The Ice Virgin

by Hans Christian Andersen

  Andersen’s 1831 trip set a pattern for many later journeys. Momentously, and again compelled abroad by unhappiness at home, centring indeed on Edvard Collin, Andersen travelled in 1833–34 to Paris, to French-speaking Switzerland and so down to Italy, which overwhelmed him. In Rome he associated with members of the Scandinavian Club, many of them young practitioners of the arts. One of these, Thomas Fearnley (1802–42), was a Norwegian painter of English extraction. An amorist himself, he tried without success to make Andersen more adventurous in his approach to the opposite sex. He also passed on to him his own enthusiasm for alpine scenery. Fearnley’s great canvases – ‘The Wetterhorn’, ‘Near Meiringen’ (both 1835) and ‘The Grindelwald Glacier’ (1838) – pay homage to major natural features that were to play essential roles in Andersen’s own alpine novella; indeed the Wetterhorn and Grindelwald are named in its first paragraph. Andersen’s own descriptions have something of that awe, that reverence for both the blind power and the spiritually nourishing beauty of these mountains that Fearnley gave them in his paintings.

  Andersen returned to Denmark in spring 1835 with two completed books that would change not only his own life but European literature itself. The first was a novel, The Improvisatore, which purports to be the autobiography of a young Italian born and raised in a poor quarter of Rome, and now well-known for his powers of improvisation – then a fashionable art. The Improvisatore shows its real author’s extraordinary empathy with those outside his own culture. In The Ice Virgin Rudy is a chamois-hunter, a cooper, a mountain guide. And through him we learn of other representative Swiss pursuits – goat-herding, the making and selling of toy chalets, running a timber-mill, opening hotels to cater for tourists. We feel Andersen must have known such practices and customs from his own experiences. But in truth his accounts of them are the fruits of the imaginative identification he constantly made with places and a whole diversity of persons throughout his travels.

  The second book that followed Andersen’s return from his great European journey was his first book of Fairy-Tales Told for Children (Eventyr, Fortalte for Børn) published only a matter of weeks after The Improvisatore, in May 1835. Two of these fairy-tales, ‘The Tinder-Box’ and ‘The Princess on the Pea’, are still universal favourites. Andersen’s faithful and kind-hearted older mentor, the distinguished physicist and writer H. C. Ørsted, told him that whereas The Improvisatore would make him famous (it certainly did), the fairy-tales would make him immortal, so fresh, so original, so direct were they, yet with such skilled artistry behind them. And so it has turned out, and it is as a writer of fairy-tales that Andersen is primarily thought of outside Denmark today, especially fairy-tales for children. But in fact by the time he had reached his critical and commercial breakthrough collection of 1843, New Fairy-tales (Nye Eventyr), he had dropped the qualifier ‘for children’ – ironically since this particular book contains one of the best-loved children’s tales of all time, ‘The Ugly Duckling’ – and for subsequent volumes he often preferred the term Historier or ‘Stories’ rather than Eventyr. The reading world outside Denmark has tended to concentrate so exclusively on the children’s tales that it passes by many works of great intensity and imaginative ambition in which Andersen combined the immediacy of those early tales with a complexity of construction as intricate as any in nineteenth-century fiction. Such works unite a novelist’s interest in society and culture, and in the individual’s relation to them, with the fairy-tale teller’s way of appealing to feelings and notions well below the surface of conscious life. Such a work is The Ice Virgin (Iisjomfruen). Here we should also see Andersen’s admiration for contemporaneous German writers excelling in the novella form, particularly two with whom he became friendly as far back as his tour of 1831, Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853) and Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838). It is my own opinion, strengthened by attentive readings of The Ice Virgin over many years, that Andersen never more completely realised the many aspects of his phenomenal genius than he did in this story, and that the novella form, in distinction to the full-length novel or the single-narrative tale, peculiarly assisted this richness combined with succinctness: the homely details of life in rural and small-town Switzerland, the perception of social changes and their effects on persons who cannot withstand them, the apprehension of the natural world amounting to rapport with it, from swallows and cats and an old dog to the terrifyingly inimical realms of snow, ice, flood and storm. We face up to the complex issues the tale raises, about self and civilisation, by means of its complex verbal richness, its controlled abundance of psychically penetrative imagery, its narrative that never once loses metaphoric force and its haunting ambivalence of emotional loyalties.

  By the time he came to write The Ice Virgin, Andersen was a writer of international stature whose travels reflected this, being treated as a celebrity wherever he went and meeting the leading European intellectuals and artists of the day, Mendelssohn, Balzac, Hugo, Heine, Dickens. But in a vital sense the Andersen who went back to Switzerland in 1861, a country with enormous appeal for him, retained many of the salient qualities of the young traveller he had once been. He had proved unable – and surely at any deep level unwilling – to unite his life with that of another person, of either sex. He was the most stalwart of friends, however, just as he was the most loyal of Danes, and Edvard Collin was still the most important person in his life, even if Andersen had steadied his expression of it. He showed his continuing devotion to Edvard now through friendship with his wife, Jette, who was very attached to him, and with his son Jonas. In 1861, in Italy and Switzerland, Andersen took Jonas Collin jnr (1840–1905), as he had done on earlier expeditions, as his travelling companion, a source of pleasure, since Andersen was genuinely fond of him, and of vexation. Jonas, a burgeoning biologist, was intelligent, good-looking, strong-willed, also recalcitrant, truculent, sometimes downright insolent, and certainly not above reminding Andersen of how indebted he was to his grandfather, Jonas Collin snr. Some of these attributes can be found in Rudy; The Ice Virgin surely gains in authenticity from its accurately observant, feelingly done depiction of a young man (in some ways Rudy is every young male) emerging into life. He wants everything his own way, from being the champion in the Interlaken shooting contest to winning the hand of the beautiful daughter of one of the richest burghers of his own region. And yet we cannot feel, for all that a fine wedding lies ahead of him, that Rudy’s ideas of his future are capable of being realised.

  Andersen began this novella – to which he first gave the working title ‘The Alpine Hunter’ – on 18 June 1861 in a hotel in Montreux on Lake Geneva, where he and Jonas stayed until 22 June. They had journeyed there from Italy via the Simplon Pass and St Maurice in Canton Valais and Bex on the other side of the Rhône in Canton Vaud. It is a route with which readers of The Ice Virgin become intimately familiar, from the sharp upward bend ‘like an elbow’ that the river valley takes before reaching these two opposite towns to the mountain looming above Bex called Les Diablerets, the highest point in Canton Vaud. Andersen was thus staying in the very milieu with which his novella concludes, the Switzerland of resorts and luxurious hotels and international travellers, the country that Babette has been educated to appreciate and which her English godmother likes to visit, and in which, by contrast, Rudy, scion of the high Alps, is greatly ill-at-ease – and in which indeed he dies, on the eve of (apparent) happiness.

  Rudy is on his mother’s side of Germanophone Bernese Oberland stock. His wood-carver grandfather came from Meiringen and then made his home near Grindelwald. Rudy’s father was a mail-coach man from the predominantly French-speaking and Roman Catholic Canton Valais, and it is in his Valais village that Rudy was born. After his father’s death, Rudy’s mother decides to take him, still a baby less than a year old, to her own father’s house in the Oberland. It is on the highest point of the journey there, on the fault-line between Rudy’s two ancestral regions, that the mother and her son fall into the icy chasm of the glacier, the former to her death a
nd the latter kissed, though not to death, by the Ice Virgin, an experience with a permanent and mortal legacy. After his early childhood years in the Oberland Rudy will spend the greater part of his all-too-short life in Valais, but on his triumphant visit to the Oberland resort of Interlaken the locals think he speaks German exactly as spoken in the neighbourhood. He can therefore – not least because of his youth and dashing charm – seemingly straddle both sides of Swiss life, the German and the French, though he does not live long enough for this to be put to any test.

  Rudy’s story can be read, among other things, as a paradigm of Switzerland, and through the cultural differences that this entails, it stands for abiding contrasts and tensions in the human personality itself: quest versus peaceful stasis, adventure involving danger and threat to life (one’s own, the lives of others) versus harmonious living, even libidinous release versus home-creating love. Not for nothing does Andersen make Rudy a skilled marksman, like the most famous Swiss of all, honoured in legend and opera, William Tell. Tell’s feat is in fact commemorated in the weather-vane that surmounts Rudy’s future father-in-law’s mill-house.

  We learn that Rudy dies in 1856, so must have been born c.1833. The action of the novella therefore takes place in a country the peace and growing prosperity of which was viewed by the rest of Europe – especially after the Swiss Federal Constitution of 1848 – as a template for other societies. More and more visitors, as is made clear in the novella, came from elsewhere to Switzerland for the sake of its spectacular natural beauties, in the interests of their mental and physical health, both catered for in its resorts, and also to experience its smooth-running societal achievements. But Andersen was aware – as all the characters of the novella are, and as a good proportion of his readers must have been – that Switzerland’s recent history was not quite the serene one its present appearance suggested. Also that there might well be a downside to the galvanising transformations Switzerland had witnessed in only a few decades and which the admiring world might do well to ponder. Were there casualties as well as the many beneficiaries of so rapid and thoroughgoing a progress? Is it right that Rudy – who unquestionably arouses our sympathies – should feel so uncomfortable, so unwanted in a place like Montreux?

  Andersen, as was his practice, worked with great thoroughness on The Ice Virgin so that topographically and historically it possesses an exemplary exactitude. Accordingly, examination of the facts behind the story is well worth making. Switzerland’s long-famous cantonal system was dismantled by victorious Revolutionary France in 1798, to be replaced by a centralised government. But the subsequent Helvetic Republic was so unpopular that many Swiss refused to fight for it on the side of France, causing Napoleon to grant the Swiss their canton system back in 1803. But in the novella’s course we meet one very great enthusiast for Napoleonic France, Rudy’s uncle, not, for all his kindness to Rudy himself, a wholly admirable figure but an influential one. (He insists on Rudy being educated in Canton Valais, imbued, one imagines, with a belief in the inherent superiority of a French education over all others.) The post-Napoleonic Congress of Vienna of 1815 confirmed Switzerland’s independence and neutrality. However, within its borders all was not completely well; the internal differences, cultural, religious, linguistic, which the country was in principle upholding could assert themselves, and nowhere was this more in evidence than in the Rhône Valley, where Cantons Valais and Vaud meet and where we readers of The Ice Virgin spend so much of our time. St Maurice, the bridge from which leads from Valais into Vaud and which Rudy crosses bound for Bex and Babette, saw in 1847 troops of Valais soldiers amassed with the express intention of launching an attack on Bex. Rudy’s (and his paternal family’s) Canton Valais, together with six other strongly Catholic and Conservative cantons, had united in 1843 to form the Sonderbund (Separate Alliance) in protest against the anti-Catholic measures of the central government. In contrast Canton Vaud, the miller and Babette’s canton, was – and still is – overwhelmingly Protestant, conserving a legacy from Calvin’s Geneva. The Sonderbundskrieg (Sonderbund War) against the Swiss Federal Army broke out in November 1847, but lasted a mere 26 days, with fewer than a hundred killed and all the wounded cared for. Canton Valais was perhaps the most committed to war of all the Sonderbund, and was the last of its cantons to surrender. All this – after all only in the main story’s recent past – has considerable bearing on Rudy’s dealings with Babette and the miller. It is why they have to reassure themselves that, both being Francophone, their respective two cantons make good neighbours, something hopefully propitious for a good relationship between the two young people. And the miller is surely Vaudois Protestant, having chosen an English godmother for his daughter. When we meet this cultivated, upper-class lady, we cannot believe she is other than a respected member of the Church of England, and therefore Rudy and Babette’s wedding ceremony might well have taken place in an Anglican church in Montreux.

  Rudy the alpine hunter? We know that the miller loves hearing from him about his chamois-hunting triumphs, the audacious skills his uncle developed in him after realising his natural talents for the pursuit. Rudy has, after all, exhibited an interest in the hunt even as a small child in the Oberland; he was more interested in the gun on a chalet roof-beam than in all the exquisite carvings in wood. He is thus more nephew of his pro-Napoleon huntsman uncle than he is grandson of the Germanophone old wood-carver. But, married to Babette, will such a risk-taking life be possible for him, or will his youthful feats be eventually consigned to a past as remote as that of the dungeons at Chillon, souvenirs of a bygone era which bore the young man stiff when he has to take part in sight-seeing? Questions now press on us. Which do we in honesty prefer, the liveliness, the enterprise, the animal good spirits, the instinctual courage and the ready resourcefulness of Rudy – most strikingly shown in his wonderfully described trek over the mountains to Interlaken in the Oberland from his village in the Valais (probably, a look at a map suggests, near Leuk) – or the second-hand, second-rate, sybaritic life-style of Babette’s godmother’s family in their quarters in Montreux? To say nothing of the dandyish self-satisfaction of the English cousin? And how do we view Rudy, if not favourably, alongside Babette’s chatter and arch little attempts to win male admiration? But this of course is to be unfair on her. Andersen makes quite clear the sincerity not only of her love but of her high regard for Rudy. And these feelings for him bring out an unexpectedly mature percipience in her. No section of the novella is more remarkable in its insights into the wellsprings of human nature than chapter 14, ‘Visions in the Night’. In this Babette perceives the fundamental incompatibility of the two of them, seeing Rudy as a decoy figure, an alpenstock hung with hunting clothes, while the frivolous English cousin – whom she doesn’t even like – is restored to her company.

  This ‘vision’ leads us to make a difficult acknowledgement. We are forced to admit that while there is much in Rudy to find attractive, even endearing, there is also much to cause us concern, for we can view him as instinctively antipathetic (possibly even antagonistic) to an enlightened, expanding modern culture, one admirable however limited. It never occurs to him that hunting chamois – which appeals to him even before he has tried it – causes suffering, brings about in truth re-enactments of that very tragedy which has scarred his own life: a mother’s death, a bewildered offspring’s orphaning. This point is brought most fully home in the chapter entitled ‘The Eagle’s Nest’, which was the second title that Andersen used for the story while at work on it. Of course we cannot but be impressed by the courage and ingenuity Rudy displays throughout this daring adventure. But how cruel it surely is deliberately to arrange the death of the magnificent mother-bird, and how acutely the hostility and distress of the captured eaglet are conveyed to us in the subsequent chapter, when Rudy brings it, caged and fiercely resentful, into the miller’s house! For all his male health and confidence, Rudy is a servant of death in these seminal episodes. That there is anyway an important dark side to his
whole being is inescapably revealed in the two encounters he has, alone in the mountains, with female envoys (as one assumes) of the Ice Virgin herself. These surely show that his sexual nature at the deepest level refuses to be satisfied with so domestic, so unalloyedly sweet a relationship as that to be experienced with Babette. We recall that in his infancy he was kissed by the Ice Virgin. And it was after that powerful figure that Andersen eventually chose to name the entire novella.

  What does she mean? How should we interpret the kiss the Virgin gives Rudy? Ambiguity is of the story’s very essence, we truly murder it to dissect. The Ice Virgin, in my view, is a personification rather than a personage, an embodiment of knowledge and of forces within ourselves that we are all obliged to recognise at some point in our lives, though how we deal with that recognition depends on our circumstances, our cultural conditioning, and, obviously, on other aspects of our personality. The Ice Virgin is an enemy of all attempts to domesticate or harness Nature, and we readers, like Andersen himself, who was deeply committed to progress, who celebrated railways and underwater cables, fear and loathe her annunciations of destruction to all human enterprises of this kind. But we also sense her incontestable indomitability, her stunning inviolable majesty, as when we look at the mountain peaks or hearken to the elemental forces we shall never be able wholly to subdue. Indeed, we live by courtesy of them every day of our lives. Rudy is one of those marked out to appreciate this truth, yet his appreciation of it denies him the life of contentment that most of us (including, for a while, himself) aspire to. And that is why Andersen, after describing what can only be termed Rudy’s unavoidable, if surprised, surrender to death, and, more tentatively, his removal from the world in which he has hoped to achieve happiness to the indefinable realm of eternity, asks us: ‘Would you call that a sorrowful story?’ Readers must do as Andersen bids them and answer this for themselves, no easy matter – on the contrary, a profoundly challenging one. And surely a rewarding one also.