9. three red poppies were floating on the water. The red poppy has traditionally been a symbol of death, renewal, and resurrection. The flower has seeds that can remain dormant for years on end but will blossom when the soil is turned over. The fields of northern France and Flanders became the site of vast tracts of poppies after World War I, and their presence was commemorated in John McCrae’s famous verse: “In Flanders Fields the poppies blow / Between the crosses row on row.”
10. he was horrified and insisted that she could not be his daughter. The king’s repudiation of his daughter sets the stage for a second rejection that will take place when the king who marries Elisa listens to the archbishop’s denunciations of his wife. The atrocities at home are habitually repeated at the heroine’s second, new home in fairytale plots.
11. they were humble creatures and had no say in the matter. Andersen repeatedly placed his sympathies with migratory creatures like swallows, with whom he, as an energetic traveler, identified. In a letter to Jonas Collin, he described his nomadic habits: “Now I have a home for 25 rix-dollars a month, which I will probably fly away from when the first warm rays of the sun prickle me, the way they prickle the migratory birds” (Rossel 1996, 48). The watchdog may be a reference to Argos, the faithful dog who is the first to recognize Odysseus when he returns home disguised as an old beggar.
12. Hundreds of fireflies glittered like some kind of green fire above the grass and moss. Fireflies, also known as lightning bugs, and as glowworms (the term for the larvae and the wingless females), belong to the nocturnal beetles of the family Lampyridae, which have special chemicals in the abdomen that produce a flashing light. The males fly around in the evening during early summer. Andersen was fascinated with special light effects, the play of the sun’s rays, the sparkling of stars, and the Northern lights. Luminescence in general works a profound aesthetic and spiritual charm in Andersen’s works and, as holds true for “The Wild Swans,” provides inspiration and hope.
13. All night long she had dreams about her brothers. Elisa, unlike Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and other characters from oral storytelling traditions, has a lively nocturnal dream life. In her dreams—which can be seen as a slow incubation period for developing the self—she reminisces about the past, ponders the future, and discovers the means to release her brothers from their enchanted state.
14. What was once in the picture book had come alive. The notion of a book whose characters can step out of the pages is a literary conceit, with origins in the Romantic period that flourished when Andersen was a boy. Related to the notion that portraits and statues can come to life, the concept suggests a breaking of the boundaries between art and life. In many children’s books, for example Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, characters can enter into the story that unfolds while they are reading. Andersen may have been influenced by Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1799), a novel by the German Romantic Novalis, that charted the travels of a young man on his way to becoming a poet. On his journey, Heinrich encounters a hermit who possesses an exotic volume written in a foreign language. As he leafs through the pages, he realizes that the figures in the book represent him and members of his family, all dressed in costumes from another time and place.
15. the sun was already high overhead. Idyllic nature scenes abound in Andersen’s work, but the description of Elisa at the pond is almost unsurpassed in its beauty. The visual, aural, and olfactory elements combine to produce a utopian scene of arresting natural splendor, as the pure surface of the pond reflects and reproduces all that surrounds it.
16. a more beautiful royal child. The bathing scene presents a pagan baptism in which Elisa purges herself of her stepmother’s evil influence. If the earlier immersion in water (at home) had a transformative effect, this second cleansing reveals, once again, Elisa’s inherent nobility.
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Elisa bathes in a pond in order to remove the stains left by the walnut oil and “vile ointment” applied by her stepmother.
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An old woman carrying a basket of berries emerges from the forest to help Elisa in her quest to disenchant her brothers. By contrast to the stepmother, she will offer guidance and advice.
17. Elisa had never before known such loneliness. After the idyllic beauty of the woodland scene comes a moment in which Elisa feels the deepest emotional despair of her entire ordeal. For the ugly duckling and other figures like Elisa, the existential crisis marks what J.R.R. Tolkien has referred to as the eucatastrophe, the dark desolation that signals a turning point that will lead to redemption.
18. an old woman carrying a basket of berries. Like the various old women in “The Snow Queen,” the woman with the basket of berries provides physical nourishment and spiritual guidance to the solitary heroine. Although she possesses no magical powers, she serves as a counterweight to the stepmother and her evil machinations, suggesting that benevolent forces will emerge in the course of the heroine’s peregrinations.
19. leaned out over the water until their branches met. The force of desire operates powerfully, even in nonsentient beings. The description of the trees transcending their rooted nature and reaching out to each other across the waters prefigures the strength of Elisa’s desire to reunite with her brothers. The kind of contact pictured here—reaching across obstacles to meet and embrace—mirrors the poetic effect of the kiss in Andersen’s works.
20. the sea was always changing. The notion of mutability is introduced in the descriptions of the changing landscape. The narrative begins with the transformation of the boys into swans and repeatedly takes up the theme of metamorphosis. The toads in Elisa’s bath, for example, are turned into poppies. Here, the landscape participates too, albeit in more subtle ways, in the process of transformation.
21. eleven swans with golden crowns on their heads. The swans are presented as a wondrous sight. As in “The Ugly Duckling,” their golden crowns mark them as royal beings, and their movements create the impression of an aesthetic ornament that fills the sky with beauty. Swans, as Jackie Wullschlager points out, were cherished birds in Andersen’s personal mythology. They were closest to his “romantic selfimage as wild, pure, lofty and loyal.” They are also, as she points out, monogamous creatures who take care of their young as a pair. They appear to soar with great power in the air even as they are “elegantly resigned” on water and “uncomfortable and graceless” on land (Wullschlager, 189). And, as Boria Sax points out, their families, “at least viewed from a distance, seem close to the domestic idylls of the human imagination” (Sax, 63).
22. who was still fast asleep. Even as Elisa becomes savior to her brothers, she also becomes something like a child to the swan brothers. Placed in netting that resembles a cradle, she is sheltered from the sun by one of their protective wings. She is even provided with nourishment in her aerial bed.
23. The clouds formed one huge, menacing wave. During the travels of the brothers and their sister, “up,” “above,” and “down below” become nearly interchangeable. The clouds above take on the characteristics of the ocean, and the world becomes one vast tract without any kind of division between air and sea. Swans are, of course, at home on land, in the air, and at sea.
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Elisa and her brothers huddle together on a rock that has just enough room for them to stand. Black clouds, thunderbolts, and waves threaten them all around.
24. as large as mill wheels. In “The Tinderbox,” Andersen used mill wheels to describe the size of the dog’s eyes.
25. Fata Morgana’s lovely castle. Fata Morgana, also known by the name of Morgan le Fay, is an enchantress with the ability to transform her appearance. Trained by Merlin the Magician, she is described by one source as King Arthur’s shape shifting half-sister. Her name is used to describe a special type of mirage, formed by alternating warm and cold layers of air near the ground or near the water, that appears in the form of a castle half in the air and half in the sea. Fata Morgana was said to live in
a castle under the sea, and the enchantress had the capacity to cause the castle to appear reflected in the air. Sailors would be lured to their deaths when they mistook her magnificent castle for a safe harbor. The term is used colloquially to denote a mirage or optical illusion.
26. The scene kept changing before her eyes. Mutability in the landscape creates a sense of dangerous instability. Elisa has little control over her constantly changing environment when she flies with her brothers.
27. you may not speak. Like the little mermaid, Elisa combines virtue with silence, epitomizing heroism as she sacrifices her own well-being for others. The yoking of virtue with silence appears frequently in earlier literature—for instance, Shakespeare’s Cordelia in King Lear and Constance in Chaucer’s “Man of Law’s Tale.” Marina Warner locates the origins of this fairy tale in a time when “women’s capacity for love and action tragically exceeded the permitted boundaries of their lives” (Warner, 392–93). The silence in this particular tale creates a sense of powerlessness even as the heroine is developing the capacity to transform her brothers. Ruth B. Bottigheimer points out that “a historical understanding of fairy tales leads to the conclusion that insistent privation or imminent deprivation can be and have been recast into a narrative in which silence and being condemned to silence stand for the domestic, political and social experience of the poor” (Bottigheimer, 73).
28. the pain was gone. The power of tears to heal is evident in stories like “Rapunzel,” in which the heroine’s tears have the capacity to bring sight back to the prince’s eyes. In “The Snow Queen,” Gerda’s tears break the wintry spell cast on Kai by the glass splinter in his heart.
29. Never before had he seen a girl so beautiful. Max Lüthi has pointed out that the actual form beauty takes in fairy tales is rarely made explicit: “The beauty is abstract. The listener must fall back on his own imagination.” He notes further that this kind of abstract beauty does not have an erotic quality: “Beauty spellbinds and attracts, and with magic power. But there is no talk of sensual vibration, either with respect to the beautiful girl herself or with respect to those affected by her” (Lüthi, 4–5). Andersen’s fairy tales, in contrast to his novels and plays, construct beautiful scenes and images that yield aesthetic rather than sensual pleasure.
30. If you’re as good as you are beautiful. In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry notes that virtue and beauty are powerfully linked: “beautiful things give rise to the notion of distribution, to a life-saving reciprocity, to fairness not just in the sense of loveliness of aspect but in the sense of ‘a symmetry of everyone’s relation to one another’ ” (Scarry 1999, 95). Elisa is fair in both senses of the term. She rights the wrongs of the stepmother and becomes an agent of justice, restoring her brothers to their human form and returning them to their natural home.
31. even though the archbishop was shaking his head. In most other versions of the tale, it is a mother-in-law or other evil female figure who spreads vicious rumors about the heroine, switching her newborn child with whelps or monsters and branding her a sorceress. The association of evil with an ecclesiastical figure reflects skepticism about nineteenth-century religious orthodoxies. More importantly, it is also consonant with a deeply critical attitude toward the clergy in folktales. Parsons and priests are frequently represented as freeloaders and cheats who deserve to have the tables turned on them.
32. The wedding took place. This first wedding is a ceremony that may bring Elisa and the king together in official terms, but they remain divided because of Elisa’s secret.
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Elisa steals out of the castle and makes her way to the churchyard in order to find the nettles she needs to finish the shirts.
33. a group of hideous ghouls. The flesh-eating witches in the churchyard are a reminder that, from the 1400s up until 1693, the Danes engaged in witch hunts (coinciding with those in Salem and elsewhere) that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of old women.
34. the carved images of the saints shook their heads. In “The Red Shoes,” the paintings on the walls appear to fix their eyes on Karen’s footwear. Certain sins are so brazen that even images of the dead are stirred back to life in protest. But Elisa herself, a miracle of beauty and piety, can also work wonders.
35. Tiny mice ran across the floor. Elisa, like many orphaned children in fairy tales, finds in nature a source of aid and support. The mice and the birds, like the birds in “Cinderella,” make sure that she can complete the tasks assigned to her. Protagonists of fairy tales often become children of nature. Cut off from human help, they find in animals the help they need.
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36. because his shirt of mail was missing a sleeve. The tiny flaw that accompanies the great accomplishment provides a moment of imperfection in a genre that famously prefers perfection and utopian closure to compromise and negotiation. Falling just short of a deadline can lead to resolution, as in this tale, but more frequently it ushers in a second catastrophe.
37. the aroma of millions of roses began to spread. Bengt Holbek points out how innocent goodness triumphs over evil in this story. He emphasizes the difference between the virtues set forth in folktales and those celebrated in Andersen’s work: “In Andersen’s universe, the qualities of good and evil have become absolute. . . . We observe a number of what may be called social virtues like helpfulness, generosity, steadfastness in danger, faithfulness, honesty and so on” (Holbek, 157).
38. An enormous hedge had spread out. The dense hedge of roses is, of course, well known from “Sleeping Beauty.” For Andersen, the rose bears an added redemptive layer. The white blossom signals innocence and salvation, and the red, passion and love.
39. birds appeared in great flocks. Birds, which can soar high into the heavens while roses remain rooted on earth, add a further dimension of spirituality to the tale. And these creatures are, of course, kindred to the boys in their avian form.
40. A wedding procession headed back toward the palace. This second wedding will presumably be marked by more trust than the first, for the king’s willingness to listen to the archbishop and to let his wife perish by fire did not signal great confidence in Elisa.
Thumbelina
Tommelise
Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Første Samling, 1835
“Thumbelina” was the first story in the second installment of Andersen’s Eventyr, published in December 1835, just in time for Christmas. Its date coincided with his first real triumph as a writer: publication of the novel The Improvisatore, soon reprinted and translated into German. The first volume of fairy tales had met with mixed reviews; at least one reviewer advised Andersen to stop writing them altogether. In his introduction to the third volume, Andersen conceded that such reviews “weakened the desire” to write but that he had persevered. Reviving his memory of tales heard in spinning rooms and at harvest time, he brightened up “the faded colors of the images” and used them as the point of departure for imaginative creations of his own.
“Thumbelina,” Andersen’s tale of a runaway bride, has been variously interpreted as a tale teaching that “people are happy when with their own kind” (Opie, 288), as an allegory about “arranged marriages that were not uncommon in the bourgeoisie of that time” (Ingwersen 1993, 168), and as a “straightforward fable about being true to your heart” that also upholds “the traditional notion that fame and fortune aren’t worth a hill of beans compared to the love of a good old-fashioned prince” (Holden, C19). Thumbelina can also be seen as a female counterpart to the heroic Tom Thumb. Both are diminutive creatures who suffer through all manner of ordeals and survive against all odds. Thumbelina earns her good fortune and becomes a queen after an act of compassion (reviving the swallow), and Tom Thumb uses his cunning to defeat the ogre and return home to live like a king with his parents and siblings. According to Hindu belief, a thumb-sized being known as the innermost self or soul dwells in the heart of all humans and animals. Most likely the concept migrated into Europ
ean folklore, surfacing in the form of Tom Thumb and Thumbelina, both of whom can be seen as figures seeking transfiguration and redemption. Note that Thumbelina is renamed Maya.
“Tommelise” is the Danish title of the tale. The first English translations of the story used the names “Little Ellie,” “Little Totty,” and “Little Maja.” The name Thumbelina was first used by H. W. Dulcken, whose translations of Andersen’s tales appeared in England in 1864 and 1866, and it is now the name used in most translations and in all films based on the tale. There have been at least five cinematic adaptations, beginning with Lotte Reiniger’s in 1954 and including Barry Mahon’s (1970), Shelley Duvall’s (1984), Don Bluth and Gary Goldman’s (1994), and Glenn Chaika’s (2002). Frank Loesser’s lyrics for the 1952 film Hans Christian Andersen contain the song about Thumbelina that is still well known today: “Though you’re no bigger than my thumb . . .”
Once upon a time there lived a woman who was longing for a tiny little child, but she had no idea where to find one. Finally she decided to call on an old witch,1 and she said her: “My heart is set on having a little child. Can’t you tell me how I can get one?”
“That’s easily done,” the witch said. “Here’s a grain of barley,2 but it isn’t the kind grown by farmers in their fields or the sort used to feed chickens. Put it in a flower pot, and you shall see what you shall see.”
“Thank you so very much,” the woman said, and she gave the witch twelve pennies and planted the seed as soon as she arrived back home. The seed quickly grew into a big, beautiful flower that looked just like a tulip, but its petals were folded tightly, as though it were still a bud.