Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen

by Hans Christian Andersen

  “It must be lovely over there,” said Babette. She once again had such a strong wish to visit the little island, and that wish could be fulfilled at once. There was a boat by the bank. The rope that held it was easy to loosen. They didn’t see anyone to ask for permission, so they just took the boat. Rudy knew how to row.

  The oars caught the yielding water like the fins of a fish. Water is so soft and yet so strong. It has a back to bear weight, and a mouth with which to swallow. Gently smiling, softness itself and yet a terror, with shattering strength. There was a foamy wake following the boat that reached the little island within a few minutes, and the two went ashore. There was only enough room for the two of them to dance.

  Rudy swung Babette around two or three times, and then they sat down on the little bench under the overhanging acacia trees. They gazed into each other’s eyes, held each other’s hands, and everything around them shone in the splendor of the setting sun. The fir forests on the mountains had a violet cast that made them look like blooming heather, and the rocky stones above the tree line glowed as if the mountain were transparent. The clouds in the sky were lit up like red fire, and the whole lake was like a fresh, blooming rose petal. As the shadows rose higher and higher up the snow-capped Savoy mountains, these turned to dark blue, but the highest peaks shone like red lava. It was as if they repeated a moment from their creation, when these massive mountains rose up glowing from the earth’s womb, still burning. It was an Alpenglow unlike any Rudy or Babette had ever seen. The snow-covered Dent du Midi shone like the disc of the full moon as it rises above the horizon.

  “What beauty! What happiness!” they both said. “The world has nothing more to give me,” said Rudy. “An evening like this is really a whole life. How often have I sensed my joy, as I sense it now and thought that if everything were to end, what a happy life I have had! How blessed this world is! And that day was over, but a new one began and I thought that one was even more beautiful! How good and great God is, Babette!”

  “I am so happy,” she said.

  “The world has nothing more to give me,” exclaimed Rudy.

  And the evening bells rang from the mountains of Savoy, from the Swiss mountains. In golden glory the dark black Jura mountains rose up in the west.

  “May God give you the most wonderful and best!” Babette exclaimed.

  “He will!” said Rudy. “Tomorrow I’ll have it. Tomorrow you’ll be all mine. My own lovely little wife.”

  “The boat!” screamed Babette at the same time.

  The boat that was to ferry them back had torn loose and was drifting away from the island.

  “I’ll get it,” said Rudy. He cast off his jacket, tore off his boots, and ran into the lake, swimming swiftly towards the boat.

  Cold and deep was the clear blue-green ice water from the mountain glaciers. Rudy looked down into it, only a single glance, and it was as if he saw a gold ring roll, gleam, and sparkle. He thought about his lost engagement ring, and the ring became bigger, and widened out into a glittering circle. Inside of it the clear glacier was shining. Infinitely deep crevices were gaping all around, and water dripped tinkling like a carillon, and shining with white-blue flames. He saw in an instant what we must describe in many long words. Young hunters and young girls, men and women—those who at one time had sunk in the glacier’s crevasses—stood here alive with open eyes and smiling mouths. And deep under them sounded church bells from buried towns. The congregation kneeled under the church vault. The mountain stream played the organ, whose pipes were pieces of ice. The Ice Maiden sat on the clear, transparent floor. She rose up towards Rudy, kissed his feet, and an icy chill shot through his limbs—an electric shock—ice and fire! You can’t tell the difference from a quick touch.

  “Mine! Mine!” resounded around him and inside him. “I kissed you when you were little! Kissed you on the lips! Now I kiss your toes and heel. You are solely mine!”

  And he was gone in the clear, blue water.

  Everything was still. The church bells stopped ringing. The last tones disappeared with the radiance on the red clouds.

  “You’re mine!” resounded in the depths. “You’re mine!” resounded in the heights, from the eternal.

  It’s lovely to fly from love to love, from the earth into heaven.

  A string snapped. A song of sorrow sounded. The kiss of death conquered the perishable. The prologue ended so that the drama of life could begin. Disharmony dissolved in harmony.

  Would you call this a sad story?

  Poor Babette! For her it was a time of terror. The boat drifted further and further away. No one on land knew that the couple had gone to the little island. Evening came. The clouds descended, and it got dark. Alone and despairing she stood there moaning. There was a devilish storm brewing. Lighting flashed over the Jura mountains, over Switzerland, and over the Savoy. Flash after flash on all sides—thunder boom after boom, rolling into each other and lasting for several minutes. It was as bright as sunlight in the lightning flashes. You could see each individual grapevine as if at midday, and then the brooding black darkness returned. The lightning came in ribbons, rings, and zigzags, struck all around the lake, and flashed from all sides, while the thunder claps grew in echoing rumbles. On land people pulled boats up on the shore. Everything living sought shelter. And the rain came streaming down.

  “Where in the world are Rudy and Babette in this terrible weather?” asked the miller.

  Babette sat with folded hands, her head in her lap. Mute with grief and from her screams and sobs.

  “In the deep water!” she said to herself, “Deep down, as if under the glacier, is where he is!”

  She thought about what Rudy had told her about his mother’s death, and his rescue, when he was pulled as a corpse from the cleft of the glacier. “The Ice Maiden has taken him again.”

  And there was a flash of lightning as blinding as the sun on white snow. Babette jumped up. The lake rose in that instant like a shining glacier. The Ice Maiden stood there—majestic, pale blue, shining—and at her feet lay Rudy’s corpse. “Mine!” she said, and then there was pitch darkness again, and pouring water.

  “It’s horrible,” whimpered Babette. “Why did he have to die just as our day of joy had come? God! Help me understand! Enlighten my heart! I don’t understand your ways. I’m groping for your omnipotence and wisdom.”

  And God enlightened her heart. A flash of thought, a ray of mercy—her dream from last night, large as life—flew through her in a flash, and she remembered the words she had spoken: the wish for the best for Rudy and herself.

  “Woe is me! Was the seed of sin in my heart? Was my dream my future, whose string had to be snapped for the sake of my salvation? Miserable me!”

  She sat whimpering in the pitch dark night. In its deep stillness she thought Rudy’s words still rang out—the last thing he said here: “The world has no more joy to give me.” Words uttered in an abundance of happiness, repeated in a torrent of grief.

  A few years have passed since then. The lake is smiling. The shores are smiling, and the grapevines are heavy with grapes. The steamship with its waving flags hurries by, and the pleasure boats with their two out-stretched sails fly like white butterflies across the mirror of the water. The railroad above Chillon is open and runs deep into the Rhone valley. Tourists get off at every station. They consult their little red bound travel guides to learn what attractions there are to see. They visit Chillon, see the little island with the three acacia trees out in the lake, and read about the engaged couple who rowed over there early one evening in 1856. They read about the bridegroom’s death and how “only the next morning did those on shore hear the bride’s screams of despair.”

  But the travel guide doesn’t say anything about Babette’s quiet life with her father. Not at the mill—strangers live there now—but in the pretty house by the railroad station from where she can still see on many evenings the snow-capped mountains above the chestnut trees where Rudy once played. In the eveni
ngs she sees the Alpenglow. The sunshine’s children camp up there and repeat the song about the wanderer whom the whirlwind tore the cloak from and carried away. It took his covering but not the man.

  There’s a rosy radiance on the mountain snow, and a rosy radiance in every heart that believes that “God lets the best happen for us!” But it’s not always as apparent to us as it was for Babette in her dream.

  NOTES

  1 Schreckhorn (13,379’) and Wetterhorn (12,142’) are mountains in the Bernese (Swiss) Alps.

  2 Canton in southern Switzerland that is predominantly French speaking.

  3 Waterfall in south-central Switzerland, near Interlaken.

  4 Swiss mountain (13,642’) not far from Grindelwald.

  5 I have omitted “As we know” from this sentence. Andersen had given information about Rudy’s father in an earlier version of the story. This “as we know” reference is evidently a remnant from an earlier version overlooked by Andersen in the final story.

  6 Cretinism, mental and physical retardation caused by a lack of thyroid hormones, was more common in Switzerland than in other European countries because of an iodine deficiency in the water of the Swiss Alps. A survey carried out in 1810 in what is now the Swiss canton of Valais revealed 4,000 cretins among 70,000 inhabitants.

  7 Mountain pass in the Alps in southern Switzerland.

  8 Pass in the Bernese Alps connecting Bern and Valais cantons.

  9 Warm dry wind that blows down the northern slopes of the Alps.

  10 English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), wrote The Prisoner of Chillon after visiting the castle with fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the summer of 1816. The castle, on Lake Geneva, was for the most part built by the counts of Savoy in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, although the site had been occupied for hundreds of years. During the sixteenth century the castle was used as a prison.

  EVANGELICAL AND RELIGIOUS TALES

  THE SNOW QUEEN AN ADVENTURE IN SEVEN STORIES

  THE FIRST STORY

  WHICH IS ABOUT THE MIRROR AND THE FRAGMENTS

  ALL RIGHT! Now WE’LL begin. When we’re at the end of the story, we’ll know more than we know now, for we’ll know just how evil this troll was. He was one of the absolute worst. He was “the devil” himself! One day he was in a really good mood because he had made a mirror that caused everything good and beautiful it reflected to shrink to almost nothing, and anything that was worthless and ugly to stand out and look even worse. The most beautiful landscapes looked like cooked spinach in it, and the best people became nasty looking or stood on their heads without stomachs. Faces became so contorted that they were unrecognizable, and if you had a freckle, you could be sure that it would cover your nose and mouth. The devil said that it was great fun. If a person had a good, pious thought, a sneer would appear in the mirror, and the troll devil would laugh in glee at his clever invention. All those who attended the troll-school—you see, he conducted a troll-school-spread the word that a miracle had occurred. It was now possible to see, they said, what the world and people really looked like. They ran around with the mirror, and finally there wasn’t a country or a person who hadn’t been distorted in it. Then they wanted to fly up to heaven itself to make fun of the angels and the Lord. The higher they flew with the mirror, the more it sneered. They could hardly hold on to it. Higher and higher they flew, closer to God and the angels. Then the mirror shook so violently from sneering that it flew out of their hands and fell to the earth where it broke in hundreds of millions, billions, and even more pieces, bringing about even more unhappiness than before. This was because some of the pieces were no bigger than a grain of sand, and these flew about in the world, and when they got into people’s eyes, they stayed there and people saw everything wrong, or only had an eye for what was wrong with a thing since every little piece of mirror retained the power of the whole. Some people also got a little piece of the mirror in their hearts, and it was quite dreadful. The heart became like a clump of ice. Some of the mirror pieces were so big that they were used for window panes, but you wouldn’t want to look at your friends through those. Other pieces were used for glasses, and then it went badly when people put them on just to see and to see justly. The devil laughed so his sides split, and he was tickled pink! But in the air some pieces of mirror were still flying around. Now listen to what happened!

  SECOND STORY

  A LITTLE BOY AND A LITTLE GIRL

  In the big city, where there are so many houses and people that there isn’t enough space for all people to have a little garden, and where most people have to be contented with flowers in pots, there lived two poor children who had a garden slightly larger than a flowerpot. They weren’t brother and sister, but they loved each other as if they were. Their parents lived right next to each other in two garret rooms, where the roof from one house leaned right up against its neighbor, and the gutters ran along the edges of the roof. From each house a little garret window opened, and you just had to stride over the gutters to get from one window to the next.

  The parents each had a large wooden box outside their windows, and here they grew kitchen herbs that they used for cooking, and a little rose tree. There was one in each box, and they grew very nicely. Then the parents decided to place the boxes crosswise over the gutters so they almost reached from one window to the next, and it looked almost exactly like two flower beds. The peas hung down over the boxes, and the rose trees shot out long shoots that wound around the windows and turned towards each other so that it became almost a kind of arbor of greenery and flowers. Since the boxes were very high, the children knew that they couldn’t climb on them, but they were often allowed to climb out to each other and sit on their small footstools under the roses. And they played there very nicely.

  All those who attended the troll-school spread the word that a miracle had occurred.

  Of course in the winter, that pleasure was over. The windows were often covered with frost, but then they warmed copper pennies on the stove, laid them against the frosty panes, and made delightful peepholes that were perfectly round. Behind each peered a gentle and friendly eye, one from each window; it was the little boy and the little girl. His name was Kai and hers was Gerda. In the summer they could easily see each other with just a leap, but in the winter they had to go down many, many steps and then up many more steps, and outside the snow drifted around.

  “The white bees are swarming,” said the old grandmother.

  “Do they have a queen bee too?” asked the little boy because he knew that the real bees had one.

  “They do!” said grandmother. “She is flying where they are closest together. She is the biggest of them all, and she never rests on this earth. She flies up into the black clouds. Many winter nights she flies through the city’s streets and peeks in the windows, and then they freeze so strangely, like flowers.”

  “Oh yes, I’ve seen that!” said both children, and then they knew it was true.

  “Can the Snow Queen come inside here?” asked the little girl.

  “Just let her come,” said the boy, “and I’ll set her on the warm stove so she’ll melt.”

  But the grandmother smoothed his hair and told other stories.

  That evening when little Kai was home and partly undressed, he crept up on his chair by the window and peered out of his little peephole. A couple of snowflakes fell outside, and one of these, the biggest, remained lying on the edge of one of the flower boxes. The snowflake grew and grew, finally it became a woman, dressed in the finest whitest gauze, as though she were made of millions of star-like specks. She was very beautiful and fine, but made of ice, the dazzling, gleaming ice—still she was alive. Her eyes stared like two clear stars, but there was no calm or quiet in them. She nodded at the window and waved her hand. The little boy became frightened and leaped down from the chair, and then it was as if a big bird flew by the window.

  The next day there was clear frost—and then came spring. The sun shone, gr
eenery sprouted, the swallows built nests, windows were opened, and the little children once again sat in their little garden high up in the gutters above all the stories of the house.

  The roses bloomed so exceptionally that summer; the little girl had learned a hymn, and there were roses in it, and when she heard it, she thought of her own and sang it for the little boy, and he sang along:

  “Roses in the valley grow

  And baby Jesus there we know”1

  And the little ones held hands, kissed the roses, and looked at God’s clear sunshine and talked to it, as if the Christ child were there. What beautiful summer days they were! How blessed it was to be out by the fresh rose trees that never seemed to stop blooming!

  Kai and Gerda sat looking at a picture book of animals and birds, it was then—the clock struck five on the big church tower—that Kai cried, “Ouch! Something stuck my heart! And I have something in my eye!”

  The little girl took hold of his neck to look. He blinked his eyes—no, there was nothing to be seen.

  “I think it’s gone,” he said, but it wasn’t gone. It was one of those splinters that had come from the mirror, the troll mirror, the one that we surely remember: the nasty glass which made everything good and great reflected in it seem small and ugly, while the evil and worthless qualities stood out, so that every flaw in a thing was immediately noticed. Poor Kai had also gotten a piece right into his heart. It would soon become like a clump of ice. After a while it didn’t hurt anymore, but it was there.

  “Why are you crying?” he asked. “It makes you look ugly! There’s nothing wrong with me! Yuck!” he cried out. “That rose there is worm eaten! And look how crooked that one is! Those really are some ugly roses. They look like the boxes they’re standing in,” and he kicked hard with his foot against the box and tore the two roses off.