Spitsbergen is located in the Arctic Ocean and administered by Norway. The name means “jagged peaks,” and the island is situated so far north that the sun disappears for four months in the winter.

  57. “my own dear, sweet goat!” The Norse god Thor is said to have driven a chariot pulled by two powerful goats, who symbolize thunder and lightning. Goats figure prominently in Christian orthodoxy as satanic creatures who serve as familiars to witches, transporting them to the witches’ Sabbath, over which a goatlike devil presides.

  58. “Northern lights.” The common name for aurora borealis, the Northern lights are like silent fireworks that can be seen on clear winter nights in regions near the earth’s magnetic pole. The bands and streamers of colored light appear in their most spectacular form in Finnish Lapland, where the number of auroral displays can be as high as two hundred per year. The Finnish term revontulet for the Northern lights means “fox fires,” referring to fables about arctic foxes creating the celestial spectacle by brushing their tales against the snow. As always, Andersen uses light effects to inspire the characters but also to ignite the imagination of the reader.

  59. a wretched hovel. This new abode has been seen as a womblike dwelling. Both the Lapp woman and the Finn woman can be seen as “wise women,” friendly witches who, however eccentric or macabre they may appear, provide Gerda with vital information and assistance in her travels.

  60. “Finnmark.” Finnmark forms the northernmost part of the Scandinavian peninsula. It borders on the Arctic Ocean to the north and on Finland to the south. It is the largest county of Norway, but also has the smallest population.

  61. “dried codfish.” The codfish is often dried in order to preserve it. When left to stiffen, it is as flat as a sheet of paper and can be used as a writing tablet. For a deeper understanding of the fish and its significance, particularly for Scandinavian countries, see Mark Kurlansky’s Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World.

  62. “you can tie all the winds of the world together.” The Lapp woman, like the witches, enchantresses, and wise women of fairy tales, seems to have a special command over the forces of nature. The four winds in Andersen’s story represent varying degrees of strength, but in many myths, they represent different colors. The Apache people, for example, have black, blue, yellow, and white winds. In “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” the four winds act in concert with each other as a relay team for the heroine. Gerda, like the heroine of that tale, embarks on an arduous journey to release a young man from a magical spell. Knots are often used to work magic and are seen as storing energy that can be released for a specific purpose.

  63. Strange letters. The Finn woman is most likely consulting runes, an ancient Germanic writing system that was thought to have sacral significance and magical qualities. Runic inscriptions were used in Iceland, the British Isles, and in Scandinavian lands for many centuries, from about the third century through 1600. The term rune means mystery, secret, or whisper, and each rune has special magical properties and meanings. More than 4,000 runic inscriptions and several runic manuscripts exist, with the majority from Scandinavian countries.

  64. she is a sweet, innocent child. The importance of childhood innocence famously becomes evident in Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In “The Snow Queen,” Andersen deepens the significance of that innocence, connecting it with the redemptive power of the Christ child.

  65. Gerda was standing there all alone—no shoes, no mittens. Like the little match girl and the ugly duckling, Gerda is completely exposed to the icy elements and must fend for herself. Andersen repeatedly created solitary icons of suffering, diminutive figures set in glacial surroundings that combine the sublime and the terrible. In “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf,” he created the image of a vain child who is subjected to a humiliating display of her abject state.

  66. little angels that grew even bigger. Gerda’s warm breath serves as the perfect weapon against the “terrible snowflakes.” Interiority and innocence, combined with ardent prayer, give birth to the angels that defeat the snowflakes, demolishing them as they splinter into hundreds of pieces.

  67. Mirror of Reason. As at the beginning of the tale, a mirror of powerful symbolic import appears. Unlike the devil’s mirror, which produced grotesque distortions of reality, this mirror possesses geometric precision and mathematical exactitude. Its fragments do not come in all shapes and sizes, as was the case with the devil’s mirror. Instead, each piece is exactly like the next, suggestive of a monstrous monotony that, as we learn, takes the form of “eternity.” This mirror is even more perilous than the devil’s looking glass, yet it is also an optical illusion created by the fragment of the looking glass in Kai’s eye.

  68. he didn’t notice anything at all. Blue with cold, Kai begins to resemble his frigid surroundings and loses the capacity to feel, to touch, and to become aware or to be touched and moved emotionally.

  69. Chinese puzzles. Andersen is most likely referring to the tangram, an ancient Chinese puzzle that consists of seven pieces which, when fitted together, form a square. The seven pieces include five triangles of different sizes, a square, and a parallelogram, and the object is to create specific designs with all seven pieces, which may not overlap in the new design.

  70. the designs seemed remarkable and deeply important. The Snow Queen’s element is the snowflake or crystal, which illustrates “the spontaneous creation of pattern and form” (Libbrecht, 21). Snowflakes, formed by condensation, are attractive precisely because of their patterned complexity and their symmetries even amid endless variation.

  71. Eternity. Kai is not seeking the immortality promised by Christ: “Whoso eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, hath eternal life” (John 6:54). Instead he serves the master of reason and is striving to gain immortality through his intellectual labors. A. S. Byatt’s meditation on the significance of the Snow Queen is intriguing. Reflecting on Yeats’s dictum “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work,” she views “the frozen, stony women” in Andersen’s work as images of “choosing the perfection of the work, rejecting . . . the imposed biological cycle, blood, kiss, roses, birth, death, and the hungry generations” (Byatt, 78).

  72. “I will give you the whole world and a pair of new skates.” The Snow Queen’s offer conflates high and low registers, echoing the words of the devil: “All these things will I give thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me” (Matthew 4:8–10). She also introduces an object of desire that, however ordinary and diminutive in contrast to the “whole world,” would have a powerful appeal to children reading the tale. W. H. Auden used the reward and the scene in which Kai works on the ice puzzle to identify the difference between folklore and literature. The ice puzzle would never appear
in a folktale, he insisted, “firstly because the human situation with which it is concerned is an historical one, created by Descartes, Newton and their successors, and secondly, because no folk tale would analyze its own symbol and explain that the game with the ice-splinters was the game of reason. Further, the promised reward, ‘the whole world and a new pair of skates,’ has not only a surprise and a subtlety of which the folk tale is incapable, but also a uniqueness by which one can identify its author” (Auden, 205).

  73. Mt. Etna and Vesuvius. Mt. Etna lies on the east coast of Sicily and is the largest of Italy’s three active volcanoes. In ancient times, it was thought to mark the spot of Tartarus, the Greek underworld. Vesuvius, which is located east of Naples, is famous for the destruction of Pompeii in 79 AD. Andersen made eight trips to Italy in his lifetime, the most significant of which was perhaps his first journey to Naples, in 1834. It was there that he linked the volcanic eruptions of Mt. Vesuvius with his own troubled sensual stirrings, or what he called the “Neapolitan passion.” Letters to friends provide detailed accounts of the smoke, steam, and lava he witnessed, and Andersen made several pen-and-ink drawings of the “splendors” of Vesuvius and Etna. In his 1835 novel The Improvisatore, Andersen revealed the degree to which the smoldering volcano of Naples captured the intensity of sensual experience: “My blood was like boiling lava. . . . Everything was flames outside, as in my blood. The air currents rippled with heat, Vesuvius was aglow with fire, the eruptions lit up everything around” (Jens Andersen, 522).

  74. Gerda shed hot tears. The tears, warm and liquid, stand in sharp contrast to the hard, frigid surfaces of the Snow Queen’s realm. Gerda’s animating kisses also differ markedly from the paralyzing kiss of the Snow Queen.

  75. Gerda kissed Kai’s cheeks. Described as “love’s first snowdrop” (Burns), “a heartquake” (Byron), and “the shine / Of heaven ambrosial” (Keats), the kiss has long been the subject of poetic meditations. With its venerable history, from the biblical story recounting Judas’s betrayal of Christ through fairy tales like “The Frog Prince” or “Sleeping Beauty” to Rodin’s rendition of a lip-, limb-, and soul-locked marble couple, kisses range dramatically in meaning, signaling both seduction and betrayal as well as compassion, romance, and redemption. In Andersen’s work, they are linked with both love and death. His poem “The Dying Child” ends with the child joyfully telling its mother of being kissed by an angel. “The Snow Queen” has kisses in abundance: the kisses planted on rosebushes by the young Kai and Gerda, the icy kisses of the Snow Queen, Gerda’s good-bye kisses to her grandmother, the reindeer’s soft kisses on Gerda’s mouth, and, finally, Gerda’s liberating kiss at the end of the story.

  76. the reindeer was waiting for them. Like the Finn woman and the Lapp woman, the reindeer functions as one of a series of helpers who provide nourishment, clothing, and transportation. Each stands in contrast to the cold, boreal mother incarnated by the Snow Queen.

  77. “go to the ends of the earth for your sake.” Like the heroine in “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” (which exists in multiple variant forms in Scandinavian countries), Gerda must travel to the ends of the earth to find her beloved Kai.

  78. “the crow is dead.” The prince and princess, on the road to foreign countries, and the two crows, one in mourning and the other dead, can be seen as doublings of the couple formed by Gerda and Kai, with the prince and princess evoking adventure and voyages into the wide world, the crows representing banality and loss, and Gerda and Kai signaling a blend of what characterizes the other pairs.

  79. they were grown-ups and children at the same time. Time has stood still, but Gerda and Kai return as adults who are still able to occupy the small chairs in which they sat as children. Retaining the beauty and innocence of childhood, they live as chaste partners in an eternal present, with the grandmother reading from the Bible in “God’s clear sunshine.” The concluding tableau may not be a utopia to everyone’s taste, but it is decidedly a “happily ever after,” with its “warm” and “wonderful” summer.

  The Princess and the Pea 1

  Prinsessen paa ærten

  Eventyr, fortalte for Børn, 1835

  Andersen claimed to have heard this story as a child, and it is likely that he was inspired by a version akin to the Swedish “Princess Who Lay on Seven Peas.” The heroine of that tale is an orphaned child who sets out into the world accompanied by a pet cat or dog and who presents herself as a princess. Challenged by a suspicious queen, the girl’s royal ancestry is put to the test at night, when a small object (a bean, a pea, or a straw) is slipped under her mattress. Informed by the cat or the dog about the object, the girl complains about her inability to sleep and is declared to be of royal blood. The folktale heroine uses deceit to raise her social rank, but Andersen’s princess is the “real” thing and does not have to misrepresent her sensitivity.

  For Andersen, a story demonstrating that “true” nobility resides in sensitivity rather than birth had a certain appeal. Constantly reminded of his lowly social origins by his many benefactors as well as by friends and critics, Andersen compensated by developing narratives demonstrating that those who are born in barnyards (the ugly duckling) or those who appear out of nowhere at the doorstep of royals (the princess) may turn out to be the real thing. As a poet, he aspired to become Denmark’s representative among a European elite of writers and thinkers. In “The Nightingale,” Andersen once again took up the distinction between the real thing and sorry imitators.

  The 1959 musical Once Upon a Mattress, starring Carol Burnett as the irrepressible princess Winnifred the Woebegone, enjoyed success on Broadway for many years and was revived in 1997 with Sarah Jessica Parker in the lead role. There have been numerous cinematic adaptations, and the story has been rewritten creatively by Jon Scieszka as “The Princess and the Bowling Ball.”

  “The Princess and the Pea” remains a favorite among Andersen tales, and the princess herself has become an emblem of supremely delicate sensibilities. The casual, conversational tone and humorous touches, which operate to produce parody, redeem many features that might offend modern sensibilities. The prince’s insistence on finding a “true” princess and the characterization of sensitivity as the exclusive privilege of nobility challenge our own cultural values about character and social worth. And yet the sensitivity of the princess can also be read on a metaphorical level as a measure of the depth of her feeling and compassion. Andersen also gives us a feisty heroine, one who defies the elements and shows up on the doorstep of a prince, whom she has succeeded in tracking down on her own.

  Once upon a time, there was a prince. He wanted to marry a princess, but she would have to be a true princess. And he traveled all over the world in search of one,2 but something was always wrong. There were plenty of princesses around, but the prince could never be quite certain that they were real princesses. No matter what, something was always not exactly right. And so he would return home feeling sad, for his heart was set on marrying a real princess. One evening a terrible storm broke out.3 Lightning flashed, thunder roared, and rain came down in buckets—it was really dreadful! There was a sudden knock at the city gate, and the old king himself went to open it.

  W. HEATH ROBINSON

  The prince takes his time scrutinizing the various young women masquerading as princesses. His robe has floral designs on it but also displays a dragon. One defiant toddler seats herself on the robes of the prince, who has his back turned to us as he contemplates the surprisingly youthful candidates for marriage.

  It was a princess, and she was waiting outdoors.4 But goodness gracious! What a sight she was from all the rain and the nasty weather! Water was dripping from her hair and her clothes. It flowed in through the tips of her shoes and back out again through the heels. And she said that she was a real princess.

  “Well, we shall see about that soon enough!” the old queen thought. She didn’t say a word, but went straight to the bedroom, removed all the bedclothes, and placed a pea on
the bottom of the bed. Then she took twenty mattresses and piled them on top of the pea and placed another twenty featherbeds on top of the mattresses.

  KAY NIELSEN

  A windswept princess seeks shelter in the castle and is welcomed by the king, who has the foresight to bring an umbrella when he lets in this “real” princess.

  EDMUND DULAC

  The canopy, the posters of the bed, the mattresses and featherbeds, and the massive timbers of the ceiling contain the tiny figure of the princess, who appears uncomfortable, despite the small mountain of cushioning protecting her from the pea. The many layers beneath the princess provide the artist with an opportunity to create several tiers of decorative touches.

  KAY NIELSEN

  The princess kneels atop the many mattresses in a room governed by extraordinary symmetry. The single light in the chandelier, the mirror over one chair, and the design on the bedstead, along with the princess herself, disrupt the symmetries.

  The princess was going to sleep on them that night.

  In the morning, everyone asked the princess how she had slept.

  “Oh, just dreadfully!” the princess said. “I barely closed my eyes all night long!5 Goodness knows what was in that bed! I was lying on something so hard that I’m just black and blue all over. It’s really dreadful!”

  Then of course everyone knew that she really was a princess, because she had felt the pea6 right through the twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds. No one but a real princess would have skin that tender.

  And so the prince took her as his wife, because now he knew that he had a true princess. And the pea was sent to the Royal Museum, where it is still on display,7 unless someone has stolen it.

  Now you can see, that was a real story!8

  W. HEATH ROBINSON