“You’re a fine fellow, running off like that!” she said to Kai. “I wonder if you really deserve having someone go to the ends of the earth for your sake.”77
Gerda just patted her cheek and asked about the prince and princess.
“They’re traveling in foreign lands,” the robber girl said.
“And the crow?” Gerda asked.
“Oh, the crow is dead,”78 she replied. “His tame sweetheart is now a widow, and she has wrapped a bit of black woolen yarn around her leg. She complains constantly, and it’s really all nonsense. But tell me now what you’ve been up to and how you managed to find Kai.”
Gerda and Kai both told the story.
“Abracadabra, hocus-pocus, bibbety-bobbety-boo!” said the robber girl, and took them both by the hand. She promised to visit if she ever found her way to the town where they were living. And then she rode out into the wide world. Kai and Gerda walked away hand in hand, and as they walked, it turned into a beautiful spring day, with green everywhere and flowers in bloom. The church bells were ringing, and they recognized the tall towers of the town in which they had grown up. They went straight to Grandmother’s door, up the staircase into the living room, where everything was just as it had been. The clock went “Tick! Tock!” and its hands spun around. As they walked through the door, they realized that they had turned into grown-ups. The roses on the roof were blooming in the open windows. The children’s two chairs were still there. Kai and Gerda sat down in them and held hands. They had forgotten the cold, empty splendor of the Snow Queen’s castle. It was nothing more than a bad dream. Grandmother was sitting in God’s bright sunshine and reading out loud from the Bible: “Unless you become as little children, you shall not enter the Kingdom of God.”
Kai and Gerda looked into each other’s eyes, and suddenly they understood the old hymn:
“Down in the valley, where roses grow wild,
There we can speak with our dear Christ child!”
There they sat, and they were grown-ups and children at the same time,79 children at heart. And it was summer—warm, wonderful summer.
HONOR APPLETON
1. Look out! We’re about to begin. Andersen does not use the impersonal, formulaic “once upon a time” of fairy tales and instead creates an embodied narrator who summons an imaginary audience to attention. His exclamatory remark also evokes a sense of physical engagement, anticipating the joy of adventure, the excitement of a journey, and the thrilling exhilaration Kai feels when hitched to the sled of the Snow Queen. Acting as a bridge between “long ago and far away” and the “here and now,” Andersen’s narrator also suggests that this is a tale to be read out loud, one that can build a bond between older and wiser tellers of tales and their listeners. Andersen himself, in an ingenious formulation, observed that his works were “written to be heard, that is how I know when they are good enough to be read.” He conceded that his dramatic readings of the stories were not always appreciated: “I did not have enough experience to know that an author should not do this, at least not in my country” (Travels, 22).
2. we’ll know more than we do now. The narrator straightaway makes the point that his story turns on the production of knowledge as well as entertainments. The introduction of the devil in the very first paragraph emphasizes a broad nexus of concerns that draws together division, sin, and the acquisition of knowledge. In some ways, readers will be repeating the experience of Kai and Gerda, who move from innocence to experience through knowledge.
3. He was one of the very worst—the “devil” himself! The hybrid figure of the devil/ troll represents a compromise between the Christian devil and the trolls of pagan
4. he had just finished making a mirror. Magical mirrors figure prominently in the folklore of many cultures. Mirrors can answer questions, make wishes come true, and predict the future. Moreover, they not only reflect but also transform. Whether we look at the folklore of Aztec Mexico or ancient Egypt, shadows and mirror images are generally seen as magically empowered embodiments of the soul. It comes as no surprise that bargains involving both shadows and mirrors animate the desires of devils and other fiends. Andersen weds folkloric tradition—contracts involving the soul—with literary convention, in which the mirror represents mimetic practices, capturing reality and reflecting it back to us in new ways. His mirror has magic qualities with the capacity to shrink what is “good and beautiful” and to enlarge what is “worthless and ugly.” It reflects and distorts reality, and at the same time functions as a tool of the devil, who is invested in making a mockery of everything worthwhile through its surface. Andersen’s contrast between the beautiful and the hideous appropriates fairy-tale aesthetics, which align the beautiful with the good and the hideous with what is morally worthless. The devil’s distorting mirror can also be read as a metaphor for satiric art, which attempts not to capture reality but to engage in its disfigurement and thereby reveal what is amiss and untrue in our world.
Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, in her history of the mirror, points out that the theology of sin positioned the “mad stare” as the greatest obstacle to salvation: “All things visual, including seeing and thus knowing oneself, were linked together through sin. Most sins, pride or arrogance first and foremost, derive from sight. The mirror served as an attribute of sin because it is the emblem of the powers of sight, whose perverse effects it increases” (Melchior-Bonnet, 193). Vanity, as we know from lore. In Scandinavian folklore, trolls live in castles and haunt surrounding areas after nightfall. When exposed to sunlight, they turn into stone or simply burst. Today, children in Anglo-American cultures know them from stories about creatures who live under bridges and make demands on those who use them—most notably the Norwegian “Three Billy Goats Gruff.”
“The Red Shoes” and “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf,” is the cardinal sin in Andersen’s fictional world. Looking and desiring to be looked at create problems for both Karen and Inger in those two stories.
5. a miracle had taken place. Andersen’s troll-devil is a kind of artistic anti-Christ whose art consists of finding truth (“you could see what the world and its people were really like”) through criticism and satiric distortion. The plan to take the mirror up to the angels and God is doomed to fail in its hubris and defiant ambition, much like the biblical effort to build a Tower of Babel that would reach to the heavens. Shattered as it approaches the heavens, the mirror produces fragments that are lodged everywhere on earth. The shattering, fragmentation, and splintering represent the opposite of love, a power that unites and overcomes oppositions and antagonism. For many theologians, the devil is seen as the being that divides and creates enmity. The devil says to Jesus: “My name is Legion, for we are many” (Mark 5:9). The transition from plenitude and wholeness to division and sin reveals the action of evil in the world. God’s creation is shattered and atomizes into isolated fragments that create hell on earth.
Yet mirrors, even as they introduce the notion of self-division and self-deception, are also linked with reflection and selfknowledge. In this sense, Andersen’s devil, like his biblical counterpart, can be linked with salvation as well as damnation. As the patron of multiplicity and variation, he helps to produce a world that contrasts sharply with the monotonous domain of the Snow Queen. As Roger Sale, an expert on children’s literature, points out, “The Snow Queen” is long and complex, “because it must be, in order to show that the world, when it is not dominated by the Snow Queen, is not paradise but the world, multiple, varied, usually helpful to a distressed girl if it doesn’t have to go far out of its way to do so” (Sale, 71).
6. Now let’s hear what happened next! The colloquial tone enters once again to introduce the main story and to refocus the attention of the audience, which has been distracted by the back story about the devil and his mirror. The mythological/ biblical background takes advantage of comic anaphora, that is, the repeated use of parallel phrases (“A little splinter from the mirror landed in the hearts of some people,” “The shards wer
e so large at times,” “Other pieces were turned into eyeglasses”) that culminate in the grotesque image of the devil laughing until his sides split and thereby becoming the very embodiment of self-division. In an oral storytelling situation, the use of repetition would provide the opportunity for poetic improvisation and audience engagement, although it would also have the effect of distracting from the main contours of the plot.
7. In the big city. The urban landscape is introduced as a crowded, dense space, filled with houses and people, but lacking space for the organic growth found in gardens. The window boxes represent an effort to reclaim natural beauty in improbable city spaces and to create an appealing site that invites imitation by the two children, who play “happily” under the roses. The tale begins with a “cosmic prologue staging the opposition between God and the Devil,” then shifts to “a small idyllic ambience created by poor bourgeois parents in order to preserve benign nature within an urban milieu” (Johansen 2002, 37). In the story “The Drop of Water,” Andersen satirized the cruelties of life in the big city. No doubt he had Copenhagen in mind, a place that contrasted sharply with his native Odense, and for his entire life he had a powerful love/hate relationship with the city and its inhabitants.
8. A rain gutter ran between the two houses. The gutter creates a bridge and introduces the importance of connection early on in the story. As an architectural device that channels a vital natural substance coming down from the heavens, it has an important symbolic significance, particularly since the notion of fluidity and mobility will come to be opposed to rigidity and stasis.
9. a little rosebush. Roses were first grown about 5,000 years ago in the ancient gardens of Asia and Africa. They are among the oldest cultivated flowers and grew in the mythical gardens of Semiramis, queen of Assyria, and Midas, King of Phrygia. In every mythological system, the rose has become the emblem of beauty and love, but not without complications, for it is well known that roses do not bloom for long, that they are vulnerable to insects, blight, and wind, and that they grow on a plant that bears thorns. In Greek mythology, Aphrodite, goddess of love, is said to have created the rose by mixing her tears with the blood of her lover Adonis. Roman antiquity turned the rose into a symbol of love and beauty affiliated with Venus. For early Christians, the strong pagan associations with the rose produced resistance to exploiting its iconic power, but it was eventually declared to be a symbol of the blood of the martyrs and came to be associated with the Virgin Mary (like Christ, she is the Mystic Rose that is sometimes a white rose or a rose without thorns). Because of the earlier associations with Venus, Bacchus, and other classical deities, the rose was displaced by the lily as the Virgin’s floral symbol. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, the rose becomes a symbol of Christ, who is described as “the Rose in which the Word became incarnate” (Paradiso 23, 73). The beauty of the rose has long been linked with the beauty of song, primarily through the association between nightingale and rose, which was said to have received its color from the blood of the nightingale.
ARTHUR RACKHAM
Kai and Gerda enjoy their rooftop meeting place, which represents an island of greenery in an urban setting. Gerda is shown here with a book, even though it is she who will liberate Kai from the icy spell of Reason.
10. the best peepholes you can imagine. The copper coins that create spy-holes on the frozen windowpanes are a reminder that heat and warmth have the power to defeat cold and frost. Note also the contrast that follows between summer and winter, with the one season associated with the empowering freedom of a single leap and the other marked by hurdles in the form of “lots of steps.” Sight and visual pleasure are emphasized throughout the story, and the theme of vision is introduced early on through the peepholes.
11. Gerda. Edvard Collin, the son of Andersen’s benefactor Jonas Collin, had a daughter named Gerda, who died at the age of four. In a letter to Henriette Collin, Andersen wrote: “Yesterday, when I left Kalundborg on the steamship Gerda, I thought about Kai and Gerda, and about the child after whom the fairy tale’s Gerda was named.”
12. “The white bees are swarming out there,” Grandmother said. It is not clear whether “Grandmother” is related to Kai or to Gerda. That the parents of the two children are mentioned only in connection with the window boxes and never clearly differentiated leads to a sense of kinship between Kai and Gerda, one reinforced by the fact that the only woman present at home seems to be grandmother to both.
13. “Is the Snow Queen able to come into houses?” The contrasts between heat and cold, summer and winter, sun and moon, flora and frost, city and garden are expanded here to include inside and outside. The Snow Queen can thrive only out-of-doors, and for that reason, warm interior spaces provide a safe zone for humans.
14. it turned into a woman. In The Fairy Tale of My Life, Andersen describes being haunted by the image of a snow maiden who is an agent of death: “I recollected that, in the winter before, when our window-panes were frozen, my father pointed to them and showed us a figure like that of a maiden with outstretched arms. ‘She is come to fetch me,’ he said in jest. And now, while he was lying there on the bed, dead, my mother remembered this, and I thought about it as well” (14). Andersen’s mother had also referred to the ice maiden as the figure who had carried her husband to his death. Sixteen years after writing “The Snow Queen,” Andersen published a story called “The Ice Maiden,” which tells of a supernatural creature who inhabits Swiss lakes and glaciers and kisses people to death. As in “The Snow Queen,” death is linked with seductive beauty and erotic desire.
15. Just then it seemed as if a huge bird was flying past the window. It is not clear whether the presence of the bird offers a rational explanation for Kai’s vision of the Snow Queen or whether the bird foreshadows Kai’s flight with the Snow Queen. In Andersen’s world, the boundaries between human and animal sometimes seem as porous as in the pagan world of Ovid, where humans are constantly shifting shape.
16. Down in the valley. The verse comes from a popular hymn, still sung in Denmark at Christmas, by H. A. Brorson, called “The Loveliest Rose.”
17. God’s clear sunshine. Sunshine, warmth, clarity, and divine powers are set in opposition to ice, chill, bewilderment, and diabolical forces.
18. “Ouch! Something just stung my heart! And now there’s something in my eye too!” The effect of the glass splinter is felt at once and leads to a sudden metamorphosis that critics have connected with a compressed form of the physical and mental transformations of growing up. Kai can no longer tolerate childish activities, and his behavior takes a deeply cynical turn. One critic finds that Kai acts “like the typical adolescent”—a boy in crisis who must differentiate himself from women and consolidate his male identity. “The effect of the splinters,” Wolfgang Lederer writes, “appears to be that they bring about the onset of a perfectly normal, if disagreeable adolescent phase. To that extent they can hardly be considered detrimental. But we do recall that the splinters are to represent sinfulness; in what manner adolescent withdrawal into intellectuality may be a sin is not at all clear” (Lederer, 27–28). In his autobiography A Sort of Life (1971), the novelist Graham Greene famously declared: “There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer.” He was very likely drawing on Andersen’s “Snow Queen” to explain the emotional distance writers establish to real-life sorrows and tragedies.
19. “That rose over there has been chewed up by a worm!” Kai cannot see the rose itself, only its flaws, which are magnified by the splinter in his eye. For him, the inorganic, mathematical beauty of the snow “flowers” becomes far more appealing than the flawed beauty of real flowers.
20. leaving dear little Gerda all alone. Kai’s change in perception is followed by an effort to separate himself from Gerda, then from the grandmother, both of whom represent not just femininity but also the domestic and local. The Snow Queen, by contrast, is an exotic regal presence linked with the power of logic, reason, and calculation. Francis Spufford points out that “The S
now Queen is the inverse of Gerda; her sterility, her intellect, her icy composure, all take their force from being reversals of conventional female qualities. It is mythically apt that her roles as antimother and anti-wife should be vested in the lineaments of beauty, all emptied to white: white furs, white hair, white skin” (Spufford, 141). The word “alone” appears here for the first time, introducing the double notion of the solitary nature of Gerda’s quest and the solitude of Kai’s experience in the realm of the Snow Queen.
21. with a large magnifying glass. Mirrors, glass, magnifying glasses, and windowpanes form a symbolic nexus of hard, sometimes transparent substances that seem to heighten understanding and consciousness but in fact also impede it. They will, of course, be connected with the ice, snow, snowflakes, and other crystalline substances of arresting beauty but sinister power.
22. all he could remember were his multiplication tables. Kai is drawn into an ice-cold realm of mathematical reasoning that stands in direct opposition to a domestic world of warmth in which prayer and passion perform small miracles.
23. It was the Snow Queen. In Norse mythology, Niflheim (Mistland) is the realm of ice and cold and constitutes the resting place for those who have died of old age or illness rather than of wounds from the battlefield. It represents the land of the dead, a frigid Nordic counterpart to the fire and brimstone hell of the church fathers. It is ruled over by Hel, Queen of Death, a figure whose kinship with Mother Holle of German folklore is unmistakable. Mother Holle may be less imposing and seductive, but she too brings the winter season when she shakes her comforter to cover the earth with snow. The Snow Queen has clear connections with these Nordic and Germanic figures of death, although she has none of their redemptive qualities.