THE SNOW QUEEN - REVIEW BY ALTHEA ANN
This was one of my favorite stories as a very young child.
I hadn't re-read this short tale in many many years. My thoughts upon rereading:
Well, it's more sentimental than I remembered, and the tone, especially at the beginning, is almost verging on patronizing in the way it addresses the (presumably young) reader/listener. As a child, I don't think I picked up on that at all. think as a kid I just tuned that stuff out, but took it for granted.
The imagery: still so beautiful! The shards of glass, the snowflakes, the roses... This is why the story has endured so long. It is simply gorgeous.
As a child, I perceived Andersen's Snow Queen as the same character as Jadis, the White Witch in CS Lewis' 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe.' As an adult, well, yeah, it is definitely the same character. Lewis took her, whole cloth, and her sleigh too....
Vivid memory - this story was the first time I'd ever heard of "Lapland," and it seemed like such a fantastic land. Interesting to realize that this portrayal of northern Finland was probably much more 'realistic' & contemporary (if remote) to children reading the story when it was first published, and people there still did depend on reindeer and travel by sleigh...
The robber girl!!!! How on earth did I ever forget about her! Her practical and self-interested, but not quite 'bad' character is simply amazing.
I've seen modern criticism of 'The Snow Queen' accusing it of being an apologist tale for domestic abuse, encouraging women to pursue relationships with men who mistreat them. It is possible to read the Snow Queen as the homewrecker, and Gerda as the good wife who must faithfully pursue her errant husband, represented by Kai, but I don't think Andersen intended that, or that the story actually is that. I think it's more likely that Andersen intended another possible reading: that of an allegory, where both Gerda and Kai are, at times, led astray and forget what is right (Kai due to the shard of glass; Gerda due to the witch's enchantment), but eventually find their way back to the redemption and live in innocence and purity. However, I personally like the simplest and most direct reading: that the story is what it says it is, a narrative of bravery and friendship. That the enchantment on Kai is real, and not his fault, and that Gerda's dedication to her quest, and her achievement, is admirable.
I think that one of Andersen's main intentions here is, clearly, to show women as brave, capable, and self-sufficient. Throughout the story, they keep appearing: First, of course, there's Gerda and her quest to rescue her friend. But there's also the childrens' grandmothers, who are more vivid characters than the childrens' parents; the springtime witch, who keeps her cottage all on her own; the princess, who had no intention of marrying until she met a man who appreciated her intellect; the knife-wielding bandit girl, whose mother seems to be the leader of the robbers; & the Lapp woman, who gives Gerda help & directions on her quest, to meet a Finnmarkish wise woman. Of course, the Snow Queen herself wields her power alone...
The biggest takeaway I believe I had from this story, though, is from the very beginning. The imps' twisted mirror which shows everything as ugly and rotten, and its shard of glass that, in someone's eye or heart, does the same, took hold for me in the idea that the world is the world, but that how we look at it can be an option. We can focus on the mean and the corrupt in all things - or we can look for the beauty and the redeeming qualities of the world. It is up to us. (We don't have to see everything as boiled spinach or vast barren wastelands of decay.) ;-)
Along with the evocative imagery of winter, there is a very emotional and spiritual love story. Kai and Gerda share a strong emotional bond, but that bond is damaged by Kai's infection with the slivers from the shattered evil mirror. His eye and his heart are pricked, and it changes the way he sees the world, and makes his loving heart grow cold towards poor Gerda. But Gerda doesn't give up on him. When the Snow Queen steals away Kai, she goes searching for him, going on quite an odyssey and meeting some very unusual people along the way. But she never gives up on him.
The lesson of sacrificial love never gets old. That kind of love can melt the fiercest frozen heart and claim back those who are lost. I loved rereading this, and the illustrations I had in my version was a lovely adjunct.
If one has not ever read this book, I highly recommend it.
Many thanks for the opportunity to revisit this tale. As always, my opinions are solely my own.
REVIEW BY BIONIC JEAN
I remember being bored when I read this story as a child, and reading it again now, nothing has really changed for me. The Snow Queen starts out interestingly enough, and the imagery throughout is good, but as for the actual storyline... It is very long and discursive, and as in many fairy tales, the events seem very random, and the reader tends to lose the main thread. It is the sort of story which could make a marvellous stage production, with all its imaginative possibilities, or a film or TV adaptation - as indeed it has, many times over the years. There are also many beautifully illustrated versions of the tale.
The Snow Queen, or "Snedronningen", by Hans Christian Andersen, is one of his longest original fairy tales, which was first published in 1844. At its core it is about the struggle between good and evil as experienced by two children, a girl, Gerda and her friend, a boy, KaI. It is told in seven parts, or chapters:
1. The Mirror and the Splinters
2. A Little Boy and a Little Girl
3. The Old Woman's Flower Garden
4. A Prince and a Princess
5. The Little Robber Girl
6. The Lapp Woman and the Finn Woman
7. What Happened at the Snow Queen's Palace and What Happened After That
The first part starts in Hans Christian Andersen's delightfully chatty way,
"Listen! This is the beginning. And when we get to the end we shall know more than we do now."
The storyteller tells of an evil troll, who made a magic mirror which distorted the appearance of everything it reflected. It would never reflect the good and beautiful aspects of people and things, but instead magnify their bad and ugly aspects. The villain thinks this is a great joke. He is the headmaster at a school for demons, who all decide to carry the mirror into heaven with the idea of making fun of the angels or gods... But,
"the mirror shook and grinned, and grinned and shook" until eventually all the demons dropped it, and it broke into "a million billion splinters", some no bigger than a grain of sand.
These glass splinters "blew everywhere, getting into people's eyes, and making them see everything ugly and twisted. Some splinters even got into people's hearts and that was awful, because their hearts became like blocks of ice."
The first part is quite a short chapter, explaining the underlying moral thread which is to run throughout the story. The next chapter introduces the two characters, the little boy Kai, and the little girl Gerda. They live next door to each other in a large but provincial town, in the garrets of buildings which have adjoining roofs. They play among the window boxes there, which are full of herbs and roses. It was easy to get from Gerda's to Kai's home, just by stepping over the gutters of each building. The two become great friends.
Kai's grandmother tells them stories about the Snow Queen, who is ruler over the "snow bees" — snowflakes that look like bees. Just as honeybees have a queen, so do the snow bees. So wherever the snowflakes clustered the most, there you would find the Snow Queen. Looking out of his frosted window one winter's day, Kai sees the Snow Queen, who beckons to him to come with her. Kai is frightened and draws back from the window.
The days pass and there is a thaw. But one day in Spring, something happens,
"Oh! What's that pain in my heart! And oh! What's that in my eye?"
Even though the child blinks and thinks it has gone, we can tell from their behaviour that one of the glass splinters from the evil troll's mirror has become lodged. The child becomes cruel and aggressive, and the other cannot understand the change in their friend, who teased them, "kicked the window box, and tore off the rose blooms", made fun of the kind grandmother, and did all sorts of horrid things. Everything seemed distorted and ugly to this enchanted child now, and the only interesting and beautiful things, are the tiny snowflakes to be seen through a magnifying glass.
While Kai and Gerda are playing with their sleds in the snow, the Snow Queen appears as a woman in a white fur coat, driving a curious white sleigh carriage. The enchanted child is tempted to go back with the Snow Queen to their palace.
If this is all beginning to sound familar to you, perhaps it reminds you of C.S. Lewis. The first part of this story, with the adjoining garrets and crossing over the rooftops, was very reminiscent of the first (or prequel) Narnia story, "The Magician's Nephew" At the beginning of that story, the Victorian children are neighbours in a similar type of building, and this aspect is crucial to the story's plot. Then in a similar way, C.S. Lewis clearly took his inspiration for the witch "Jadis" Queen of Charn, (who called herself the "Queen of Narnia") from Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen. The first meeting between Jadis and Edmund, one of the children in "The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" is almost a rerun of Hans Christian Andersen's idea.
Just as C.S. Lewis's stories are clearly moral allegories, this earlier story is also a tale of good and evil. And all the subsequent story follows the child who is under the mirror's spell. It involves an evil sorceress, a clever crow, a pair of doves, a Prince and a Princess, a frightening robber girl, and a captive reindeer. There is a "Mirror of Reason", and a Puzzle. There is a beautiful flower garden, an old Finnish woman and an old Lapp woman. Throughout, the child is determined to rescue the friend, showing loyalty, great courage and tenacity. Eventually the children's adventures are over and the enchantment is dispersed by the power of love. Kai and Gerda make their way back to their home, where they find that everything is just the same, except that they themselves have grown through their experiences.
At the end, the grandmother reads a passage from the Gospel of Matthew,
"Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven",
and Kai and Gerda realise that they were saved by their goodness and innocence. They will always remain children at heart.
This story was originally included in the same book of fairy stories as "The Nightingale" which was a tribrute to Jenny Lind. But in the meantime, Jenny Lind had spurned Hans Christian Andersen's affections. The author subsequently - and rather unfairly - modelled the Snow Queen on what he saw as her icy manner towards him. The Snow Queen is a story of high fantasy, and usually included in most anthologies including works by Hans Christian Andersen; it is considered one of his greatest stories. However it does not really capture my imagination. I am extremely glad though, that he inadvertently provided the inspiration for part of C.S. Lewis's Narnia Chronicles, which I do enjoy enormously.
"I can't give her any more power than she has within her. Don't you feel how strong that is? Humans and beasts are at her service as she makes her way through the wide world on her own two bare feet. But she must not learn of her power from us."
(The Finn woman talking to the reindeer)
DAVID
It's not a particularly thrilling fable - boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back - though really, it's the boy who is lost and the girl who does the getting.
The story starts with an evil hobgoblin (also referred to as a demon) who goes to magic school (why did Rowling not find a way to hook this into her mythology?) and creates a magic mirror which shows "reality" in the harshest, ugliest way possible. It is shattered into a million pieces, and spread around the world, where it becomes smaller mirrors, spectacles, or tiny specks of glass getting caught in peoples' eyes, creating mischief and cold-hearted misunderstanding.
One such shard gets in the eye of a little boy named Kai, who then spurns his childhood sweetheart, Gerda. One day he goes wandering in the woods and is picked up by the Snow Queen. Gerda, convinced that he is not dead, goes on a quest to find him.
There are talking flowers, talking crows, and a not-really-wicked witch, and of course, the Snow Queen herself.
A cute story with perhaps a few too many elements thrown in for the fantasy-minded modern reader, but it would certainly entertain children. Andersen does wrap this tale up with a rather saccharine moral, but it's a story to please those in search of adventuresome girls and magical talking animals.
JAROM
I. LOVE. THIS. STORY.
Yes, this is a fairy tale that I plan to tell my children before I tuck them into bed at night. Holy cow.
This is the tale of a boy and a girl. Simple enough, right? The story hasn't even begun and you know it will be good.
It all begins with a mirror. Made by demons in the pits of the Realm of Hades, this mirror takes everything good that looks into it and makes it the exact opposite. The better of a person you are, the worse it makes you look.
This mirror shatters. Shards fall to the earth, and one of them pierces the heart of a boy. It poisons him, freezes his heart over, and he is spirited away by the mysterious Snow Queen.
The girl, his close friend in childhood, notices his change in behaviour and when he goes missing, she embarks on a quest to save him.
Following several encounters, she finally finds him deep in the Snow Queen's frosted palace, frostbitten and numb to the world.
He doesn't recognize her.
It is here that she realizes just how much he means to her, now that he looks at her with dead eyes.
She can't get him to remember her, so she hugs him and turns to leave.
And the shard of mirror falls out of his heart, and it all suddenly comes rushing back.
He sweeps her off her feet and they live happily ever after, the end :)
Perfect.
This is a fairy tale that puts into perspective the journey. Everyone expects a happily ever after to fall into their lap as soon as they fall in love.
We often overlook the dragons, the orcs, the goblins and imps that lie in the way to everlasting happiness, don't we?
Well folks, love is easily found.
Pure, true love, however, is what remains when the knight sheathes his sword for the last time. After the last bandit surrenders and the troll lies slain, that is when two lovers decide on a happily ever after.
So the million dollar question: is love worth it? Is it worth the fight?
I'm with Hans Christian Andersen: Heavens yes it is!
Great story. Loved it.
MILICA
One day, when the king of all goblins was feeling very good about himself, he created a special mirror. The mirror took everything that was good and beautiful in the world and turned it into bad and ugly, and when things were bad and ugly it did the opposite. When the goblins – the villain’s pupils tried to fly to Heaven, to mock angels, the mirror laughed so much that it slipped from goblins’ hands and shattered into millions of pieces when it hit the ground. Some of those pieces were so small that they could fly all around the world, and every time they got in someone’s eye or their heart, they made that person only see what’s wrong and bad about everything. That’s what happened to Kai.
Kai was a small boy who had spent all his life playing with his best friend Gerda. Shortly after he was struck with the piece of mirror, the Snow Queen came and kidnapped him. Everybody thought that he was lost, everybody except of Gerda. In order to find Kai, with only innocence of a child as her power, Gerda will travel through dangerous places and meet all kinds of people, some good, some bad. But, what will happen when she finally finds him?
The Snow Queen is a story about friendship, the purest kind, about children's innocence, and about love. I think I would have loved it more, had I read it as a child. This way some parts were boring to me, and the final resolution was painfully anticlimactic. Still, it was nice story and I’m glad I read it. This edition contains illustrations, and I found them nice addition to the story.
Glory (reviewer):
How does The Snow Queen relate to Frozen?
I won't go into huge detail over particulars, just name a few things that both film and book share, especially thematically. Both tales carry a theme about love and its many forms (the Andersen tale also includes a strong moral on the smearing of innocence that leads to destruction, and the perils of innocence's opposite -- industrial progress). The different adventures of Gerda all represent a progression of love, of possession. The old lady who wanted to hoarde her, the Princess who thought love was choosing a man who was handsome and talked well, the robber maiden who captured her pets for her own amusement. And then there is Gerda, a legion of angels in her breath, Prayer on her lips, a power within her worth more than a dozen men and lasts longer than all the creations of humanity: true love.
That's where this little tale threads to the Disney film that claims origin to its story. Anna and Elsa's love are as Gerda and Kai's. Their childhood of fun is turned to separation when winter comes, with Anna (Gerda) only able to see her sibling (in blood or in spirit) through a small peephole of a window, or a keyhole. Anna meets many people on her adventure and on the journey to locate her sibling, all of them representing love in its different forms: Hans, like the Princess of the tale, is almost shallow in his view of love, "true love" found so quickly and from nothing more than a day's meeting and a quick-witted word. The stone trolls are unconventional, rude, unlikeable, like the robbers Gerda meets along the way. Yet like the robber maiden and her mother, the trolls have a "pure love" within their clan. Olaf the snowman is the pure representation of a child's love and innocence, like Gerda is in Andersen's tale. Kristoff is the representation of a pure romantic love, which was not quite represented in the original tale, but acts as a foil to the Hans romance.
There is a reindeer, a homely house that is warm and gives her supplies against the cold, living snow creatures that defend the Snow Queen's home, a blizzard-swept finale on a frozen lake, and, of course, the expression of love that thawed little Kai's frozen heart and Elsa's cold soul. And as with the love of Gerda and Kai, so with Anna and Elsa:
"and wherever they went, the winds ceased raging, and the sun burst forth."
Brandyn:
Suprised by the evil elements in the story! For instance the kidnapping, the robbers and the little girl robber who threatened to kill! Full of danger and mystery and bad characters. We were wanting resolve with the snow queen but the end left it up to our own imagination...
Drew Graham:
Little Kai and little Gerda were best friends who lived just a rooftop-jump away from each other. When a shard of a mischievous demon's viciously cursed mirror falls into Kai's eye and heart, he is soon whisked away by the Snow Queen to her icy domain, and it's up to Gerda to go on a journey to find him and bring him home.
Ah yes, I've finally reached the most recent Disney release in my source material read-through. This is a story I knew well as a kid, but I think I'd forgotten most of it over the years, so it was nice to read this faithful retelling. I'm of two minds about this story: On one hand I think it's beautiful and melancholy and even fairly epic, but on the other hand it meanders and has a lot of filler and sometimes just makes no sense. The story itself is fairly simple, but it gets distracted along the way by long-winded flowers sharing irrelevant stories, a red herring prince and princess, and of course the perhaps-homicidal robber-girl. But I don't know, maybe it's all some deep symbolic thing and I just don't get it. In any case, I love how it's wintry and cozy at the same time, and how the seasons are such a big part of the storytelling, and even though Gerda and Kai (and most of all the Snow Queen herself, who appears in basically TWO scenes and says and does almost nothing) aren't the most developed of characters, their relationship feels like something worth trekking to the chilly north to save. Maybe the Snow Queen isn't the most dynamic or threatening villain ever, but maybe that's the point... the danger of the snow and cold is well-established, and really the whole mess started with that little demon in the first place. Angela Barrett's illustrations in this edition were pretty lovely, though I think there could have been a few more of them.
(Also of note, apparently this is also the only fairy tale that has only female principal characters, but I really don't think HCA was trying to say something when he made that decision... I think that's just how this story happens to play out.)
Regarding Disney's interpretation, this is definitely one of the loosest adaptation jobs they've done. They took one part of the premise of this story, adjusted it almost beyond recognition, and then wrote their own completely different story around it. I know they've always taken liberties, but Frozen is so beyond recognition as based on this story that it almost seems like a joke to say the movie's based on it. Don't get me wrong, I liked Frozen okay (I mean... OKAY), but when you consider their original treatment and some of the concept art they did, which aligned a lot more closely to the actual story of the Snow Queen, it feels kind of like a wasted opportunity. Oh well, at least we have access to some of that stunning artwork.
Hans Christian Andersen's tribute to all seasons but mostly winter is wonderful reading for this time of year. At its heart it's a little bit scattered and doesn't always make sense as a story, but the themes and imagery are interesting and evocative. The illustrations by Angela Barrett complemented the translated text nicely, and I was glad to refamiliarize myself with this favorite fairy tale (which bears almost zero resemblance to a certain recent cinematic adaptation, alas).
