Here, the idea for the premise of The Snow Queen is clearly sketched, but then, that time, it did not yield anything more. On the 5th of December 1844, he writes in his diary: "Writing The Snow Queen." Three days later, he records: "Written The Snow Queen; read it and 'The Christmas Tree' aloud at Fräulein Bülow's. Finished both fairytales." The book Nye Eventyr (New Adventures/Fairytales) containing both these Yuletide stories was released on the 21st of December the same year. To Ingemann he writes in January 1845: "My latest adventure tale, The Snow Queen, has been a pleasure to write down; it imposed itself upon my thoughts so intensely that the words just flowed forth on the paper."
In The Snow Queen there is no clear discerning line between the real world and the supernatural world. The title character herself is at first introduced as the stuff of legends, but she takes human form and spirits Kai away to the realm of cold reason because the glass shard from the demonic mirror has made him apt to live there. In his last moment of fear, before the kiss of the Snow Queen makes him forget everything, he tries to say his prayers or scream for help, but can only remember the nine times table.
Gerda has preserved all the innocence and warmth that Kai has lost, and, even though she can be of course delayed on her quest (by the old lady in the straw hat, by the confusion with the young prince, by the wild and obstinate robber maiden), nothing can stop her from carrying on until she has found him. After the male reindeer has taken her out of the woods (literally and metaphorically), she arrives in the Finmark where she seeks up the wise woman who is so wise that she can tie up all the winds on Earth into a knotted thread and make a potion that will give Gerda the strength of an army. But even that is not enough, as the Finnwoman explains to the reindeer:
"I cannot give her more power than she has already! Don't you see how powerful she is? Don't you see how people and animals have served her, how she has made it on her own two feet walking unscathed through fire and ice across the wide world? We can't tell her what power she harbours in her heart -- it consists of the fact that she is pure and innocent. If she herself cannot reach the Snow Queen's fortress and take out the glass shards from Kai's heart and eyes, we cannot help her either!"
At last Gerda arrives at the Snow Queen's palace, where the walls are made out of swirling snow, and the windowpanes and doors out of ice quenched by the piercing north winds. In the very centre of the endless throne room, before the throne of ice, there is a frozen pool, and there is Kai walking about and carrying some sharp, flat ice pieces, eagerly employed with solving the "Ice Puzzle of Reason," yet unable to arrange the ice shards so that they form a sun with the word ETERNITY written on it. "If you can make this shape and this word, only then you shall be once more your own lord and master of yourself; and I shall give you the whole wide world and a pair of brand new ice skates!" Gerda's tears of joy defrost the lump of ice in Kai's heart and dissolve the little glass shards, and Kai's own tears make the liquified shards to be washed out through his eyes. So great is their elation that even the glass shards dance out of sheer joy and arrange themselves in that very shape, spelling out that very word, that Kai was not able to lay down.
Brorson's carol Den yndigste rose er funden echoes as a leitmotif throughout the whole original novella, whose moral is in these words from the Gospel of Matthew: "Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven."
In spite of Andersen's undogmatic Lutheran Christianity, there was a dogma that he accepted without reserves: precisely the immortality of the soul. This thought he has succeeded to give such beautiful and genuine expressions in some of his tales, for example The Little Mermaid or The Snow Queen.
His religious conviction can be summed up in that he believed in the existence of a god, in that one had to behave themselves decently, and in the immortality of the soul. This well-known trinity of divinity, virtue, and immortality, which are the pillars of all theological rationalism, were also the foundations of Andersen's personal faith.
He believed as firmly as could be in some kind of higher plan, and he was so convinced that Providence had completely decided plans for him that he often took the name of the LORD in vain. To Jonas Collin he wrote on the 2nd of October 1825 that he thought "'tis really a pity that the LORD has made me so bad when it comes to learning Latin." And, when he felt himself overwhelmed with elation, he felt a desire to "press the LORD to my heart."
Andersen's religion was primitive and undogmatic; he regarded Jesus Christ as a role model that people were supposed to learn from and do their best to fashion themselves after, and he regarded Nature as the greatest and most spacious of churches. He went himself rarely to church to hear the service. One of the passages that were nearest to his heart was: "Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." That is the original message of The Snow Queen.
Once when Andersen was living at Holsteinborg, he read two of his tales aloud to a dying Frøken Borup, and, when he took his leave of her, he said "See you later." "Yes, up there," she replied. "Maybe," said the author, "and, if you reach that place before me, send my regards to my friends; I have many up there."
The Fairytale Author
H.C. Andersen was a creative artist, and his strength lies to a far higher degree in the original literary tale than in the retelling of old magic tales from folklore. It is therefore a fallacy to compare him to the Grimm brothers or to Asbjørnsen and Moe, something that is not unusual outside Scandinavia.Yet it is equally true that a little number of fairytales, especially some of his very first, are based upon memories of Danish magic tales that he had heard in his childhood. He writes himself about this:
Throughout my childhood, I listened eagerly to adventures (magic tales) and stories, and many of them are still quite alive in my memories; some of them, in my own humble opinion, appear to be Danish from the start, straight from the word of mouth, and I have not found them in any other sources. In my own style have I retold them, allowing myself the licences that I found convenient, and letting fancy refresh the faded colours of the remembered pictures.
This statement concerns the following nine stories: "The Firelighter," "Big Jack and Little Jack," "The Princess and the Pea," The Travelling Companions, The Six Wild Swans, The Garden of Eden, "The Pig-Keeper," "Simple Simon" (AKA "Clod Hans"), and "Hans in Luck." Even into these stories has Andersen put his own personal style.
The greater number of his up to 156 adventures and stories are, however, of his own device. Of those he often wrote these so often quoted words: "they lay in the mind like seeds, and all they needed was a stream, a ray of sun, or a drop of absinthe, and they grew into flowers."
Andersen called his tales eventyr og historier, because he consciously told "adventures/magic tales/fairytales" from "stories;" the criterium being that the former contained supernatural elements, while the latter were completely realistic. Therefore, The Little Mermaid is a fairytale or adventure, while "The Emperor's New Clothes" is a story. But the divisive line is not always so clear, and Andersen himself not always so consequent.
The most unforgettable opening line in the Andersenian corpus is the introduction to The Snow Queen: "All right! Let us begin this story. And when we reach the end we shall know more than we already know, for here's a wicked troll, one of the most evil ones ever!" (The translation used in the Swedish version I translate the Bredsdorff analyses from, a 1980s Swedish version by Bengt Anderberg, renders "trold" as "vidunder")
Of how revolutionary Andersen's subversive, oral style was regarded by his contemporaries, we get an impression upon reading the leading conservative critic of the era, C. Molberg, rant about how the style and spoken form of the magic tale had to be. In 1842, he wrote that the genre had to be "as pure, correct, and cultured as the spirit of the language and its degree of development as the given time of setting requires. Wanting to tell eventyr to children or peasants in one particular style or another, or giving an artificial impression of the peasantry's natural, yet also circumstantial and not always equally successful or clear narrative technique, or in a so-called childish style, can only lead to ruining them in an insipid or incomprehensible fashion. To precisely translate the oral tale into a written medium often implies an incomprehensible and irksome purple prose or laconism; it is the spirit, the national character and completeness of the national stylistic form that have to be preserved; not the flaws and the shapelessness in the narrative style." To sum up in the same critic's words: "There is only one style that has to be used for telling magic tales: the good style or the pure and natural one -- the style that enables all readers, in the right fashion according to their circumstances, to connect to the text as its natural expression."
Even though Andersen is not mentioned by name, there was and is no doubt of whom Molberg is therefore clearly referring to.
In Andersen's fairytales, a queen is naturally not contented with a normal pair of scissors, but owns (like in "The Firelighter") a large pair of golden scissors.
And a fairytale princess does not abide by common social rules. She can perfectly decide to proclaim that she is to marry the one who can speak best for his own cause and not someone who can only stand still and look distinguished -- this occurs in both The Snow Queen and "Simple Simon."
There is a special reason that Andersen still feels so alive to Scandinavian readers, and that is the lack of humour in many translations into English and other languages, that makes foreign adults often unwilling to read his tales.
Even into the most serious sagas there is humour smuggled in secretly. Think only of the two crows -- the wild male and his fiancée, the tame royal pet -- who have the run of the castle grounds and address Gerda in such a cultured and courteous way: "My fiancé has spoken so beautifully about you, Mademoiselle! Your biography, as 'tis called, is quite a moving story, too!" As a reward for helping Gerda, the princess offers the crows the choice to either be free or receive fixed positions as courtiers, with all the leftovers from the kitchen that this entails. "And both crows bowed low and asked for their fixed positions, for they thought of their autumn years and said: 'It would be good indeed to have a nest egg at the end of the day,' in Crowatian." When Gerda resumes her journey in a carriage of pure gold that the princess has offered her on behalf of her quest, she is escorted with company for a while on the road:
The woodland crow, who was newly wedded, tagged along on board for the first three miles. He sat down by her side, for he could not stand riding a carriage backwards; it made him carriage-sick. And his wife stood on the garden gate flapping her wings; she did not tag along because she had a terrible headache, after receiving her fixed position and too much palace fare to eat.
On the way home, when Gerda asks about the fate of the crows, the robber maiden tells the end of their story:
"Yeah, the wild crow is dead! His tame wife is now widowed and walks about with bows of black crêpe tied round her ankles; she laments horribly, but it's all much ado about nothing!"
The Finnwoman, who in Story or Part the Sixth of The Snow Queen says the most decisive and deeply serious things about the power Gerda harbours, is at the same time a comic relief character. When she has received the message that the Sápmi woman has written on a dry salted codfish, and has read this message thrice, "she knew it by heart and dropped the fish into the pot, for it was still edible, and she never let anything go to waste."
Andersen is a master when it comes to what we might as well call humourous platitudes, for instance: "There were a lot of people, and twice as many feet as there were heads." "They travelled by train, in fourth class, which travels as fast as first class." "The General was born the day after his daughter; naturally, earlier than she was born, decades before." "Three princes danced the waltz with her, which means first one of them, then the second, then the third." "Suddenly two will o'wisps came hopping in, the first one quicker than the second, and that was why that one came first." "'Sixth comes before seventh!' said the elven king, for he knew how to count." When Andersen addresses children in many of his tales, he makes an effort not to use words or expressions that might be difficult to understand. He contrives to write about microscopes without using the term itself. He writes "a young student, who was studying to become a vicar," instead of mentioning any "Theology degree." Whenever he occasionally uses a word that maybe children will not know, he makes an effort to explain the term. He says for example about a performer among his leading characters that "he devoted himself to be able to talk through his belly; that is called ventriloquy."
It happens that he uses French words or expressions in dialogues, and, in such cases, this occurs very consciously, with a lot of purpose:
"Superbe! Charmant!" said the court ladies, for all of them spoke French, each one of them worse than the other.
"Prenez garde aux enfants!" said Mr. Owl. "This is nothing for the owlets to hear!"
Another characteristic trait of Andersen's style is his ability to tie abstract concepts to a concrete reality. When the hero of "The Firelighter" has hefted down the third guard dog (the one with eyes like rose windows) to the ground, the tale explains how much gold there is in the treasure chest in a way that children can easily understand: "There would be enough to buy each and every candy cane in each and every sweetshop, and all the toys in each and every toy shop, in this whole wide world!"
Even in other cases there is concretisation of wealth. In The Six Wild Swans it is told that Eliza's older brothers, a half dozen young princes, "wrote on gold-framed blackboards with diamond chalk," and the elven king "had his crown dusted with chalk dust; it was chalk from university blackboards, and that is not easy to get for elves!"
Instead of only writing that the hero's father in "The Flying Saratoga Trunk" is wealthy, Andersen tells us that "he could as well have paved the whole high street, and almost a pair of little backstreets too, with silver coins." The addition of the little backstreets gives an impression of exactitude when it comes to measuring the extent of his fortune.
We hear in The Snow Queen that Kai is very rational, but we hear so much more than that. He himself tells the Snow Queen that he can "do maths in his head, and even with fractions, as well as the size in square miles of every country in Europe and how many inhabitants each country had."
The character of the messages depends of the narrator. In The Snow Queen, the woodland crow begins his conversation with Gerda: "In this kingdom where we presently now are, there lives a princess who is incredibly bright and well-read; one has to say that she is subscribed to all the newspapers that are published across the known world, and she has read all of them; 'tis true that she is so bright that she forgets what's in the papers as soon as she's read them, so clever is she."
Expressions like "everyone," "all people," or "the whole wide world" were too abstract for Andersen, so he often added something that was more concrete. The best example of this is surely the reward that the Snow Queen has promised Kai if he can arrange the ice puzzle pieces right, so that they form a sun with the word ETERNITY written in its centre: "only then you shall be once more your own lord and master of yourself; and I shall give you the whole wide world and a pair of brand new ice skates!" One such quote explains something crucial about Andersen's genius, since behind this expression there is both a sharp humour and a deep understanding about children's thinking. In 1861, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson wrote to Jonas Collin Jr.:
'Tis completely wrong to call what Andersen is writing "fairytales." Those were his first ones, those little completed thingamies that one could fit inside a nutshell, and that one could pull out again and encompass a world with. In these tales, there also reigns a completely fulfilled form that does not seize anything else but the innermost core of the text. But nowadays, since Andersen, often unfairly, has been repressed from the realms of novel, poetry, drama, and philosophical essay, it was only to let all these suppressed shoots spring up like oaks through a ground of rock elsewhere; now he has, Heaven help me, his drama, his novel, his poetry, and his philosophy all present in the fairytales. That these are no longer magic tales is obvious. It's something Andersenian, and thus it does not fit into any literary categorisation... Now this genre is something that knows no limits, whether upwards, downwards, or sideways; neither in its form, and thus something that only the most ingenious nature is able to control...
But all of this unchainedness, that all the forms and all the worlds --tragedy, comedy, lyrism, epic, analysis, song, sermon, quip, the living, the lifeless-- are fused together as in a paradise, make someone shiver in anticipation of his next works! What kind of secret does he take to, what kind of journey must we undertake, and will we succeed or not?
Many of Andersen's tales are diverse.
Some of Andersen's tales were penned within a few days or even hours, while others took ages to write. In 1845, as we have said before, Andersen wrote to Ingemann that the text of The Snow Queen "danced directly upon the paper." It is a fact, incredible as it might sound, that he began to write The Snow Queen, one of his longest tales, on the 5th of December 1844, and that it was released in storybook format (along with "The Christmas Tree") on the 21st of December the same year. The whole novella was written, sent, printed, bound, and published within the lapse of a fortnight!
PS. The Andersen quotes in this article are my own translations straight from the Danish from the original tales and correspondences by Andersen and his Victorian contemporaries. The translations of the remarks and analyses are also of my own device, but via the Swedish, from Elias Bredsdorff.
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