2. Everything outdoors was covered in ice and snow. Winter is the season of death in Andersen’s poetic lexicon, and the figure of Death in this story has an icy breath that blights whatever it contacts.
3. The clock stopped. The stopping of the clock coincides with the end to the child’s heartbeat. Death is marked by the end of time, and, with the end of time, the mother undertakes a journey into Death’s territory to retrieve her child. The journey has a decidedly fairy-tale quality (resembling the heroine’s travels to “the end of the world” in the Scandinavian folktale “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”), but the mother has a mission far different from that of fairy-tale characters, who are generally in search of a prince or a princess.
4. “I am Night, and I love lullabies.” The mother encounters four different figures before meeting up with Death. With each, she engages in some kind of barter or transaction that will improve her chances of finding her child. The allegorical figure of Night is enamored of the mother’s songs, which are associated with tears and grief.
5. A hawthorn bush was growing at the crossroads. The hawthorn, like the oak and hazel, has been seen as sacred, having protective powers. It is small and characterized by fruit known as “haws” and thorny branches. Native to northern Europe, in Celtic lore it was famous for healing broken hearts. Hawthorn was sometimes put into the cradles of infants to protect them from harm.
6. The mother pressed the hawthorn bush to her breast to warm it up. Andersen was haunted by a recurring nightmare about a child lying on his breast. Over two decades after writing this story, he recorded the following in his diary: “Slept fitfully and had a hideous dream about a child lying on my breast and how it turned into a wet rag” (June 1, 1868). On August 29, 1874, he wrote, “The horrible dream I often have about a child who is wasting away at my breast and becomes nothing but a wet rag troubled me again.” One critic points out that the tale can be read in biographical terms: “The mother’s sacrifices for her child may represent the poet’s sacrifices for his art: when the mother sings for the night, it is the poet’s song; when her blood flows for the thorn bush, it is the artist offering his heart to the public” (Stecher-Hansen, 103). The thorns of the hawthorn conjure associations with Christ’s crown of thorns, and the mother’s love becomes transformative, turning the icy branch into one that blooms. Oscar Wilde, who was deeply influenced by Andersen’s fairy tales, writes of the sacrificial love of a bird for a flower in “The Nightingale and the Rose.”
7. Her eyes sank to the bottom of the lake. In bartering her eyes, the mother relies on her wisdom and inner vision to guide her. Andersen took advantage of the popular Romantic trope pairing blindness with insight.
8. And she gave her beautiful black tresses away. In this last of four bargains, the woman trades her youth and beauty for information about her child. Like the sisters in “The Little Mermaid,” she is willing to sacrifice her beautiful hair for the sake of another person.
9. “the great Garden of Paradise in the unknown country.” Andersen had originally written “the flowering garden” for “the unknown country,” a phrase that may have its origins in Hamlet’s famous reference to death as “The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveler returns.” Death becomes a source of mystery, the destination of a second journey, one that promises regeneration through the transplantation from greenhouse to garden.
10. “Which one is condemned to misery and which one is blessed?” Andersen may have been familiar with the Grimms’ tale “The Little Old Mother,” which was included in their “Legends about Children” at the end of Children’s Stories and Household Tales, published in 1815. In that tale, a little old lady grieves over her losses, including the death of her husband and two children. She attends a religious service and realizes that she is the only living soul in the church. There she discovers that her two sons, both of whom died young, would have lived to become criminals, with one dying on the gallows and the other tortured on the wheel. She falls to her knees and declares her gratitude to God.
11. And Death went with her child to the unknown land. The first draft of the tale ends with the awakening of the mother from a nightmare about the death of her child. It concluded in the following way: “He lay there in a sweet, healthy sleep, and the sun shone on his cheeks so that they seemed red, and when the mother looked around, she found herself sitting in her little room. . . . Death was not in the room. The mother folded her hands, thought of the house of the dead, of the child’s future and said again ‘God’s will be done!’ ” (Stecher-Hansen, 97). That Andersen elected to use the tragic ending may have had something to do with the fact that the tale was a Christimas gift—drawing attention to Christ’s death at the time of his birth—for the British, who were schooled in melodrama through Dickens.
The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf
Pigen, som traadte paa brødet
Nye Eventyr og Historier. Tredie Samling, 1857
“The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf” is without doubt the least child-friendly of Andersen’s narratives, with a chilling display of punishment beyond the disciplinary excesses found in nineteenth-century Anglo-American and European children’s literature. Even the notorious Struwwelpeter of 1845 by the Frankfurt physician Heinrich Hoffmann, with its images of children going up in flames after lighting matches or losing their thumbs after sucking them, looks tame by comparison.
Andersen’s title refers to the folksong “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf,” which inspired his retelling of the girl’s story. Kathryn Davis, in her novel named after the folksong, gives an account of the plot’s origins:
Originally a folksong, “Pigen, der trådte på brødet,” it chronicles the horrible fate of a vain young woman from the town of Sibbo, in Pomerania, whose punishment for loving a pair of shoes more than a loaf of bread is to be “frozen like a boulder” before she’s swallowed up in a mud puddle. Toward the end of the eighteenth century the song was published as a broadside and despite its heavyhanded morality and plodding rhymes (“O human soul keep this in mind, / Abandon pride’s temptations, / And leave all other sins behind, / They were her ruination . . .”) it’s remembered for having inspired Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the same name.
(The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf, 14)
The name “Inger” was Andersen’s invention, and he may have been inspired by Inger Meisling, the wife of the detested schoolmaster in Slagelse. Andersen freely admitted the role of revenge in his construction of narratives: “Many times when people have behaved in an irritating way and I have been unable to hit back, I have written a story and put them into it” (Travels, 91).
You have probably heard about the tribulations of the girl who trod on a loaf of bread to keep from soiling her shoes. The story has been written down and put into print as well.1
She was a poor child, but proud and vain. And people said that she had a bad streak. As a very small child, she enjoyed catching flies, pulling off their wings,2 and turning them into creeping things. She would take a May bug and a beetle, stick each of them on a pin, then place a green leaf or bit of paper up against their feet. The poor creatures would cling to it, twisting and turning, trying to get off the pin.
“Now the May bug is reading,” little Inger would say. “Look how it’s turning over the leaves!”
As she grew older, she became worse rather than better. But she was very pretty, and that was probably her misfortune, for otherwise she would have been punished more often than she was.
“It’ll take some desperate remedies to cure your stubborn ways,”3 her mother told her. “When you were little, you used to stomp all over my aprons. Now that you’re older, I’m worried that you will stomp all over my heart.”
And, sure enough, that’s what she did.
JENNIE HARBOUR
Dressed in beautiful clothes, Inger looks completely carefree, unaware of the grave consequences that will attend stepping on a loaf of bread to keep her shoes from getting dirty.
One day
she went out to work for gentry living in the countryside. They treated her as kindly as if she were their own child and dressed her in the same way. She looked very beautiful now and became more vain than ever.
After she had been with the family for about a year, her mistress said to her: “Isn’t it time to go back and visit your parents, Inger dear?”
So she did, but she only went because she wanted to show off and let them see how refined she had become. When she reached the village, she caught sight of a group of girls gossiping with some young fellows near a pond. Her mother was there too, pausing to rest on a rock, with a bundle of firewood she had gathered in the forest. Inger was ashamed4 that she, who was dressed so smartly, should have a mother who went about in rags collecting sticks. She wasn’t in the least sorry to turn back. But she was annoyed.
Another six months went by.
“You really should go home sometime soon to visit your old parents, Inger dear,” her mistress said. “Here, you can take this big loaf of white bread to them. They’ll be happy to see you again.”
Inger put on her best clothes and wore a pair of fine new shoes. She picked up the hem of her skirt and walked very carefully so that her shoes would stay nice and clean. No one can blame her for that! But when she reached the place where her path crossed over marshy ground, with a stretch of puddles and mud before her, she flung the loaf down on the ground as a stepping-stone so that she could make her way across with dry shoes. Just as she put one foot down on the bread and lifted the other, the loaf began to sink, carrying her down deeper and deeper until she disappeared altogether and there was nothing to see but a black, bubbling swamp!5
LORENZ FRØLICH
LORENZ FRØLICH
That’s the story.
What became of her?6 She went down to the Marsh Woman, who brews underground. The Marsh Woman is aunt to the elf maidens,7 who are known everywhere, for people sing songs about them and paint pictures of them. But nobody knows much about the Marsh Woman, except that when the meadows begin steaming in the summer, it means that the old woman is brewing things below. Inger sank down into her brewery, and that’s not a place you can stay for very long. A cesspool is a place of luxury compared with the Marsh Woman’s brewery. Every vat reeks so horribly that you would faint,8 and they are all packed closely together. Even if you could find a space wide enough to squeeze through, you wouldn’t be able to get by because of all the slimy toads and the fat snakes tangled up in there. That’s where Inger landed. The whole nasty, creepy mess was so icy cold that her every limb began to shiver, and she grew stiffer and stiffer. The loaf was still sticking to her feet, dragging her down, just as amber attracts bits of straw.9
LORENZ FRØLICH
The Marsh Woman was at home, for the brewery was being visited that day by the devil and his great-grandmother,10 an extremely venomous old creature whose hands are never idle. She always has some needlework with her, and she had it with her this time too. Her pincushion was with her that day so that she could give people pins and needles in their legs and make them get up and run around. And she was busy embroidering lies and crocheting rash words that might have fallen harmlessly to the ground had she not woven them into mischief and slander. How cleverly that old great-granny could sew, embroider, and weave!11
When the devil’s great-grandmother saw Inger, she put on her spectacles and took a good look at her. “That girl has talent,” she declared. “I’d like to take her back with me as a souvenir. She’d make a perfect statue for my great-grandson’s entrance hall.” And she got her!
That’s how little Inger ended up in hell. People can’t always go straight down there, but if they have a little talent, they can get there in a roundabout way.
The antechamber there seemed endless. It made you dizzy to look straight ahead and dizzy to look back. A crowd of anxious, miserable souls were waiting for the gates of mercy to be flung open. They would have to wait for a long time! Huge, hideous, fat spiders were spinning webs that would last a thousand years around the feet of those waiting, and the webs were like foot screws or manacles that clamped down as strongly as copper chains on the feet. On top of all that, there was a deep sense of despair in every soul, a feeling of anxiety that was itself a torment. Among the crowd was a miser who had lost the key to his money box and now remembered that he had left it in the lock. But wait—it would take far too long to describe all the pain and torment suffered in that place. Inger began to feel the torture of standing still, just like a statue. It was as if she were riveted to the ground by the loaf of bread.
LORENZ FRØLICH
“This is what comes from trying to keep your shoes clean,” she said to herself. “Look at how they’re all staring at me.” Yes, it’s true, they were all staring at her, with evil passions gleaming in their eyes. They spoke without a sound coming from their mouths, and it was horrifying to look at them!
“It must be a pleasure to look at me,” Inger thought. “I have a pretty face and nice clothes.” And then she turned her eyes, for her neck was too stiff to move. Goodness, how dirty she had become in the Marsh Woman’s brewery! She hadn’t thought of that. Her dress was covered with one great streak of slime; a snake had wound itself into her hair and was dangling down her neck12; and from each fold in her dress an ugly toad was peeping out, making a croaking noise that sounded like the bark of a wheezy lapdog. It was most disagreeable. “Still,” she consoled herself, “the others down here look no less dreadful.”
Worst of all was the terrible hunger Inger felt. If she could just stoop down and break off a bit of the loaf on which she was standing! Impossible—for her back had stiffened, her arms and hands had stiffened, and her entire body was like a statue made of stone. All she could do was roll her eyes, roll them right around so that she could see what was behind her, and that was truly a ghastly sight. Flies began to land on her, and they crawled back and forth across her eyes. She blinked, but the flies wouldn’t go away. They couldn’t fly away because their wings had been pulled off, and they had become creeping insects. That made Inger’s torment even worse, and, as for the pangs of hunger, it began to feel to her as if her innards were eating themselves up. She began to feel so empty inside, so terribly empty.13
“If this goes on much longer, I won’t be able to bear it,” she said, but she had to bear it, and everything just became worse than ever.
Suddenly a hot tear fell on her forehead.14 It trickled down her face and chest, right down to the loaf of bread. Then another tear fell, and many more followed. Who could be weeping for little Inger? Didn’t she have a mother up there on earth? The tears of grief shed by a mother for her wayward child can always reach her, but they only burn and make the torture all the greater. And now this unbearable hunger—and the impossibility of getting even a mouthful from the loaf she had trod underfoot! She was beginning to have the feeling that everything inside her must have eaten itself up. She was like a thin, hollow reed that absorbs every sound it hears. She could hear everything said about her on earth above, and what she heard was harsh and spiteful. Her mother may have been weeping and feeling deep sorrow, but still she said: “Pride goes before a fall.15 That’s what led to your ruin, Inger. You have created so much sorrow for your mother!”
Inger’s mother and everyone else up above were all aware of her sin and how she had trod upon the loaf, sunk down, and disappeared. They had learned about it from the cowherd, who had seen it for himself from the crest of a hill.
“You have brought me so much grief, Inger,” her mother said. “Yes, I always knew it would happen.”
“I wish I had never been born!”16 Inger thought. “I would have been so much better off. Mother’s tears can do me no good now.”
Inger heard her master and mistress speaking, those good people who had been like parents to her. “She was always a sinful child,” they said. “She had no respect for the gifts of our Lord, but trampled them underfoot. It will be hard for her to squeeze through the gates of mercy.”
“They should have done a better job raising me,” Inger thought. “They should have cured me of my bad ways, if I had any.”
Inger heard that a ballad had been written about her17—“The proud young girl who stepped on a loaf to keep her shoes clean.” It was being sung from one end of the country to the other.
“Why should I have to suffer and be punished so severely for such a little thing?”18 Inger thought. “Why aren’t others punished for their sins as well? There would be so many people to punish. Oh, I am in such pain!”
Inger’s heart became even harder than her shell-like form.19 “Nothing will ever improve while I’m in this company! And I don’t want to get better. Look at them all glaring at me!”
Her heart grew even harder and was filled with hatred for all humans.
“I dare say that they will have something to talk about now. Oh, I am in such pain!”
And she could hear people telling her story to children as a warning, and the little ones called her Wicked Inger. “She was so horrid,” they said, “so nasty that she deserved to be punished.”
The children had nothing but harsh words for her.
One day, when hunger and resentment were gnawing deeply away in her hollow body, she heard her name spoken. Her story was being told to an innocent child,20 a small girl who burst into tears when she heard about proud Inger and her love of finery.
“Won’t she ever come back up again?” the girl asked. And she was told: “She will never return.”
LORENZ FRØLICH
“What if she asks for forgiveness and promises never to do it again?”
“But she won’t ask to be forgiven,” they replied.