by Anne Fadiman
BARBARA SJOHOLM
The Ice Palace
“The Snow Queen,” by Hans Christian Andersen
Three a.m., bolt awake. It’s late November above the Arctic Circle. The body insists it’s time to get up, even though it won’t be light until—when?—nine-thirty, and only a pale blue light then. I crossed nine time zones to arrive in Stockholm, traveled seventeen hours north by train to Kiruna. I’ve come to spend the winter in Arctic Scandinavia, first stop the old Sami village of Jukkasjärvi by the frozen Torne River, where every year a team of builders, artists, and amateurs comes together to reshape what melted in the spring: a hotel made of mounded snow and blocks and columns of blue river ice.
My cabin is warm. Outside, snow falls. Most of the possessions I’ll have with me for the next three months—laptop, journal, long underwear, woolens, calcium pills with extra vitamin D—lie strewn about. I’m never tidy when I travel; I need to take over my temporary spaces completely. I make a cup of coffee, take out a folder of photocopied pages and a library book.
I’m going to reread “The Snow Queen” the way I always dreamed I’d read it, not in the twee Danish town of Odense, which has made an industry of Hans Christian Andersen, but up here in the North, in the wintery land of reindeer. As a child in Southern California, I dreamed of snowy landscapes but never saw a single flake. Every December my friends and I heard familiar songs: “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas,” “Frosty the Snowman,” and “Jingle Bells.” As the sun beat down, some of our neighbors turned their yards into Santa’s Workshop or sprayed white stuff on their trees. Illustrated books showed cottages half-buried in white, snowmen out front, with children in caps and jackets throwing snowballs. We knew the forts and figures were made of snow, but what was snow? Was it very cold, like ice cream, or was it more like the spangled white felt that surrounded the base of the Christmas tree in our living room? The only snowflakes we knew were the ones we cut, painstakingly, from folded white paper in school. Was snow frozen rain? No, it must be soft, we thought, a silent satin coverlet.
What about ice? Ice cubes we knew, snow cones and Popsicles. But up in Alaska and the North Pole there were houses of ice—the igloos of the Eskimos, the palace of the Snow Queen. That far north, Christmas wasn’t just white, it was perpetual. I’d never even owned a coat. What would the cold feel like? Sleeping in an igloo must be like climbing into the freezer at the ice cream shop and having the lid close over you.
I pull out one of the photocopied versions of “The Snow Queen,” taken from The Pink Fairy Book. The Pink Fairy Book, along with the Green, Lilac, Yellow, and so on, was edited by Andrew Lang and first published in the late nineteenth century. I read the library editions as a child. We had few books in our house beyond the Bible and the complete works of Mary Baker Eddy. Nevertheless, we were avid library-goers, my mother and I, and when I wasn’t reading Christian Science Sentinel stories for children, I was reading fairy tales. The Lang books were my passport to Grimm, Perrault, and Andersen; I checked them out over and over. I believe my mother thought they were as innocent and uplifting as the tales about children praying, not precisely to be healed, but to keep their thinking clear and right.
It’s utterly silent and utterly black except for the pool of light outside my window, which illuminates a deep drift of snow and snowflakes—“white bees,” Andersen calls them—buzzing by. I slip into the story of Kai and Gerda, a tale of friendship frozen into ice and redeemed by faithful love, as if placing on an old turntable an LP I’ve heard a thousand times. The pictures are as I remember them, bold but languid, vaguely Pre-Raphaelite. The women wear swirling cloaks and clingy, high-waisted skirts that show the outlines of their strong, elongated thighs. “The Snow Queen Appears to Kai” seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to Botticelli’s Venus.
I read about the troll who invents a mirror “which had the strange power of being able to make anything good or beautiful that it reflected appear horrid; and all that was evil and worthless seem attractive and worthwhile.” When the troll takes the mirror up to heaven to make fun of God and the angels, he loses his grip on it, and it falls and breaks into billions of pieces, some of which are turned into windowpanes or spectacles, and many of which become tiny glass splinters that get into people’s eyes and make them see things askew and cruelly. I read about the splinters that lodge in Kai’s eye and his heart; about his semi-willing abduction by the Snow Queen; about his friend Gerda’s long journey to find him and love him back to himself. I read slowly, but it’s over too soon.
It was twelve years ago that I first reread “The Snow Queen.” The story had been important to me as a child, and I went back to Andersen’s tale as I began to pull together fragments of memories and past influences for a memoir about my Christian Science childhood. At the time I was struggling to make sense of a religion that had instilled such trust in God’s love—and in the certainty that all was for the best in this best of all possible worlds—that it had left me completely unprepared for a string of family disasters. The memoir tells the story of my mother’s crisis of faith when she discovered she had breast cancer; of her breakdown and the suicide attempt that left her disfigured; of her suffering and death and my losses as a child. The metaphor of the splintered mirror offered a means of exploring how people who said they loved you (your parents, for example) could change into unrecognizable beings who would abandon you for the icy necessity of death or for another woman (my father’s second wife, a classic wicked stepmother). It was with Kai that I identified on that reading. I felt as if I too had long had an icy splinter inside me, a splinter that had gradually frozen my heart.
But now, reading “The Snow Queen” in Lapland, I see how much of the tale is taken up by Gerda’s great adventure, out into, as Andersen calls it several times, “the wide world.” When she loses her dearest childhood friend—first psychologically, through the splinters that turn him sour and cynical, and then, in reality, to the powerful and seductive Snow Queen—Gerda sets off on an epic journey to find him. Never wavering in her belief that he is alive, she sails, walks, rides in a carriage, and is carried by a reindeer to the Snow Queen’s palace, where Kai has been doing little but racking his brain over broken pieces of ice, trying to spell a forgotten word.
Yesterday I crunched and squeaked my way through the halls and suites of the Ice Hotel, taking photographs and talking with an architect who told me he’d modeled his design of the vault-like corridors on Antonio Gaudi’s strange cathedral masterpiece, La Sagrada Familia. The mounds of snow, bulldozed onto steel forms, had become disorienting tunnels with white floors, ceilings, and walls. Opaque and soft-looking, the snow nevertheless was hard to the touch, the crystals packed into weight-bearing walls. All sound was muffled; it was impossible to hear voices in the next room because snow acts as a sound barrier. I had the impression both of being buried alive and of being in a sacred space, a Cistercian monastery or a Greek Orthodox chapel. The white solidity of the snow was balanced by the transparency of the pillars and blocks of ice. During the day the ice was a radiant blue, the light broken and refracted hundreds of times by joints and crackings. Light is captured and magnified by ice; even under the workers’ artificial floodlights, the ice took on unearthly sheens and glitters.
Well wrapped in my insulated clothes and red hat and mittens, I stomped my feet and breathed clouds of mist in suites where chain saws roared and chisels chinked, where artists attacked massive blocks of ice, creating everything from tables and chairs to beds to statues and friezes. Some of the designs were free-spirited (the Rock ‘n’ Roll Room, with its homage to the Fender guitar) or kitschy (the Viking Room, with its bed in the shape of a dragon-headed ship—“Especially popular with Americans,” I was told). Other suites were designed by minimalists, with bulging snow beds and undulant columns of ice. In an ecstasy of cold, I wandered around for hours before dipping back into the warmth of my cabin to write up notes.
“It’s really not so cold to sleep in the Ice
Hotel,” everyone told me. “Snow is an insulator. It only gets down to five in here, even though it might be twenty or thirty outside.” No one ever says “minus” here during the winter; it’s just assumed. I’m planning to come back in a couple of months, when the hotel is finished, to take a room overnight. Somehow I’m not convinced that sleeping on a bed of ice, even on a layer of reindeer skins, even inside a thermal sleeping bag, will be especially cozy. (Fast-forward: It’s not. Though it is strange and beautiful.)
In my memory, the Snow Queen’s palace absorbed most of the narrative. Its descriptions acted on me like an icy aphrodisiac:
The castle walls were of the driven snow, and the windows and doors of the biting winds. There were more than a hundred halls, according to the way the snow drifted; the biggest stretched for many miles, all lit up by the intense Northern Lights; and they were so big, so bare, so icy cold, and so sparkling.
I am surprised now to find that so little of the fairy tale takes place in the palace. In fact, there are almost as many descriptions of sunshine and flowers as of snow. Did I forget them because these things were so normal to a California child? Andersen, who often traveled to Italy and claimed he felt more himself in warm and sensuous climes, lavishes description on the little window boxes between Gerda’s and Kai’s attic apartments, and on the cherry orchard and garden of the wise old woman who takes Gerda in. The book ends with a vision of a garden too—Eden restored after the cold trials of the North.
Andersen’s descriptions of ice owe much to his imagination. Now that I’m actually up above the Arctic Circle with my maps and guidebooks, I’m aware of just how vague Andersen’s geography and meteorology are. He puts Lapland near the North Pole, and makes the snow and ice perpetual. In reality, Lapland is far enough south to experience all four seasons; it’s not Italy, but some summer days can be positively balmy. Even the Ice Hotel melts in late April.
I make a second cup of coffee and take out a copy of another translation, this one by Erik Christian Haugaard, a bilingual Danish author who put together Hans Christian Andersen: The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories twenty-seven years ago. This is the version I read when I was working on my memoir. I’m shocked at how lively the writing is, at how much more story there is than in the Pink Fairy Book tale, which is, I now notice for the first time, “Translated from the German of Hans Andersen by Miss Alma Alleyne.” I compare the two. Miss Alma Alleyne’s condensed and bowdlerized translation has left out whole sections, such as Gerda’s encounters with the wise old woman’s flowers, each of whom tells a different story. Again I read slowly; again I think, This is really about Gerda, out in the wide world, discovering herself.
It’s still only 6:00 a.m. I rummage through my things, find a Luna bar and an apple, and eat them. Now I open a collection of Andersen’s tales in Danish that I picked up yesterday at the Kiruna library. (During my three months of travel in Scandinavia, I’ll often be allowed to check out books overnight by trusting librarians.) I’ve never read Andersen before in his original language, but Danish isn’t difficult if you know Norwegian. People often assume that because I translate Norwegian, I must be Norwegian myself. In fact, I had a grandmother who emigrated from Sweden as a child with her family, as well as a grandfather who came from the southwest of Ireland, arriving alone in Boston at fourteen. My Stockholm-born grandmother died in childbirth; my father was sent to an orphanage, and then adopted. Later, when he found his grandparents again, he discovered they spoke Swedish, or English with heavy accents. Their language died with them. My father never thought to learn it, preferring Latin instead.
I know Norwegian because of a few summer jobs, and then because its literature began to interest me enormously. In days gone by, when there was more time, educated people often learned a language, or several, in order to read important authors. I suppose that’s how I’ve felt about Norwegian. Relatively few literary works in Norwegian have crossed into English; when I read fiction and poetry in the original, new worlds opened up. I also found how rich the experience of reading another language could be when I succumbed to a different rhythm and tasted the flavors and shapes of unfamiliar words.
I turn to “Snedronningen,” Danish for “The Snow Queen,” where Andersen’s quirky, confident voice immediately rings out: “Se så. Nu begynder vi.” (“Well, now. Let’s begin,” is how I would translate it.) Andersen was famously underserved by English translators in the past (and even more recently—the opening of the Haugaard version is decidedly clunky: “All right. We will start the story”). Yet there’s a colloquial dash that comes across even in Miss Alma Alleyne’s translation, a sense of real speech, racy and humorous. With pleasure, I now read the original Danish through to the end, noting the places where the text can’t be rendered in English with the same meaning. For instance, Gerda calls Kai her “lille legebroder,” her little play-brother, which is always translated as “playmate,” a tarnished English word if ever there was one.
What catches my attention on this rereading, now that I’m up in the North? Shoes and socks! What does it mean that Gerda is so often shoeless in the story? Her first act, on setting off to find Kai, is to offer her red shoes to the river. Later on she’s given boots by a princess, but these are forgotten in haste. By the time she approaches the icy door of the snow palace, she’s barefoot again and has to pick her way across a frozen expanse toward Kai.
Andersen was a cobbler’s son, and shoes played a recurring role in his work. Another memorable Andersen tale is “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf,” a creepy story in which a selfish girl who doesn’t want to get her new shoes wet puts a loaf of bread down on a puddle, and promptly sinks into a boggy purgatory in which all the flies whose wings she’s torn off for sport crawl over her face. In “The Red Shoes,” a poor orphan named Karen is taken in by a nearsighted old lady who, when she buys the child a pair of shoes, can’t tell that they’re red, not black. There’s a scandal when Karen wears them to church, and the red shoes take on a life of their own, dancing away with Karen until she becomes so worn and thin that she asks an executioner to chop off her feet with his ax. (As a child growing up to believe that illness, pain, and selfish behavior were just “errors” that could be rectified by a half hour with Science and Health, I was shocked and thrilled at the bizarre punishments Andersen meted out to his heroines.) Gerda often has no shoes, and that suggests that her journey is a religious pilgrimage, with echoes of barefoot martyrdom endured for love, as well as an act of great courage and fortitude.
Reading “The Snow Queen” as Gerda’s story makes me more aware of its wide array of female characters, including animals and talking flowers. Not just one, but four wise old women play roles in the tale. One is the grandmother at home (Kai and Gerda are said to have parents, but we never meet them, and it’s never clear whose grandmother she is). Second is the old gardener who snags Gerda off the river with her shepherd’s crook and uses mild magic to keep her in the cherry orchard long past summer. Later in the story, we meet first a Lapp woman, who writes a note to her friend the Finn woman on a piece of dried cod, and then the Finn woman herself, who seems to live in her sauna and who boils the cod letter in a stew pot after reading it. All these women are good witches, mild fertility figures dispensing wisdom and directions.
The Snow Queen herself is a goddess archetype of a different mold, a seductive vamp, even a polar vampire, who invites Kai to creep inside her bearskin coat:
“Are you still cold?” she asked, and kissed his forehead. Her kiss was colder than ice. It went right to his heart, which was already half made of ice. He felt as though he were about to die, but it hurt only for a minute, then it was over.
She refrains from more kissing only because she knows she’d kiss the life out of him. Seductresses are common in nineteenth-century fiction; more intriguing to me, I find on this rereading, is the little robber girl, who participates in the casual killing of the coachman and servants accompanying Gerda, and then claims Gerda for herself. “She must give me h
er muff, her beautiful dress and sleep with me in my bed,” she announces. A modern reader might well find an erotic subtext in their night together, especially after reading Jackie Wullschlager’s recent biography, which finds ample evidence that Andersen, if not an open homosexual, definitely had queer predilections. Butch or not, the little robber girl is a bold and brilliant creation, as refreshingly unfeminine and amoral as Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking (Lindgren also wrote a novel about a robber family, Ronia, the Robber’s Daughter).
Yet of all the story’s characters, it’s Gerda who impresses me most now. (As a child, I liked the talking reindeer best; a dozen years ago, it was Kai who called to me; in twenty years, perhaps I’ll be most drawn to the Finn woman in her sauna.) Gerda is steadfast, she’s warmhearted, she listens to animals and takes their advice, she’s shaken but unbowed by setbacks. Even though her feet are freezing, she enters the palace of the Snow Queen, walks over to Kai, and sets him straight. She has no pride; her tears fall on his breast and melt the splinters in his heart. Then he cries, and the splinter washes right out of his eye. And isn’t that what we all want deep down? To drop the cynicism and defensiveness, to give up the mathematics of hatred, to melt the hardness of another’s heart and in the process melt our own walls too?
Not all of Andersen’s tales appeal to me anymore, and many make me shudder. I believe Gerda is the reason I can still reread “The Snow Queen” without gagging on the saccharine Christian symbolism that spoils some of his other works. Though there’s a bit of the sentimental in the ending of the story when Gerda and Kai return by foot (Gerda presumably still without shoes) to the garden of their childhood, the effect is deeply satisfying. If our hearts are open, we can return to the Edens of our youth, even if we are, like Gerda and Kai, now fully grown.
