There is actually a lot of Romantic literature in H.C. Andersen's tales. He head read Hoffmann, Tieck, Jean Paul and Clemens Brentano, all of these. The German Romantics had showed the way in a renovation of the fairytale, based upon the commedie dell'arte of Italian Carlo Gozzi, and, on his return home from Italy in 1834, Andersen saw the Children's Ballet in Vienna, from which he might have taken inspiration for, among others, "The Shepherdess and the Chimney-Sweep" (and other object-centric fairytales). In Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen, there is an Arthurian allegory about Arcturus and Djinnistan (the land of genies), of how the reign of prose and reason is vanquished, and of how poetry and fantasy are set free. Arcturus' crystal palace can be found again in "The Snow Queen."
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THE EXPANSE OF FAIRYTALE
The magic tale or fairytale, as exploited by H.C. Andersen, is a genre in constant development and expansion. It is striking, how diverse his contributions are to one another. The author is inspired by many other narrative formats, especially those whose reach is limited: anecdotes ("The Princess and the Pea"), fables ("The Ugly Duckling" and many other animal tales), legends (already "The Undead," of 1830), parables ("The Daisy and the Skylark"), realistic tales ("The Naughty Boy," "In the Nursery,") and even short novels ("The Snow Queen," "The Ice Maiden"). The travelogue A Poet's Bazaar resembles actually something like an Andersenian fairytale collection: it is a brightly-coloured, diverse mosaic of small tales, a large quantity of various kinds of short fiction.
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There are many pairs of these fairytales which contrast with one another. "The Snow Queen," of 1844, and "The Ice Maiden," of 1862, have been mentioned before. One can already infer from their titles that they are related. In spite of clear similarities, these two tales are quite different from one another. Both of them have sprung from a traumatic experience which the author had at age eleven. His father lay on his deathbed, half dead of a lung disease (either consumption or pneumonia), and his mother explained: "The Ice Maiden has taken him away!" Both tales depict a journey of life through many stages. Good and evil are in constant conflict, and the whole universe, from heaven to hell, plays a part. Both protagonists, resilient faithful Gerda and daring Rudi, defy the ice, the cold, and the power of death. Gerda succeeds in freeing her beloved Kai from the underworld realm of the Snow Queen. Amor vincit omnia. Rudi, on the other hand, becomes the Ice Maiden's prey. Therefore, he is torn away apart from Babette immediately before their wedding can take place. It comes off as irrational and meaningless. - Both in his life and in his works, Andersen frequently returns to the thought of death, a theme that literary authors will first intensely explore about one hundred years later, in the second half of the twentieth century.
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Andersen takes inspiration from the folktale in all of its forms. The magic tale with its mysterious and magical world can be found in, for instance, "The Travelling Companions" (1835) and "The Snow Queen" (1844). Fabliaux, satirical tales, can be found in "Little Klaus and Big Klaus" (1835) and "Hans in Luck" (1861). But also the fable -the didactic and/or moral anecdote with animal characters, that is particularly known from the ancient world and from Grand Siècle France- is employed by Andersen. "The Jumpers" (1845) is an example that shows, at the same time, how Andersen mildens the fable's dry, rational style by adding to the mix elements of the magic tale (the king whill give the princess as a prize to the jumper who jumps the best). In other cases, we see Andersen employ the parable as a genre, ie the story which, taken as a metaphor, functions as the illustration of an idea. "The Buckwheat" (1842) illustrates, for instance, pride before a fall; "The Bell," the relationship between natural science and artistic creation as pathways for seeking the truth.
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During the 1830s and 1840s, there follows a series of introspective fairytales, which, on one hand, deal with the problematic of the self as a splitting, and, on the other hand, by diverse means try to postulate a redemption, a healing of this splitting. These are tales like "The Little Mermaid" (1837), "The Nightingale" (1843), "The Ugly Duckling" (1843), "The Snow Queen" (1844), and "The Bell" (1845). It is mandatory for all of them that redemption remains a postulate, just liike in "The Ugly Duckling." Although these are some of Andersen's best fairytales, this fact has to do with that the obligation of redemption in that case grows out of their self-problematic themes, so that it reaches so deep that it becomes unbearable.
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Josefine Ottesen writes, with Isblomsten, upon Andersen's "Snow Queen" (of 1844). A comparison of the two would, in this context (a short article) be too extensive. (Basically, Cornelia Hale is frozenhearted and spirited away by a Snow Queen to her magical land/secondary world of permafrost as her adoptive daughter and heir, in a parallel to Kai; while Cornelia's teammates have to travel to that realm, once an idyllic realm of eternal springtime, and free both the land and Cornelia by vanquishing the Snow Queen). This is only to name that the books (the W.I.T.C.H. novels) drink from the literary heritage and engage in dialogue with earlier works. According to Anna Karlskov Skyggebjerg, it is part of the genre conventions for the fantastic narrative and the fantasy genre to engage in dialogue with, or write upon, already existing works and drink from the literary heritage. Unlike most mainstream serialised middle-grade fiction, which is often characterised by a simple writing style and without literary ambitions, the W.I.T.C.H. novels stand apart from their predecessors because most of the books are stylistic works of fine art. That the books engage in dialogue with H.C. Andersen's fairytales is, in the meantime, not an aesthetic quality per se, but more of an expression of the genre's use and reuse of established patterns and genres.
In terms of genre, the W.I.T.C.H. novels are written into the fantasy genre, yet Josefine Ottesen's Isblomsten and Den gyldne kilde lean more towards the fairytale tradition than towards the fantasy genre, and the genre conventions are defied less in her books, because there are fewer exemples of playing with the genre.
Annette Øster -the Skyggebjerg article she names is "Tingseventyret som genre og litteraturpædagogisk mulighed" -
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There have been written a great quantity of interpretations and analyses in the form of articles, though concentrated around a very limited number of (Andersenian) fairytales. Thus, "The Shadow" was and is the most interpreted (and over-interpreted) of these tales, as well as "The Little Mermaid," "The Snow Queen," "The Bell," and "The Nightingale," which all belong to the most often analysed texts.
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The mother of Thumbelina wants to have her as her own (for sig selv) --expressed in such a way that it implies that she does not have man at home, and does not need one either. She wishes for a child, not a real child, but a "teensy weensy" ("lille bitte") one. Maybe she is one of those mothers who wish for a baby -and then wish that their child should remain always a sweet and heartwarming little baby, that they can care for. Maybe that is the reason why she gets such a diminutive child, only as tall as her thumbs. A little doll, a figurine, that never will leave her side.Thumbelina is the perfect fashion doll. She is fresh out of the box -here, the flower bud-, she can sing, she can row and sleep in her "lovely lacquered nut shell" which she has received for a boat and for a cradle; "violet petals were her mattresses, and rose petals her covers."
Her mother reminds us not so little of the woman we meet in Story the Third of "The Snow Queen." The Third Story bears the subtitle "The Flowering Garden of the Old Lady who Could Conjure." Little Gerda is here taken as a possession by the affable titular old lady, who does not want to let her go. "Such a sweet little maiden have I really been longing for," she says, and then she enchants the rose-bushes to disappear under ground, lest Gerda should ever chance to think of Kai and carry on on her quest for him. She wants to hold little Gerda all to herself, in an eternal childhood.
Thumbelina's mother is a caregiver of the same kind, of those who want to keep their child as a plaything of theirs and do not want to let them go. She has no need for a human child, that will grow up and carry on with a life of their own. She wants a teensy-weesy child, that never grows any bigger, and that thus, at the same time, is a teensy-weensy adult of foetal appearance.
Maybe this is why Thumbelina is born without wings! For that is the other quirk, or attention-grabbing detail of the story. A pixie has, in anyone's mind's eye, got wings on their back.
Pixies like Tinker Bell or the Flower Fairies have wings, but Thumbelina has none. In the nighttime, she lies in her lacquered nut shell cradle; in the daytime, she plays in the kitchen table, where her mother has filled a deep basin with water and lets Thumbelina sit in her nut shell, so that she can sail from one side of the "lake" to the other - and back again. She cannot, in other words, reach any other place on her own. She is in a little "lovely" prison, that the mother has made for her fashion doll.
Yet Thumbelina is ostensibly satisfied with being there, where she is. We never hear anything of her longing for somewhere over the rainbow, feeling bored, or having anything against her mother or the existence in which the latter keeps her imprisoned. The only sign of the fact that it really is an imprisonment, just like Gerda's at the witching old lady's in the Third Story, are the intense limitations in her everyday, as well as the eye-catching fact that she does not have any wings.
Thumbelina nevertheless flies the coop, but actually against her will. Like fashion dolls in all their sugar-sweet pink femininity are as good as asexual, Thumbelina, in spite of having come from a stamen in the flower bud, is deprived of the desire and the possibility of becoming an adult woman. She cannot fly. She cannot fly away from this lady, who is not a real mother, but related to the old lady who enchanted the rose-bushes away, for Gerda not to dare to think of love.
But then there comes someone or something from the outside world (the frogs), and whisks her away, out into the wide world, where great perils lurk: Thrice, three times (the froglet, a riverside insect, and Mr. Mole), someone will want to have her for a bride, and thrice, three times, she wants not.
There is over Thumbelina's essence as a fairytale character, and over her journey, the same uncertainty that surrounds the hero of "The Firelighter." Her origins are mysterious; her little body, so out of scale with the human world that she is planted into, is not the less remarkable. And, when she finally moves out in the wide world, the past with her mother is torn away from her memory, the ties to childhood are cut (if there have ever been such a childhood and such ties in the first place). She does not long back, she is without a past. But, even if she moves further and further out into the wide world, in the long term this is rather bereft of a resolve on which direction to take. And all the time, without any definite desire or thought of a goal to attain. She literally goes with the flow.
Of all this uncertainty in the events that shape her story, one can actually only say that, first things first, it is a movement away from something. It is a flight.
Thumbelina ends up crossing paths with someone of her own kind, finally accepted for being the one she is, and not a foetus of the desires of another individual. But first, she must go through so dreadfully many trials, ere she ends up being the queen of the realm of flower pixies. And that she ends there, where she ends, resembles to no degree her own desires or longings. Circumstances seize upon her and lead her a long way out into the wide world, to a place that may be "home," but that she has never dreamt of, and where she has never been before. Deliverance does not lie in anything she wants, but in the one she is. It is something uncertain, but not completely uncertain after all.
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From the titles, it could be near-laying to regard "The Ice Maiden" as a later counterpiece to "The Snow Queen," but, even if Andersen, in several context, has used the terms "ice maiden" and "snow queen" in such a fashion that these two names are actually synonymous, referring to the same phenomenon, it happens to be quite little that connects these two great narratives to one another, and that the best thing would be to take them as separate entities.When, in his autobiographies (1841, and 1855), in the depictions of his father's death, he lets his mother say: "The Ice Maiden has taken him," this is not the seed to the story of the Ice Maiden, but, seen from the context, completely unambiguously, an inspiration for "The Snow Queen:" a female figure, which is seen in the ice-flowers upon the windowpane, and that "takes," ie spirits away, a person, in the fairytale little Kai, in the autobiography the father.
Andersen's first poemary (1830) contained the ballad "The Snow Queen," whose sinister female figure quite obviously, like her fairytale counterpart, is "riding a cloud so black / without looking back," but who, otherwise, to a higher degree, is a first draft for the later Ice Maiden. The common ground between the villainess of that novella and the Snow Queen of the poem is that, with lethal results, both of them intrude into an engagement story, by "taking" the young man, right as he is to become one with the bride.
The 1830 Snow Queen ballad itself has roots back to the folk songs about elven maidens who capture the knight on his way to his fiancée (Herr Olof, Herr Byrting...).
In this chorus of themes and motifs, a special prominence is given to the relationship between eros and thánatos, which rises to the foreground as the central theme of the tale, as a motif of destiny and a life theme. A lethal life theme.
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Quite similar characters (to Johannes, the Tobias character in "The Travelling Companions") we have in Elisa of "The Six Wild Swans," who is so pious, so pious, that the hymnal can tell the breeze that turns its pages that she is more pious than the hymnal itself -- and Gerda in "The Snow Queen," who des not need to get a magic potion from the Finmark woman to vanquish the Snow Queen, for, as the wise crone herself tells the reindeer:"I cannot give her any greater power than she has already! Don't you see how great it is? Don't you see, how people and animals have to serve her, how she has made it on her own two feet so far away into the wide world? She does not need to know of her power from us, it lies within her heart, it lies within her being a sweet innocent child."
All these characters are, thus, the incarnation of the fundamental, naive goodness itself, a trust in the world and in the good guidance of providence. And it there is nothing that seriously attacks this goodness, for it is so the world is as well, and it is only ostensibly or rarely that it may prove evil and dreadful and wrong. The goodness of Johannes stands in a pact with higher powers, with piety towards the late father, who is a warrant for that the ostensible evil lets itself be vanquished or, as in the case of the lovely princess, turn it into what it in its heart of hearts and actually all along was at the end of the day: good.
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It deals with the instant of death as an ascent into the light and omnipervadent happiness, and in the dream happiness, that means a fusion not only with every living thing around, but also, and equally importantly, a fusion of the intensity of the present and the experience of growth. In an ejection of inner life, life is drained away. One may therefore also say that reality burns together in that instant - or that it burns to the ground. Life is used and consumed at one discharge.The dream or vision or the inner ascent is not "only" a dream or illusion, while reality is the harsh reality outside. In a wise understanding is it the dream that costs one one's life, not death, which kindles the wavering light of illusion. They do not dream while they ae about to die, but they die of the dream's overwhelming intensity.
The fusion or identity that the three-centuries-old oak and the little match girl experience comes at a price. It is not only a flight away from anything, it is also fulfillment, a movement into something, a movement or a journey or a quest, that comes at a price. Whether it be the little mermaid's desire to rise up towards the Sun, or Elisa's desire (in "The Six Wild Swans") to recreate her lost identity, or the steadfast tin soldier's desire to become one with the equally steadfast ballerina, or Gerda's desire (in "The Snow Queen") to find once more and warm the frozenhearted Kai. Everything comes at a price. So is it in folktale as well. But, for Andersen, the price to pay is often life. And especially when what is being sought is such a limit-shattering experience.
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And they are texts of vastly different kinds. But, by paying some attention, one will see that the over 200 texts so far can be reduced to a more reduced number of fundamental stories, that the others are thus variations upon.One may call these fundamental stories or motifs -the word motif originally meant a motive, ie a catalyst, something that moves or causes events- or one may call them mythemes or myths, according to if they are the seed to a description of events or something that islogem per se, in itself, shaped like an event.
One of the foundational images or mythemes of fairytale literature, which has succeeded in story after story already from the beginning and all the way down to the latest reinstallments, is the one that may be termed transformation or metamorphosis. A long series of Andersenian texts are either stories about metamorphoses or lead towards a point where metamorphosis occurs.
In "The Six Wild Swans," it lies in the premise of the folktale itself. The brothers are turned into swans, and Elisa, who has also been banished from home -leaving home and travelling out into the wide world are two other mythemes in Andersenian literature-, is now seeking the brothers to turn them back into humans. A project which for herself, at the end of the day, turns out to be a transformation process through death and resurrection. Metamorphosis is one with the process of becoming an adult, and it is the power of love that secures the way forwards towards one's real identity.
Both Elisa and Gerda (in "The Snow Queen") venture forth into the wide world to find their missing brother (missing brothers, plural, in Elisa's case) and redeem them through metamorphosis.
The Little Mermaid and the cygnet in "The Ugly Duckling" have themselves as the great metamorphic project, while the tin soldier, the Christmas tree, the snowman, and the dryad are more leaning towards their own desire for metamorphosis, or are tragically metamorphosed against their will, being liquified or reshaped, which can be interpreted both as a fulfillment of identity and as as pure, sheer destruction.
The drive towards metamorphosis that is the catalyst in so many stories and motifs in Andersen's works is a drive forwards towards renewal, new identity, a creation-drive, which has ascent and sublimation as a sign of identity. But it can also turn backwards towards lost identity, towards a state of primordiality and staying in the past for life.
It is a dream, a desire for otherness and identity in one, which may make life-drive and death-drive, eros and thánatos, to resemble one another to the point of confusion.
Johan de Mylius
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Ellen Hillingsø
Winter is a time for reading and being read aloud to. The dark, cold afternoons and evenings invite us to hygge (coziness), company, and good stories. To sit down and read in a warm room, while there is pitch black darkness outside, is nothing more than formidable. Equally good is it, if one can have another person read aloud. I have always been pleased with this experience, because then one can completely surrender, shut one's eyes, and visualise the story in one's mind's eye.
But in my childhood I always got a wee bit tense when it was H.C. Andersen that my parents lowered from the bookcase. For there was always some darkness in these fairytales. The poor protagonists must always go through so many dreadful things before the story came to an end. And some of these characters were even quite unsettling people. I understood and learned, thus, in my early life, that there are always two layers to these stories: an aesthetic and a moral!
The aesthetic lies in the beautiful language and the lovely descriptions of nature, while the moral lies in what every single character shall learn to develop and come any further.
It was in the latter that the unsettling lay, for some of these characters were so thick-headed and understood so little that it nearly led them into dire straits, and some others were so frail and vulnerable that one shuddered at the thought.
But, as an adult, I realised that the unsettling feeling is so intense because it is ourselves whom we read into the stories. We live ourselves fully and completely into "The Little Match Girl," we become her, but we also become "the Snowman," who does not understand that a snowman and a fireplace make a very bad match.
We are, in the fairytales, confronted with everything that we contain that makes us human, from our own frailty to our own arrogance and hubris.
Therefore, it is always a great idea to have someone to talk to after the reading, so one may ponder what it means to be a human or a person, and a self among the others. What it takes, what we shall learn, and that we should try to understand that our greatest strength lies within our own hearts, just like in the case of little Gerda in "The Snow Queen."
I hope that you, dear reader, will receive some bright moments in the darkest times of the year, in the company of H.C. Andersen's complex characters, and that you will enjoy the beautiful descriptions of nature and the lovely illustrations.
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