Fairy Tales

by Ганс Христиан Андерсен

  I’m eyeing Mt. Blanc, my dear.

  If only my money will hold out

  Oh, it would be good to stay here.

  All of nature around was grand, severe and dark. The fir forests looked like a carpet of heather on the high mountains whose tops were hidden in the clouds. Then it started to snow, and the cold wind blew.

  “Oh,” he sighed. “I wish we were on the other side of the Alps, then it would be summer, and I would have gotten money on my letter of credit. I can’t enjoy Switzerland because of the anxiety I have about this. Oh I wish I were on the other side!”

  And so he was on the other side, deep within Italy, between Florence and Rome. Lake Trasimeno lay bathed in evening sun, like flaming gold, between the dark blue mountains. Here, where Hannibal defeated Flaminius, the grapevines now stood peacefully with green fingers intertwined. Delightful half-naked children were shepherding a litter of coal-black pigs under a grove of fragrant laurel trees by the side of the road. If we showed this as a painting, everyone would shout, “Lovely Italy,” but the young theologian and his traveling companions in the hired coach surely didn’t say that.

  Thousands of poisonous flies and mosquitoes flew into the coach. In vain they swatted at them with a myrtle branch, but the flies bit anyway. There wasn’t a person in the coach whose face wasn’t bloated and bloody from bites. The poor horses looked like carrion. The flies were sitting on them like big crusts, and it only helped momentarily when the driver got down and scraped them off. Then the sun went down, and a short but icy chill went through all of nature. It was not at all pleasant, but the mountains and clouds had the most beautiful green color, so clear and shining. Go and see for yourself—that’s better than reading this description! It was unparalled! The travelers thought so too, but their stomachs were empty, their bodies tired. With all their hearts they yearned for a place to spend the night, but where would this be? They were looking more for that than at the beautiful view of nature.

  The road went through an olive grove. It was like driving through a gnarled forest of willows at home. There lay a lone inn there. Ten to twelve crippled beggars were camped outside. The best of them looked like “Famine’s eldest son just arriving to years of discretion.”14 The others were either blind, had withered legs and crept on their hands, or shriveled arms with fingerless hands. It was pure misery wrung from the rags. “Eccellenza, miserabili!” they sighed and reached out their withered limbs. The innkeeper’s wife met the travelers herself. She was barefoot, had uncombed hair, and was wearing a dirty blouse. The doors were tied together with twine, and the floor tiles in the rooms were partly dug up. Bats were flying around under the roof and the smell in there—

  “Well, she should set up our table down in the stable,” said one of the travelers. “At least there we’d know what we’re breathing.”

  The windows were opened so that a little fresh air could get in, but, quicker than that, came the withered arms and the perpetual whimpering: miserabili, Eccellenza! There were a lot of inscriptions on the walls, and at least half of them were critical of bella Italia.

  The food was brought out. There was a soup of water, spiced with pepper and rancid oil and then the same oil on the salad. The main course was tainted eggs and roasted rooster combs. Even the wine had a sour taste. It was a real mish-mash.

  At night the suitcases were piled up against the door, and one of the travelers stood watch while the others slept. The student had the watch. Oh, how stuffy it was in there! The heat was oppressive, the mosquitoes swarmed and stung, and outside the miserabili whimpered in their sleep.

  “Yes, traveling is very well,” sighed the student, “if one just didn’t have a body! If only the body could rest and the spirit could travel. Wherever I am, there are miseries that press on my heart. I want something better than the present. Yes, something better, the best. But where and what is it? After all, I do know what I want—to go to a happy place, the happiest place of all!”

  And when the word was spoken, he was in his home. The long white curtains hung in front of the windows, and in the middle of the floor stood the black coffin. He lay there in the quiet sleep of death. His wish was granted—his body rested, his spirit traveled. “Call him till he dies, not happy but fortunate,” said Solon.15 These words were reaffirmed once again.

  Every corpse is the Sphinx of Immortality. And the sphinx here in the black coffin couldn’t say what the student had written only two days earlier:Oh strong death, dread is your silent token,

  Your only footprint does the churchyard save.

  Shall the Jacob’s ladder of thought be broken—

  Shall I arise as grass upon death’s grave?

  Our greatest sufferings here we don’t impart,

  You who were alone at last, and often;

  Know that in life much presses harder on the heart

  Than all the soil that’s cast upon your coffin.

  Two figures moved in the room, and we know both of them. It was the Fairy of Sorrow and Good Fortune’s messenger. They leaned over the dead man.

  “Do you see what Good Fortune your galoshes brought to humankind?” asked Sorrow.

  “At least they brought the man who’s resting here a lasting good!” answered Good Fortune’s messenger.

  “Oh no,” said Sorrow. “He went away on his own; he was not called. His spiritual power here was not strong enough to gain the treasures that he was destined for. I will do him a favor.”

  And she took the galoshes from his feet. The sleep of death ended, and the resurrected arose. Sorrow disappeared, but also the galoshes. She must have considered them her property.

  NOTES

  1 A professor at the University of Copenhagen, H. C. Ørsted (1777-1851) wrote an essay entitled “Gamle og nye Tider” (“Old and New Times”). Andersen admired Ørsted, who discovered electromagnetism.

  2 King Hans was born in 1455 and ruled Denmark and Norway from 1481 to 1513.

  3 Zealand is the largest island of Denmark, separated from Funen by the Great Belt and from Scania in Sweden by the Øresund. Copenhagen is partly located on the eastern shore of Zealand and partly on Amager.

  4 The medieval dialect of Copenhagen was similar to that of the present day island of Bornholm, in the Baltic Sea, and could be somewhat comical to those who live in Copenhagen.

  5 After Thomasine Gyllembourg, a popular author of the time, published En Hverdagshistorie (A Story of Everyday Life) in 1828, the term hverdagshistorie came into use as a genre definition for stories of contemporaneous Copenhagen. Andersen was not an admirer of the genre.

  6 In his Danmarks Riges Historie, Holberg tells how one day King Hans was joking with the famous Otto Rud, of whom he was very fond. The King had been reading about King Arthur and said, “Yvain and Gawain, whom I read about in this book, were remarkable knights. You don’t find knights like that anymore.” To which Otto Rud replied, “If there were Kings like King Arthur, you would find knights like Yvain and Gawain.” [Andersen’s note] Andersen cites Holberg’s “The History of the Kingdom of Denmark.” Ludwig Holberg (1684-1754) was the most important writer in eighteenth-century Denmark/Norway. [translator’s note]

  7 Writer and critic Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860); he published writings of his mother, Thomasine Gyllembourg, among others.

  8 Godfred von Gehmen was the first publisher in Copenhagen; in 1493 he published Latin grammars for the new university.

  9 Cholera was a serious problem in most of Europe from 1830 to 1837, but except for Holstein, Denmark was not much affected.

  10 A statute of 1496 prescribed that prostitutes wear caps that were half red and half black, to distinguish them from other women.

  11 Johann Heinrich von Mädler was a German astronomer who (with Wilhelm Beer) issued Mappa Selenographica (1834-1836) in four volumes; it presented the most complete map of the moon at that time.

  12 The agave is a tropical plant that in Denmark flowers only in greenhouses after a period of forty to sixty years; in 1836
a sixty-year-old plant that bloomed in Copenhagen was nearly 20 feet tall.

  13 Cactus. [Andersen’s note]

  14 Snarleyyow. [Andersen’s note] The citation, given in the original English, is from Snarleyyow; or, The Dog Fiend (1837), a historical novel by Captain Frederick Marryat, a naval officer and writer of adventure novels. [translator’s note]

  15 Statesman and poet (c.630-560 B.C.), known as one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece.

  THE GARDEN OF EDEN

  ONCE THERE WAS A prince, and no one had so many or such beautiful books as he had. He could read about and see splendid pictures of everything that had happened in the world. He could find out about all nationalities and every country, but there was not a word about where the Garden of Eden was, and that was what he thought most about.

  When he was still quite little, just beginning his education, his grandmother had told him that every flower in the Garden of Eden was the sweetest cake, and each stamen the finest wine. History was on one flower, geography or math tables on another. All you had to do was eat the cakes to know your lessons. The more you ate, the more history, geography, and math you would take in.

  He believed that as a boy, but as he grew older, learned more, and became wiser, he understood, of course, that there must be a far different kind of beauty in the Garden of Eden.

  “Oh, why did Eve pick from the tree of knowledge? Why did Adam eat the forbidden fruit? It should have been me, and then it wouldn’t have happened! Sin would never have come into the world!”

  He said it then, and he said it now that he was seventeen years old. All he thought about was the Garden of Eden.

  One day he was walking in the forest. He walked by himself because that was his favorite pastime.

  Evening came. Clouds gathered, a rainstorm came up, and rain fell as if the whole sky was a floodgate with water gushing from it. It was as dark as it usually is at night in the deepest well. Sometimes he slipped in the wet grass, and sometimes he tripped over the bare rocks that stuck up from the rocky ground. Water poured off everything, and there wasn’t a dry thread on the poor prince. He had to climb up and over big boulders where the water was seeping out of the thick moss. He was ready to drop, but then he heard a strange whistling sound and saw in front of him a big cave, all illuminated. Right in the middle was a fire so big you could cook a stag on it, and that is exactly what was happening. A magnificent stag with huge antlers was on a spit and was slowly rotating between two felled spruce trees. There was an elderly woman, tall and strong, like a man in disguise, sitting by the fire, and throwing on one log after the other.

  “Just come a little closer,” she said. “Sit down by the fire so you can dry your clothes.”

  “There’s a bad draft in here,” the prince said and sat down on the floor.

  “It’ll get even worse when my sons get home,” the woman answered. “You’re in the Cave of the Winds now, and my sons are the four winds. Do you understand that?”

  “Where are your sons?” asked the prince.

  “Well, it’s not so easy to answer a stupid question,” the woman said. “My sons are out on their own. They’re playing ball with the clouds up there in the sky,” and she pointed up into the air.

  “I see,” said the prince. “You talk a little tougher and are not as mild as the women I’m used to.”

  “Well, they must not have anything else to do then. I have to be tough to keep my boys in check. But I can do it too, even though they are pretty stiff-necked. Do you see those four sacks hanging on the wall over there? They are just as afraid of them as you were of the belt in the woodshed. I can fold the boys up, let me tell you, and put them in the sacks without further ado. They sit there and can’t get out to gad about until I say so. But here’s one of them!”

  It was the North Wind who breezed in with freezing cold surrounding him. Big hail stones hopped around on the floor, and snowflakes swirled all around. He was dressed in pants and a jacket of bearskin, and a hood of sealskin covered his ears. He had long icicles hanging from his beard, and one hailstone after another rolled down the collar of his jacket.

  “Don’t go right over to the fire,” the prince shouted. “You can easily get frostbite on your face and hands!”

  “Frostbite!” The North Wind laughed out loud. “I love frost! What kind of a whippersnapper are you, by the way? How did you get to the Cave of the Winds?”

  “He’s my guest,” said the old woman, “and if you’re not satisfied with that explanation, you’ll go into the sack. You know what to expect!”

  That helped, and the North Wind told where he’d come from and where he’d been for almost a whole month.

  “I’ve come from the Arctic Ocean,” he said. “I’ve been to Bear Island with the Russian whalers. I sat and slept by the tiller when they sailed out from the North Cape. Once in a while I woke up to find the storm petrels flying around my legs. It’s an odd bird. It flaps its wings once quickly and then holds them out unmoving and coasts.”

  “Don’t be so long-winded,” said the wind’s mother. “And then you came to Bear Island?”

  “It’s lovely there. What a floor to dance on, flat as a plate! Half melted snow with a little moss, sharp rocks, and skeletons of walruses and polar bears were lying there. They looked like the arms and legs of giants, green with mold. You’d think that the sun had never shone on them. I blew a little of the fog away so a shack became visible. It was a house made of a wrecked ship and covered with walrus skins. The flesh side was turned outward—it was red and green, and there was a live polar bear growling on the roof. I went to the beach and looked at the bird nests, looked at the little featherless chicks who were shrieking and gaping, and then I blew down into the thousand throats, and that taught them to close their mouths. Furthest down the walruses were wallowing like living entrails, or giant worms with pig heads and teeth two feet long!”

  “You tell a good story, my boy,” said his mother. “It makes my mouth water to listen to you.”

  “Then the hunt started. The harpoon went into the walrus’ breast so steaming blood was like a fountain on the ice. Then I thought about my own game and blew up the wind, and let my sailing ships, the peaked mountainous icebergs, squeeze the boats inside. Oh, how people whimpered and how they wailed, but I whistled louder! They had to lay the dead walruses, chests, and ropes out on the ice. I sprinkled snow flakes on them and let them drift south with their catch on the encapsulated boats, there to taste salt water. They’ll never return to Bear Island!”

  “So you’ve done bad things then,” the wind’s mother said.

  “Others can talk about the good I’ve done,” he said, “but here comes my brother from the west. I like him better than any of them because he smells of the sea and brings a blessed coldness with him.”

  “Is it little Zephyr?”1 the prince asked. “Yes, certainly it’s Zephyr,” the old woman answered, “but he’s not so little any more. In the old days he was a lovely boy, but that’s past now.”

  He looked like a wild man, but he had a crash helmet on so he wouldn’t get hurt. He was holding a mahogany club, felled in an American mahogany forest. Nothing less would do!

  “Where did you come from?” his mother asked.

  “From the primeval forests,” he answered, “where thorny vines make fences between each tree, where water snakes lie in the wet grass, and where people seem unnecessary!”

  “What did you do there?”

  “I looked at a deep river and saw how it came rushing from the mountains, became spray, and flew towards the clouds where it carried the rainbow. I saw a wild buffalo swimming in the river, carried away by the current. He rushed past a flock of wild ducks that flew into the air where the water was tumbling down. The buffalo had to go over the rapids. I liked that and blew up a storm so the ancient trees went flying and became crushed to splinters.”

  “And you didn’t do anything else?” asked his old mother.

  “I turned somersaults on the savannas, pette
d wild horses, and shook coconuts! Oh yes, I have stories to tell! But, as you know, you can’t tell everything you know, old mother!” And then he kissed his mother so she almost fell over backwards. He really was a wild boy.

  Then the South Wind came wearing a turban and a flying Bedouin cape.

  “It’s really cold in here,” he said, and threw wood on the fire. “You can tell that North Wind was here first!”

  “It’s hot enough in here to roast a polar bear,” the North Wind said.

  “You’re a polar bear yourself,” the South Wind answered.

  “Do you two want to be put into the bag?” the old woman asked. “Sit down on that rock and tell where you’ve been.”

  “In Africa, mother,” he answered. “I’ve been on a lion safari with the Hottentots in the land of the Kaffirs.2 Such grass grows on those plains, green as an olive! The gnus dance there, and the ostrich ran a race with me, but I’m faster. I came to the desert, to the yellow sands. It looks like the bottom of the ocean. I met a caravan! They butchered their last camel to get water to drink, but they didn’t get much. The sun burned above them, the sand burned below them, and there was no end to the boundless desert. Then I romped about in the fine, loose sand and whirled it up into big pillars. What a dance! You should have seen how dispirited the camels were, and the merchant pulled his caftan over his head. He threw himself down in front of me as if I were Allah, his God. They’re buried now. A pyramid of sand is standing over all of them. When I blow it away one day, the sun will bleach the white bones so travelers can see that people have been there before. Otherwise, you would never believe people had been in the desert.”