Hans Christian Andersen’s Apparent Obsession With Feet

Hans Christian Andersen’s Apparent Obsession With Feet

Mari Ness

Read any collection of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales—any—and one thing becomes immediately apparent:
Dude had a really strange, unhealthy obsession with feet.
Especially the feet of little girls.
Especially especially the feet of poverty stricken little girls.
Even in stories that—at least on the surface—have nothing to do with footwear, shoes, or even feet at all.

Seriously. It pops up in tales like “The Red Shoes,” a tale of a little girl who spends—in Andersen’s opinion, at least—entirely too much time thinking about her favourite red dancing shoes, has her feet guillotined off to stop her from a non-stop dancing curse, AND DIES; in tales like “The Little Mermaid,” where a species-changing girl is punished with excessively painful or uncomfortable feet (mind, sixteen years swimming with flickers of a tailfin; no surprise that the transition to terra firma gives her two left feet!) AND DIES after falling in love and wanting something different in life; in tales like “The Maid Who Trod on a Loaf of Bread,” where a maidservant is literally sent to this hell-like underworld for trying to protect her nice shoes from getting muddy (okay, she does this by using a nice loaf of bread meant for her family to eat as a sort of stepping-stone, which, since her mother and siblings are poor and could actually use the bread, is not great, but, that said, given that they can’t afford to buy bread, I think we can take it as a given that her mother also can’t afford to buy the girl nice shoes, which is to say, the attempt to save the shoes? And then she got them as part of her maid's uniform at the toffs' estate? Understandable); and in tales like “The Little Match Girl,” where a little gamine loses her clogs and THEN HER FEET FREEZE OVER AND—NOT TO SHOCK ANYONE—SHE DIES, which might explain why the other little girls were so obsessed with taking care of their feet, Andersen!
Even little Gerda, heroine of The Snow Queen, whose chief antagonist hardly seems to be a foot fetishist, finds herself the proud owner of a lovely pair of winter boots—boots she later loses, leaving her feet frozen in the snow.
I could go on. The point is, I think the ghost of Andersen and I may need to have a talk.
A talk where I, at least, will be wearing some nice shoes.
Red velvet Mary Jane shoes, maybe. With soles made of white bread and a touch of iron.
…Andersen was, granted, the son of a cobbler (who died of consumption), which undoubtedly explains at least part of this obsession with shoes. He also grew up in the days before mass produced factory shoes—that is, at a time when most people, other than members of the aristocracy, made do with at most one pair of clogs or boots per year, if any. This, in part, explains his focus on footwear.
It’s also highly likely that Andersen, all too familiar with poverty, wanted to try to pass at least some of that familiarity on to his readers, many of whom came from the aristocracy, and were at least in a position to dispense charity—and decent shoes. “The Little Match Girl,” for instance, definitely falls into this category: Written as a Christmas story, the Dickensian tale was in part designed to draw attention to the plight of children so poor that they had to turn to “selling matches” in order to eat. I have “selling matches” in quotes because the point, from the children’s point of view, was to pretend to be selling something—outright begging was illegal, selling something on the streets was not. Thus, cheap, handmade “matches” that might or not be capable of starting a fire, but were capable of turning an illegal activity into a marginally acceptable job, of sorts, one that kept the little match girl alive for just a few more years.
Admittedly, the pathos of “The Little Match Girl” is somewhat undercut by its ending, where the little gamine ascends into heaven with her mother and grandmother. Andersen may even have intended this to be read as a happy ending—he was, after all a devout Christian (Lutheran Pietist), and I suspect he wanted to reassure young readers that the little, innocent match girl, who never does anything wrong in the story, would get a happy ending despite, you know, dying. And given the rest of the tale, which strongly hints that the gamine hasn’t just lost her shoes, but is also suffering from starvation and physical abuse, reading this as a happy ending may not be entirely without merit.
Leading, I suppose, to the conclusion that Andersen felt—or is at least suggesting here—that if we really want to help out extremely poor children, the best thing we can do for them is to let them starve and freeze to death, before they can obtain nice shoes that will occupy their thoughts and lead them straight to hell.
Probably not what Andersen actually meant, but given the contrasting fates and punishments of the girls in “The Red Shoes,” “The Maid Who Trod on a Loaf,” and “The Little Match Girl,” a rather hard thought to avoid.
To be fair, however, these tales do feature another major difference: The girls in the first two tales, desperate to save their nice shoes, have been rescued from poverty by kindly wealthy people (Karen is adopted, Ingrid employed as a maid), and are in a sense punished for not being grateful enough for that rescue. The little match girl, in stark contrast, is completely innocent—and spends the entire tale suffering despite that. The only entities who do rescue her are hallucinations, ghosts, and finally, the afterlife.
Here, Andersen is working within a 19th century literary tradition that emphasized the benefits of poverty—sure, it could end up killing you, but by preventing you from getting tempted by such things as, you know, shoes, it makes it easier for you to focus on spiritual things, important for your journey to the afterlife. It should be noted that many 19th century authors did not share this optimistic view on poverty, taking quite the opposite approach, but as someone who shifted from the lower classes to the upper classes thanks to his talents, it is perhaps not surprising to see Andersen taking a somewhat jaundiced view of the ethics, or at least the ethical motivations, of the upper classes and social climbers, whatever footwear they wore.
Which brings me back to the shoes, and feet, and Andersen’s obsession with these.
After all, other fairy tale writers and collectors knew cobblers, and also lived and worked before the age of mass produced factory shoes. Even some of the French salon fairy tale writers—not noted for their interest in or knowledge of the working classes—had periods where they were unable to indulge in fine footwear, or even coarse footwear. Several fairy tales mention or center on cobblers, and footwear is another frequent motif, with Cinderella’s presumably painful glass slippers as the most prominent but hardly the only example.  Fairies frequently don those very useful seven league boots (why Nike and Adidas haven’t gotten right on developing these remains a major mystery) or order protagonists to wear and tear iron soles (Nike and Adidas continuing to avoid these, however, is perfectly understandable).
But no other fairy tale writer or collector had anything near Andersen’s obsession with footwear and frozen feet. It leads me to wonder if Andersen suffered from frostbite as a child (given his precarious financial upbringing, this would not be completely shocking) and never emotionally recovered from this, or if he spent the rest of his life having nightmares about cobblers (also possible) and never emotionally recovered from that, either. Or if he just had a serious, serious thing for feet.
I can’t explain it. But having noticed it, I can’t unnotice it.
And thus, I chose to inflict this observation on you.
You’re welcome.

MARI NESS ON THE LITTLE MERMAID'S PAGE'S COSTUME

Once on the surface, the prince dresses her up as a pageboy, and occasionally kisses her passionately on the forehead and says that he might—he might—just marry her. And then he marries someone else—the girl he thinks saved his life, who is also very beautiful, and, I might note, not dressed up as a pageboy, and who does not ask any pointed questions about the beautiful voiceless girl who has been sleeping at the prince’s door on a velvet cushion. Prince, I feel we need to talk about a few things, including the sleeping arrangements you’ve made for little voiceless foundling girls that you occasionally kiss on the forehead, but we may not have that kind of time.

When the Girl Rescues the Prince

When the Girl Rescues the Prince: Norse Fairy Tale “East of the Sun, West of the Moon”

In the second century AD, the Roman writer Lucius Apuleius Madaurensis interrupted the winding plot of his novel, Metamorphoses, or Asinus Aureus (a title used to distinguish the work from its predecessor, Ovid’s Metamorphoses) to tell the long story of Cupid and Psyche—long enough to fill a good 1/5 of the final, novel-length work. The story tells of a beautiful maiden forced to marry a monster—only to lose him when she tries to discover his real identity.

If this sounds familiar, it should: the story later served as one inspiration for the well-known “Beauty and the Beast,” where a beautiful girl must fall in love with and agree to marry a beast in order to break him from an enchantment. It also helped inspire the rather less well-known Norse “East of the Sun and West of the Moon,” where the beautiful girl marries a beast—and must go on a quest to save him.

I like this story much more.

“East of the Sun, West of the Moon” was collected and published in 1845 by Norwegian folklorists Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Engebretsen Moe, and later collected by Andrew Lang in his The Blue Fairy Book (1889). Their tale beings with a white bear deciding to knock on the door of a poor but large peasant family. So poor that when the bear asks for the youngest daughter, promising to give the family a fortune in return, the maiden climbs up on the back of the polar bear, and heads north.

I must admit that when I first read this story, I missed all of the questionable bits, because I could only focus on one bit: she was getting to ride on a polar bear! Talk about awesome. And something easy enough for Small Me, who rarely even got to ride ponies, to get excited about.

In the far north, the peasant girl and the bear enter an ice cave, finding a castle within. I must admit, I’ve never quite looked at such ice caves the same way again: who knows what they might be hiding, underneath that snow. During the day, the girl explores the palace, and only has to ring a bell for anything she might want.

And every night, a man comes to her in her bed—a man she never sees, always in the darkness.

Eventually, all of this gets lonely, and the girl wants to return home—thinking of her brothers and sisters, not to mention her parents. The bear allows her to leave—as long as she doesn’t talk to her mother en tête-à-tête. That, too, is a twist in the tale. In most versions, mothers are rarely mentioned: the dangers more usually come from the sisters, evil, jealous, concerned, or all three.

In this version, the mother is very definitely on the concern side, convinced that her daughter’s husband is, in fact, a troll, if not Satan himself or at least a sex offender. A possibility that should have occurred to you when he showed up to your house as a talking polar bear, but let us move on. She tells her daughter to light a candle and look at her husband in the dark. Her daughter, having not studied enough classical literature to know what happened to her predecessor Psyche after she does just that, lights the candle, finding a handsome prince.

Who immediately tells her, awakening when three drops of hot wax from the candle fall upon his shirt, that if she had just waited a little longer, they would have been happy, but since she didn’t, he now must marry someone else—and go and live east of the sun and west of the moon.

This seems, to put it mildly, a bit harsh on everyone concerned. Including the someone else, very definitely getting a husband on the rebound, with a still very interested first wife. After all, to repeat, this version, unlike others, features a concerned mother, not evil sisters trying to stir up trouble. Nonetheless, the prince vanishes, leaving the girl, like Psyche, abandoned in the world, her magical palace vanished.

Like Psyche, the girl decides to search for help. This being an explicitly post-Christian version—she does not exactly turn to goddesses for assistance. But she does find three elderly women, who give her magical items, and direct her to the winds of the cardinal directions. The North Wind is able to take her east of the sun and west of the moon. Deliberate or not, it’s a lovely callback to the Cupid and Psyche tale, where Zephyr, the West Wind, first took Psyche to Cupid.

Unlike Psyche, the girl does not have to complete three tasks. She does, however, trade her three magical gifts to the ugly false bride with the long nose, giving her three chances to spend the night with her husband. He, naturally, sleeps through most of this, but on the third night he finally figures out that just maybe his false wife is giving him a few sleeping potions, skips his nightly drink, and tells his first wife that she can save him if she’s willing to do some laundry.

No. Really.

That’s what he says: he has a shirt stained with three drops of candle-wax, and he will insist that he can only marry a woman who can remove the stains.

Trolls, as it happens, are not particularly gifted at laundry—to be fair, this is all way before modern spot removers and washing machines. The girl, however, comes from a poor peasant family who presumably couldn’t afford to replace clothes all that often and therefore grew skilled at handwashing. Also, she has magic on her side. One dip, and the trolls are destroyed.

It’s a remarkably prosaic ending to a story of talking bears, talking winds, and talking… um, trolls. But I suppose it is at least easier than having to descend to the world of the dead, as Psyche does in one of her tasks, or needing to wear out three or seven pairs of iron shoes, as many of the girls in this tale are told they must do before regaining their husbands. In some ways, it’s reassuring to know that a prince can be saved by such common means.

In other ways, of course, the tale remains disturbing: the way that, after having to sacrifice herself for her family, the girl is then blamed by the prince for following her mother’s instructions—and forced to wander the wide world for years, hunting down her husband, and then forced to give up the magical golden items she’s gained on the journey just for a chance to speak to him. (The story does hurriedly tell us that she and the prince do end up with some gold in the end.)

But I can see why the tale so appealed to me as a child, and continues to appeal to me now: the chance to ride a talking bear, the hidden palace beneath the snow, the chance to ride the North Wind to a place that cannot possibly exist, but does, where a prince is trapped by a troll. A prince who needs to be saved by a girl—who, indeed, can only be saved by a girl, and doing something that even not very magical me could do.

No wonder I sought out the other variants of this tale: “The Singing, Springing Skylark,” collected by the Grimms, where the girl marries a lion, not a polar bear, and must follow a trail of blood, and get help from the sun, the moon, and the winds, and trade her magical dress for a chance to speak with the prince; “The Enchanted Pig,” a Romanian tale collected by Andrew Lang, where the girl marries a pig, not a bear, and must wear out three pairs of iron shoes and an iron staff, and rescue her prince with a ladder formed from chicken bones; “The Black Bull of Norroway,” a Scottish variant where the girl almost marries a bull, and can only flee from a valley of glass after iron shoes are nailed to her feet; “The Feather of Finist the Falcon,” a Russian variant where the girl must also wear out iron shoes in order to find her falcon—and her love.

These are brutal tales, yes, but ones that allowed the girls to have adventures, to do the rescuing, and to speak with animals and stars and winds and the sun and the moon. Among my very favorite fairy tales.

Mari Ness lives in central Florida.

MARI NESS: SYMPATHY FOR THE FALSE BRIDES

Anyway. From here, the story abruptly changes directions, as a starving Maleen and her maid leave their country in search of food and shelter. Eventually they end up in the land of Maleen’s still incredibly useless prince, where, after considerable begging, they manage to obtain jobs in the kitchen. Why exactly Maleen doesn’t go to her prince and ask directly for help is a good question, though, to be fair, as noted, the story has already gone to some lengths to focus on just how useless the guy is.
Also, to be fair, the prince has since become engaged to someone else.
This shifts the tale into something else: a false bride story. That is, a tale where the struggling girl or princess finally reaches her prince, only to find him married off, or about to be married off, to a dreadful woman—in some cases, a troll. In most stories, this forces the girl to trade what few belongings she has left to the false bride in the hopes of just getting a conversation with the guy. On her side, the false bride is usually so desperate to get the prince to notice and love her that she agrees to all sorts of wildly inappropriate things just to get the magical dress, or the lovely ring, or whatever magical item might finally—finally—get the prince to fall in love. That is, a magically hellish love triangle, and one that almost inevitably ends poorly for the false bride, who is sometimes evil (or a troll), and sometimes not. Ugly, or pregnant, or just wrong, but not necessarily evil.
The idea, of course, is that the lovely girl must free the prince from the wrong marriage because, gasp, fairy tales forbid that a handsome, charming prince, useless or not, end up married to a—gasp—ugly woman (or troll). There’s something to be said for that, especially in tales like “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” (a story that I promise we’ll get to eventually) where the prince is under an enchantment: I rather like the idea of girls doing the rescuing and getting all of the adventures. At the same time, having to rescue their princes from the monstrous women who ensnared them… well. Hmm. And at times, I can’t help but have some sympathy for the false brides.
As in this case. This particular bride isn’t just ugly, but deeply ashamed of her looks, to the point where she’s terrified of heading to her own wedding, since people will see her. Her solution? Getting a kitchen maid—Maleen—to stand in her place at the wedding. Why a kitchen maid? Well, partly to heighten the dramatic irony of just happening to choose the girl who just happens to be her prince’s first choice of bride, but also presumably because any marriage with that great of a gulf in social rank could be easily invalidated, and also because, also presumably, the ugly bride assumes that no one will look at the girl and go, wait, didn’t I see you in the kitchens? A bit snobbish, sure, but also, at least a few people there presumably see all other people as just colorful blurs thanks to a lack of access to prescription lenses.
I’m presuming a lot here, but to be fair, so is the tale. Maleen, however, refuses to presume anything, noting that it’s not exactly her place to pretend to be a king’s bride. The false bride solves this by threatening to kill Maleen, so, off everyone goes, with Maleen singing a little song about nettles to a nettle bush, presumably to cheer everyone up, or at least herself up. She also chats to a little footbridge and to the church door. The prince is understandably a little surprised about this—my understanding (gathered entirely from television coverage of the weddings of real-life European royalty to be all fairy tale and proper about it) is that singing to nettles and chatting with inanimate objects is not part of Royal Wedding Traditions. He’s also a little astonished that his father has somehow found a new bride who looks and sounds almost exactly like his old and apparently dead bride, like “astonished” is probably not the world you should be going for here, Prince Useless, as I’m now going to call you. “Creepy” is the right term.
Anyway, it’s all a bit brutal for Maleen, what with the singing to nettles and having to pretend to be the other woman who is marrying her true love, plus, the prince giving her some jewelry during the ceremony. She hastily removes her fancy clothes, allowing the false bride to join the prince, and I can’t help but think that maybe—just maybe—her prince’s failure to remember that she’s the sort of person who will sing to nettles and be kinda passive-aggressive about how she once needed to eat him in part because he couldn’t break through a wall that she could with a bread knife had something to do with her decision here.
Unfortunately, since Prince Useless wants to know why, exactly, his bride was more interested in talking with nettles, bridges and doors than, say, him, this also puts the false bride in an uncomfortable situation, since as she says—quite understandably—”I don’t talk to nettle plants.” This leads to a comedy of errors with the false bride (heavily veiled) continually jumping up and running out of the room to find out what, exactly, was said to the various objects.
Eveeeeeeeeeeeennnnnnnnnnnntttuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuaaalllllllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyy, even Prince Useless figures out that something is slightly off here—and pulls the veil from the false bride’s face. She explains that she was terrified that people would make fun of her. The prince’s compassionate response to this? To ask her to bring the kitchen maid who took her place to him. Instead, the false bride orders the servants to cut off the kitchen maid’s head. It’s a real threat—the servants are on the edge of obeying until Maleen screams, finally stirring Prince Useless to do something. He comes out, kisses Maid Maleen, and orders the false bride to be executed.
And, well, I can’t help wondering several things about this. Starting with the political implications: yes, given that it’s taken his father a full seven years to find another bride, I have to assume that many, many others agreed with me that Prince Useless was not much of a catch—but at the same time, I think it’s fair to say that in this case, the false bride is probably at least of aristocratic origins, and may have some annoyed family members. And continuing with the personal implications: ok, yes, the false bride did threaten Maleen’s life…
...but otherwise, what, exactly, is she guilty of? In the other false bride tales, the false bride is often guilty of putting the court under some sort of deception. In this one, however, she is initially guilty only of getting engaged to Prince Useless—something that the story explicitly states was the work of his father, not her—and of being so ugly that she’s terrified of being seen in public. Especially since it can be argued that Maleen went to work more or less willingly in the palace kitchens (more or less, since as a princess apparently not trained to do much and shut up in a tower for seven years, her job skills seem limited, and she has few other options). As a kitchenmaid, she is, as the story makes clear, the employee of the false bride. Sure, “pretend to be me at my wedding” is just a touch outside the usual duties of a servant, and “I’ll kill you if you don’t” is more than a trifle overdone—but, still, the false bride is not wrong to expect a servant to more or less obey her—and to expect that the servant will not chatter to nettles, bridges and doors along the way. Is ordering another woman to take her place at a wedding really the best way to handle her insecurities? I’d go with no. But at the same time, this is a false bride that I can’t help but feel a bit of sympathy for, a false bride trapped by her own insecurities and standards of beauty almost as much as Maleen was back in her tower. Just, without a bread knife.
And given that the false bride does end up executed, maybe she was right to feel so insecure. Just a thought.

SUBVERSION IN ANDERSEN'S SNOW QUEEN

Fairytale Subversion: Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”

By the time he sat down to pen “The Snow Queen” in the early 1840s, Hans Christian Andersen had already published two collections of fairy tales, along with several poems that had achieved critical recognition. Fame and fortune still eluded him, however, and would until his fairy tales began to be translated into other languages.

“The Snow Queen” was his most ambitious fairy tale yet, a novella-length work that rivaled some of the early French salon fairy tales for its intricacy. Andersen, inspired by the versions of The One Thousand and One Nights that he’d encountered, worked with their tale-within-a-tale format, carefully and delicately using images and metaphor to explore the contrasts between intellect and love, reality and dream; he also gently critiqued both stories. The result was to be lauded as one of Andersen’s masterpieces.

Its biggest inspiration was the Norwegian fairy tale East of the Sun, West of the Moon (more known in the Anglosphere as its British counterpart The Duke of Norroway). Andersen probably heard a Danish version from his grandmother; he may also have encountered one of the tale’s many written forms.

In it, a Polar Bear promises to make a family rich if he can marry their young daughter. The girl follows the Bear to his enchanted castle in the north. Each night, he joins her in bed, but in the darkness, she never sees him.

As in Beauty and the Beast, the girl misses her family and begs to return home. Her family, who, I might add, were just fine with the whole marry the bear thing, suddenly realize (especially her mother) that this situation might suck since if her husband won’t have the lights on at night, he must—he must!—be a troll! OR, YOU KNOW, THE BEAR YOU ORIGINALLY SENT HER AWAY WITH. I’m not convinced that a troll could be much worse. Anyway,  the girl decides to take a look in the light, waking him up. The good news is, because this is a fairy tale, he’s a handsome prince. The bad news is, since she tried to find this out, the bear prince now must marry a troll princess—unless the girl can journey to that enchanted land, and save him. To add insult to injury, he points out that if she had just endured the current situation for one year, all would have been well. Would it have killed you to tell her this in the first place, bear? Well, since this is a fairy tale, maybe, but still.

Basically, the theme of East of the Sun, West of the Moon/The Duke of Norroway is that life really, genuinely sucks and is extremely unfair: here, the result of obeying her parents (her mother tells her to use the light) and trying, you know, to find out what exactly is in bed with her leads to endless months of wandering around the cold, cold north, even if she does get help from three old women and the winds along the way.

Andersen took this story, with its themes of transformation, sacrifice, long journeys, and unfairness, and chose to twist several elements of it, adding themes of temptation and philosophy and intellect and Christian love and charity.

“The Snow Queen” is told in a series of seven stories. In the first, a troll (in some English translations, a “hobgoblin,” “demon,” or "sorcerer") creates a mirror that distorts beauty. The mirror breaks, sending fragments of its evil glass throughout the world, distorting people’s vision, making them only able to see the worst in everything. The troll laughs—

—and that’s pretty much the last we hear of the troll, setting up a pattern that continues throughout the novella: in this fairy tale, evil can and does go unpunished. It was, perhaps, a reflection of Andersen’s own experiences, and certainly a theme of many of his stories. By 1840, he had witnessed many people getting away with cruel and unkind behavior, and although he was certainly more than willing to punish his own protagonists, even overly punish his own protagonists, he often allowed the monsters of his stories to go unpunished. When they could even be classified as monsters.

The second story shifts to little Kai and Gerda, two young children living in cold attics, who do have a few joys in life: the roses and other flowers that they grow on the roofs of their houses, copper pennies that they can warm on a stove and put on their windows, melting the ice (a lovely touch), and the stories told by Kai’s grandmother. At least some of these details may have been pulled from Andersen’s own memories: he grew up poor, and spent hours listening to the stories told by his grandmother and aunts.

Kai sees the Snow Queen at the window, and shortly afterwards, fragments of the mirror enter his heart and eyes, transforming him from a little boy fascinated with roses and fairytales into a clever, heartless boy who likes to tease people. He abandons Gerda and the joy of listening to stories while huddled near a warm stove to go out and play with the older boys in the snow. He fastens his sled to a larger one that, it turns out, is driven by the Snow Queen. She pulls him into her sled and kisses him on the forehead. He forgets everything, and follows her to the north.

The text rather strongly hints that this is a bit more than your typical journey to visit the fjords. Not just because the Snow Queen is a magical creature of ice and snow, but because the language used to describe the scene suggests that Kai doesn’t just freeze, but freezes to death: he feels that he is sinking into a snow drift and falling to sleep, the exact sensations reported by people who almost froze to death, but were revived in time. Gerda, indeed, initially believes that little Kai must be dead. 19th century writers often used similar language and images to describe the deaths of children, and George MacDonald would later use similar imagery when writing At the Back of the North Wind.

On a metaphorical level, this is Andersen’s suggestion that abandoning love, or even just abandoning stories, is the equivalent of a spiritual death. On a plot level, it’s the first echo of East of the Sun, West of the Moon, where the prince is taken to an enchanted castle—or, if you prefer, to death. Only in this case, Kai is not a prince, but a common boy, and he is not enchanted because of anything that Gerda has done, but by his own actions.

In the third story, with Kai gone, Gerda starts to talk to the sunshine and songbirds (not exactly an indication of a stable mental state), who convince her that Kai is alive. As in East of the Sun, West of the Moon, she decides to follow him, with the slight issue that she has no real idea where to look. She begins by trying to sacrifice her red shoes to the river (Andersen appears to have had a personal problem with colorful shoes), stepping into a boat to do so. The boat soon floats down the river, taking Gerda with it. Given what happens next, it’s possible that Gerda, too, has died by drowning, but the language is rich with sunshine and life, so possibly not. Her first stop: the home of a lonely witch, who feeds Gerda enchanted food in hopes that the little girl will stay.

The witch also has a garden with rather talkative flowers, each of which wants to tell Gerda a story. Gerda’s response is classic: “BUT THAT DOESN’T TELL ME ANYTHING ABOUT KAI!” giving the distinct impression that she’s at a cocktail party where everyone is boring her, in what seems to be an intentional mockery of intellectual parties that bored Andersen to pieces. Perhaps less intentionally, the scene also gives the impression that Gerda is both more than a bit self-centered and dim, not to mention not all that mentally stable—a good setup for what’s about to happen in the next two stories.

In the fourth story, Gerda encounters a pair of crows (a wild male and a tame female), a prince, and a princess (both equally young, good looking, and especially intelligent). Convinced that the prince is Kai, Gerda enters the palace, and his darkened bedroom, to hold up a lamp and look at his face. And here, the fairy tale is twisted: the prince is not Gerda’s eventual husband, but rather a stranger. The story mostly serves to demonstrate again just how quickly Gerda can jump to conclusions—a lot of people wear squeaky boots, Gerda, it’s not exactly proof that any of them happen to be Kai!—but it’s also a neat reversal of the East of the Sun, West of the Moon in other ways: not only is the prince married to his true bride, not the false one, with the protagonist misidentifying the prince, but in this story, rather than abandoning the girl at the beginning of her quest, after letting her spend the night in the prince’s bed (platonically, we are assured, platonically!) the prince and princess help Gerda on her way, giving her a little sled, warm clothing and food for the journey.

Naturally, in the fifth tale she loses pretty much all of this, and the redshirt servants sent along with her, who die so rapidly I had to check to see if they were even there, when she encounters a band of robbers and a cheerful robber girl, who tells Gerda not to worry about the robbers killing her, since she—that is, the robber girl—will do it herself. It’s a rather horrifying encounter, what with the robber girl constantly threatening Gerda and a reindeer with a knife, and a number of mean animals that she keeps as pets, and the robber girl biting her mother (or grandmother, depending on the version), and then insisting that Gerda sleep with her—and that knife. Not to say that anything actually happens between Gerda and the girl, other than Gerda not getting any sleep, but it’s as kinky as this story gets, so let’s mention it.

The next day, the robber girl sends Gerda off to the sixth tale, where she encounters two more old women—for a total of three. All three tend to be considerably less helpful than the old women in East of the Sun, West of the Moon: in Andersen’s version, one woman wants to keep Gerda instead of helping her, one woman can’t help all that much, and the third sends the poor little girl off into the snow without her mittens. Anyway, arguably the best part of this tale is the little details Andersen adds about the way that one of the women, poverty-stricken, writes on dried fish, instead of paper, and the second woman, only a little less poverty-stricken, insists on eating the fish EVEN THOUGH IT HAS INK ON IT, like wow, Gerda thought that sleeping with the knife is bad.

This tale also has my favorite exchange of the entire story:

“….Cannot you give this little maiden something which will make her as strong as twelve men, to overcome the Snow Queen?”

“The strength of twelve men!” said the Finmark woman. “That would be of very little use.”

What does turn out to be of use: saying her prayers, which, in an amazing scene, converts Gerda’s frozen breath into little angels that manage to defeat the living snowflakes that guard the Snow Queen’s palace, arguably the most fantastically lovely metaphor of praying your way through terrible weather ever.

And then finally, in tale seven, Gerda has the chance to save Kai, with the power of her love, her tears, and her prayers finally breaking through the cold rationality that imprisons him, showing him the way to eternity at last. They return home, hand in hand, but not unchanged. Andersen is never clear on exactly how long the two were in the North, but it was long enough for them both to age into young adulthood, short enough that Kai’s grandmother is still alive.

Despite the happy ending, a sense of melancholy lingers over the story, perhaps because of all the constant cold, perhaps because of the ongoing references to death and dying, even in the last few paragraphs of the happy ending, perhaps because the story’s two major antagonists—the demon of the first tale, the Snow Queen of the last six tales—not only don’t die, they’re never even defeated. The Snow Queen—conveniently enough—happens to be away from her castle when Gerda arrives. To give her all due credit, since she does seem to have at least some concern for little Kai’s welfare—keeping him from completely freezing to death, giving him little maths puzzles to do, she might not even be all that displeased to find that Gerda saved him—especially since they leave her castle untouched.

The platonic ending also comes as a bit of a jolt. Given the tale’s constant references to “little Gerda” and “little Kai,” it’s perhaps just as well—a few sentences informing me that they’re adults isn’t really enough to convince me that they’re adults. But apart from the fact that Gerda spends an astonishing part of this story jumping in and out of people’s beds, making me wonder just how much the adult Gerda would hold back from this, “The Snow Queen” is also a fairy tale about the power of love, making it surprising that it doesn’t end in marriage, unlike so many of the fairy tales that helped inspire it.

But I think, for me, the larger issue is that, well, this defeat of reason, of intellectualism by love doesn’t quite manage to ring true. For one thing, several minor characters also motivated by love—some of the flowers, and the characters in their tales, plus the wild crow—end up dead, while the Snow Queen herself, admirer of mathematics and reason, is quite alive. For another thing, as much as Kai is trapped by reason and intellectualism as he studies a puzzle in a frozen palace, Gerda’s journey is filled with its own terrors and traps and disappointments, making it a little tricky for me to embrace Andersen’s message here. And for a third thing, that message is more than a bit mixed in other ways: on the one hand, Andersen wants to tell us that the bits from the mirror that help trap little Kai behind ice and puzzles prevent people from seeing the world clearly. On the other hand, again and again, innocent little Gerda—free of these little bits of glass—fails to see things for what they are. This complexity, of course, helps add weight and depth to the tale, but it also makes it a bit harder for the ending to ring true.

And reading this now, I’m aware that, however much Andersen hated his years at school, however much he resented the intellectuals who dismissed his work, however much he continued to work with the fairy tales of his youth, that education and intellectualism was what eventually brought him the financial stability and fame he craved. He had not, to be fair, gained either as he wrote “The Snow Queen,” which certainly accounts for the overt criticism of rationality, intellectualism, and, well, maths, and he was never to emotionally recover from the trauma of his education, and he had certainly found cruelty and mockery amongst the intellectuals he’d encountered, examples that helped shape his bitter description of Kai’s transformation from sweet, innocent child to cruel prankster and indifferent perfectionist. At the same time, that sophistication and education had helped transform his tales.

But for young readers, “The Snow Queen” does have one compelling factor: it depicts a powerless child triumphing over an adult. Oh, certainly, Gerda gets help along the way. But notably, quite a lot that help comes from marginalized people—a robber maiden, two witches, and two crows. It offers not just a powerful argument that love can and should overcome reason, but the hope that the powerless and the marginalized can triumph. That aspect, the triumph of the powerless, is undoubtedly why generations have continued to read the tale, and why Disney, after several missteps, transformed its core into a story of self-actualization.

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According to the expert opinions of the kids next door, Frozenis not just the best Disney movie ever, but the best movie ever ever ever.

EVER.

Which is one reason why I hesitated to include it in this read-watch: that expert opinion has also led the kids next door to play the English and Spanish soundtracks from Frozen at high volume on a regular basis, and, far worse, sing along with both. By the fifth rendition of “Do You Wanna Build a Snowman/Hazme un muñeco de nieve” during a Florida August, I was ready to hunt down the songwriters and bury them in snowmen myself. Plus, I had the excuse that Frozen, despite a credit that reads “inspired by” Hans Christian Anderson’s The Snow Queen, departs so far from that novella that the film is usually credited as a Disney original.

So skipping Frozen was the original plan—until, that is, I happened to reread The Snow Queen for other reasons, and realized that, in spirit, Frozen may be probably closer to its original source material than anything we’ve seen so far in this reread.

Really.

Disney animators had thought about adapting The Snow Queen as far back as 1937, when it was suggested, along with several other fairy tales, as a potential follow-up to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In many ways, the story—a small girl heads off to the north to try to save her young friend, Kai, captured by the Snow Queen after his heart was pierced by a shard of evil glass—seemed perfect for a Disney adaptation. The original story even had talking animals and flowers—Disney staples—a few witches, and a prince and princess. It virtually screams “adapt this, Disney.”

But those screams did little to help Disney adapt the story. Part of the problem—a huge problem—is that the original story arguably has too many villains: the demon who creates the original evil mirror, the witch who briefly enchants and imprisons little Gerda, the robbers, and, of course, the Snow Queen herself. But also arguably, the original story hardly has any villains at all, or at least satisfactory ones. The witch enchants Gerda out of loneliness, not malice; the robbers end up helping little Gerda; and the Snow Queen is less evil and more merely a force of nature. Indeed, at one point the Snow Queen even argues that she’s helping agriculture, and she—arguably—even helps to save Kai, by pulling him away from the dangerous sledding that almost kills him.

Granted, that’s from her viewpoint, and the text rather heavily implicates that the sledding and the snow might indeed have killed Kai, forcing Gerda to not just save Kai, but bring him back from death. But even in that reading, the Snow Queen lacks the malice Disney wanted from its villains. That left only the demon—who vanished at the beginning of the story. And although Disney had been willing to give audiences a glimpse of a Satanic demon in Fantasia (Chernabog), the company was not yet willing to feature a real demon as the main villain of a full length animated film.

Nor was anyone at Disney particularly interested in using ice as a metaphor for reason, much less focusing on the battle between Love and Reason in the late 1930s and early 1940s. They faced other, more urgent battles. The moment slipped by. By the 1950s, Disney lacked the financial resources to animate the delicate images of frost and snow fairies as they had to such great effect in Fantasia. With no script, and no ability to animate the script, even if they had one, the original concept art was quietly filed away.

Animators took another look at The Snow Queen during the Disney Renaissance of the 1990s, but once again, nobody knew quite what to do with it. Eventually Glen Keane, assigned to take another look at it, decided to focus on the more straightforward Tangled instead. That concept art, too, was filed away, and seen by very few.

Fortunately, one of those few just happened to be John Lasseter, who had become the Chief Creative Officer at Disney Animation in 2006. As he would later tell the media, he loved the original concept art, and ordered animators to take another look at it.

Initially, that look consisted only of the filmmakers finally managing to agree on one thing: the name “Gerda” should be replaced by “Anna.” That was still more progress than anyone had made on the concept for decades, and perhaps encouraged by this one small step—or simply convinced that if he ordered it, it would come—Lasseter ordered animators to continue. By 2011, he was optimistic enough to announce that Frozen would be released in 2013, even though, at that point, the planned film had no script and no solid character designs or background work.

With a looming deadline, animators, directors, and story writers scrambled, and finally, in 2012, cracked open the concept they needed to make The Snow Queen work. They simply wouldn’t do The Snow Queen. Instead, they would change the character of the Snow Queen from villain to victim, and in her own cold way, a hero. And instead of a story focused on rescuing a boy, this would be a story about sisters.

Mari Ness