JOHAN DE MYLIUS ON "THE ICE MAIDEN"

While the Ice Maiden at the start of the story is first and foremost described by her deathly aspect, her self-reliance, and power to seize, hold tight, destroy, and drag down into the abyss, she will later in the story attain another, more supple (and supplent), form of appearance.
When Rudi has met his sweetheart and fiancée Babette, and his desires have therefore been given a new direction, he meets on the way home (the chapter, the fifth one, is titled "On the Way Home,") among the rain fogs up in the peaks, a maiden:
Right by Rudi's side there walked suddenly a young maiden; he had not paid heed to her until she could not be closer to him; she wanted to cross the mountain range as well. Her eyes had a power of their own; one had to see into them, they were so strangely crystal-clear, so deep, bottomless.
She offers Rudi to show him an alternate way, which he yet refuses, because it will lead him "to fall into a crevasse in the ice." She encourages him to give her his hand, so he can help her with their ascent, but that he does not want, he has no need for her help to rise - and he has said himself as well that she will rather make him fall into the glacier crevasse. When he has turned her back upon her and heard her laugh in the blizzard, he knows to himself that she has something to do with the Ice Maiden.
The awakening sexual desire contains in itself both the ascent towards Babette and the downfall into a deathly nature, a perilous sexuality, the temptation from the Alpine maiden.
She appears once more when Rudi, yet another time, is crossing the mountains, home from Babette's. It is when he has discovered that he has a rival, an English gentleman who is courting Babette as well. In Chapter the Twelfth, "The Powers of Evil," it is told that, on his way across the peaks, he feels completely ill and out of himself. Suddenly, he sees before his eyes a newly-built wooden cabin, which he has never beheld before,
and in the door there stood a young maiden; he believed that she was the headmaster's Annette, whom he had once kissed in the dance, but it was not Annette, and yet he had seen her before, maybe somewhere near Grindelwald, on the evening he returned home from the hunting contest in Interlaken.
Jealousy loosens the ties that otherwise restrain Rudi's sexuality, and temptation stands there in flesh and blood before him, with all its certainty and all its peril. It is the maiden from before (from Chapter the Fifth), for she says - quite surely, of the goats which she affirms that she herds up on the mountains - "not a single one do I lose, what is mine remains as mine!" This leads the thoughts directly towards the Ice Maiden, who, in the first chapter, "Little Rudi," said: "Crush, hold tight! The power is mine! [...] He is once more among the humans, he herds the goats on the mountains, climbs upwards, always upwards, away from the others, not from me! He is mine, I shall claim him!"
In the seductive persona of the Alpine maiden or the headmaster's Annette, the Ice Maiden pours out an intoxicating drink for Rudi, who wants to kiss her. But she wants something in exchange, his "engagement ring:"
he drank. Joie de vivre streamed into his blood, and the whole world was his, or so it seemed, why should he worry? Everything exists to enjoy and brighten us! The stream of life is the stream of elation, 'tis torn away with it, lets itself be carried away by it, it is exhilaration! He looked at the young maiden, she was Annette and yet not Annette, as little as she was the troll-like spectral presence, as he had called the one he had met at Grindelwald; the maiden here on these peaks was as fresh as newly-fallen snow, as soft and rounded as an Alpine rose, and as light as a fawn, though, at the end of the day, she was a human like Rudi himself. And he flung his arms around her, looked into her wonderfully crystal-clear eyes, it was for only a second that, explain, relate, put it into words for us - was it spiritual or deathly life that filled him? Was he uplifted or did he plunge down into the deep, killing chasm of ice, deeper and always deeper? He saw the walls of ice like a teal-coloured glass, endless crevasses yawned all around, and the dripping water clinked like a glockenspiel and besides shone so crystal-clear in bluish-white flames. The Ice Maiden gave him a kiss, that ran as an icy shudder down the vertebrae of his spine and into his forehead; he uttered a scream of pain, tore himself away, staggered and fell, and everything turned dark before his eyes, but he opened them again. The powers of evil had played their game.
Gone was the Alpine maiden, gone the sheltering cabin, the water surged down from the eroded rock wall, the snow lay all around; Rudi shuddered with fear, drenched down to the bones, and his ring was gone, the engagement ring which Babette had given him. His shotgun lay on the snow by his side, he took it up, wanted to fire it, it clicked. Ominous clouds hung like the fixed masses of snow in the crevasses; the vertigo was there, in ambush for the helpless prey, and underneath her it rang into the deep crevasse, as if a block had fallen off the rock, crushing and tearing at everything that attempted to stop its fall.
The sexual ecstasy of the instant is described as a downfall into an aimless and lawless sexuality. It is, simultaneously, a fall backwards into the traumatic near-death experience of his childhood. He has fallen home to the Ice Maiden's.
The "supernatural" scenes in the otherwise generally realistic story begin, as we can see from these aforementioned quotes, to create a pattern, a chain of linguistic elements and imagery, a layer of Leitmotive, which lead away from the realistic and into the symbolic layer of the narrative.
The maiden he met near Grindelwald had eyes "so strangely crystal-clear, so deep, bottomless." The same elements return as descriptions of the ice walls of the glacier crevasse that he believes he is sinking down into. A new element is added, the glockenspiel, which sounds up in the mountains like an "Alpen-Echo of the pealing of the church bells" (Chapter the First, "Little Rudi.") But here it is a glockenspiel of droplets dripping down into the abyss in "bluish-white flames," a synaesthesia of sound and colour, that strikes the reader due to its modernity. There is such an expressiveness in the metaphor that it reveals that decisive powers are playing their game.
Thereafter, Rudi will try to fire his gun, but find himself unable. It clicks. And the engagement ring is lost.
The Ice Maiden has seduced him with intoxication and sexual promises, but what he receives is a deathly kiss already before the final deathly kiss. The Ice Maiden, or whoever she might be, seizes him around his upwards-striving strength, but emasculates him, makes his shotgun useless. The kiss shoots through his spinal column and out into his forehead as wild pain, a phenomenon known from several ritual initiations which subjugate sexuality and repress it, letting it sleep into some kind of death.
Rudi's striving has reached its zenith - or its deepest abyss. The story's unfurling forth towards a goal, a kind of Bildungsroman at a smaller scale, is succeeeded by a prelude to the decisive instant, when, in the most literal sense of the expression, it is a matter of rise or fall.
It is the wuthering instant of intoxication - and it is the instant, full of happiness, which Rudi experiences together with Babette out on the island in Lake Geneva, on the eve of their wedding day:
"So much loveliness! So much happiness!" the two young lovers said. "There is nothing more than Earth has to give!" quoth Rudi. "An evening like this is a whole lifetime! For how long I felt my happiness as I feel it now, and thought that, if everything came to an end right now, if I were only to die, 't were to be most happy!"
This is the highest ascent, experienced in a single satisfied instant. And it is at the same time the conclusion, the moment of death.
For that is the instant when Rudi is spirited away by the Ice Maiden - back to the glacier crevasse in which he was born. His external life-story, himself being unaware of it, has been a long attempt to break free from the Ice Maiden, who wants to seize him and take him back to the cleft from which he was born. His life as a chamois hunter and mountaineer is a flight from the death that he was once torn out of.
The series of images that begins with the glacier crevasse and continues with the two encounters up in the mountains with the Ice Maiden in the guise of seductive young human girls concludes with the description of Rudi's death, when he swims out into the lake to fetch the boat, but is frozen through and through in the deathly cold waters, and sinks down to the bottom:
Cold and deep was the clear, bluish-green ice-water from the glaciers of the Alps. Rudi saw down into it, only a single glance, and it was as if he had seen a ring of gold fall, glittering and playing with the light - of his lost engagement ring he thought, and the ring grew bigger, widened out into a dazzling circle, and within in it shone the clear glacier; endless deep crevasses yawned all around,  and the dripping water clinked like a glockenspiel and besides shone so crystal-clear in bluish-white flames. Within an instant, he said what we might say ourselves with many long-winded words. Young huntsmen and young maidens, men and women who had sunk into the crevasses of the glaciers, stood there all alive, with eyes wide open and smiling mouths; and deep beneath them pealed the church bells of sunken villages; the congregations kneeled beneath the archways, icicles created organ pipes, the currents of the rapids were the organists; the Ice Maiden sat on the clear transparent bottom, she rose up towards Rudi, kissed him on the feet, and a deathly chill coursed through his limbs, an electric shock - ice and fire! One cannot tell the difference between these by such a short touch.
"Mine! Mine!" it rang around him and within him. "I kissed you when you were a little one! Then I kissed you upon the mouth! Now I kiss you upon the toes and upon the heels; MINE is the whole of you!
And he had disappeared into the cold, clear waters.
Everything was silent... the bells ceased to peal... the last notes were hushed with the glow of the red evening clouds.
"Mine you are!" it rang in the deep. "Mine you are!" it echoed up to the heights of the skies, towards infinite space.
Lovely it is to fly from love to love, from this Earth up to the Heavens.
A string was broken, a note of sorrow rang, the icy kiss of death vanquished what is due to fade; the prelude ended for the drama of life to begin, the off-key note dissolved into harmony.
Is this what you call a sorrowful story?

Johan de Mylius - Forvandlingens pris: H.C. Andersen og hans eventyr
Translated by Sandra Dermark