KAY NIELSEN
The three dogs, their eyes wide with wonder, celebrate the wedding of the soldier and princess.
1. Tinderbox. The Danish term fyrtøjet means, literally, “fire steel.” Andersen may have been inspired by a tale from the Brothers Grimm called “The Blue Light,” in which a wounded soldier is dismissed without pay from army service by an ungrateful monarch. The soldier comes into the possession of a blue light with the same magical powers as the tinderbox. But his rendezvous with a princess and revenge on the king are elaborated in slightly different fashion, with the princess forced into servitude and the king pardoned for his offenses. Gregory Frost has produced a new version of the story called “Sparks” in an anthology entitled Black Swan, White Raven.
HARRY CLARKE
In a lush landscape filled with massive flowers, the soldier meets the witch and is perplexed that she would want him to climb into a hollow tree.
2. A soldier came marching down the road. “The Tinderbox” has been described as Andersen’s version of “Aladdin,” the story of a young man destined to succeed no matter how he behaves. Stith Thompson reviews the main features of the plot known to folklorists as “Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp”: the finding of the lamp in an underground chamber, the magic effects of rubbing it, the acquisition of a kingdom and a wife, the theft of the lamp and consequent loss of fortune, and the restoration of the lamp by means of another magic object. In Andersen’s tale, the tinderbox is not lost through deception but is left at home by accident. Critics have seen in “The Tinderbox” a domesticated version of the Oriental tale (Oxfeldt, 53).
Andersen thought of himself as an Aladdin figure and, near the end of his life, he addressed the town of Odense, which had gathered to honor him, as follows: “I cannot help thinking about Aladdin, who with the help of his magic lamp was able to create a magic castle.” Andersen added: “Then I looked out of the window, and said: ‘I was once a poor boy down there, but thanks to God I was also granted a magic lamp, Poetry, and when my lamp shines out over the world, giving pleasure to people, and when they recognize that it comes from Denmark, then my heart feels ready to burst’ ” (Travels, 380).
3. her lower lip dangled all the way down to her chest. The witch’s deformity is shared by a crone in a fairy-tale trio of old women whose physical defects serve as a powerful warning against spending too much time spinning. In the Grimms’ tale “The Three Spinners,” one of the women displays a foot deformed from excessive treading, a second sports a lower lip hideously enlarged from licking thread, and a third exhibits a thumb broadened out of shape from twisting thread. Witches, hags, and crones appear with some frequency in Andersen’s tales, most notably in “The Little Mermaid” and “The Snow Queen.”
4. more than a hundred lamps are burning down there. The radiant hall suggests that the underground realm is associated with celestial rather than sinister powers. The soldier, of course, has to climb up the tree before he slides down through it.
In Kafka: Gothic and Fairytale, Patrick Bridgwater points out that Kafka’s “Parable of the Doorkeeper” was inspired in part by Andersen’s “Tinderbox”: “In the parable, the doorkeepers, each more formidable than the one before, are clearly based on the dogs guarding successive rooms in ‘The Tinder-Box,’ and the gleam of what might or might not be ‘eternal radiance [light]’ . . . visible through the doorway to the Law, will have been suggested, in part, by the light from the three hundred lamps in the great hall of Andersen’s story” (Bridgwater, 125). Although a link between the two writers seems somewhat improbable, Kafka’s tales have often been framed as modernist anti–fairy tales, driven by the same existential anxieties found in Andersen, but without the overlay of Christian sentiments.
5. Round Tower. The Round Tower, located in Copenhagen, was commissioned by King Christian IV as an observatory and completed in 1642. A winding passage over 200 meters in length leads to a platform from which there is a magnificent view of the city.
6. The dog with eyes as big as teacups was sitting right there, glaring at him. The terrifying creature guarding the chamber is kin to Cerberus, the multiheaded dog of Greek mythology who guards the entrance to Hades. With the tail of a dragon and a neck bristling with snakes, Cerberus is even more frightening than the third in the trio of dogs guarding the underground chambers. The giant Argus of Greek mythology, with his one hundred eyes (only two of which sleep at a time), is another watchman characterized by unusual ocular traits.
7. as many copper coins as his pockets would hold. Copper, silver, and gold are known as the coinage metals, and, because they resist corrosion and do not react with other elements, they were at one time commonly used to make coins the world over. As the soldier’s journey progresses, the metals become progressively more precious, leading the soldier to discard the coins he had taken from the previous room. In some fairy tales, as in “The Twelve Dancing Princesses,” the sequence of metals starts with silver and gold and ends in diamonds. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia is famously bound to wed the man who can pick the right one of three caskets, one made of gold, another of silver, and a third of lead. Bassanio triumphs when he makes the modest choice and expresses a preference for the casket of lead.
8. every single sugar pig. Cakes and candy made in the shape of a pig were popular desserts in Denmark, and they make an appearance in “Ole Shut-Eye” (1850) as well. Andersen was an expert in capturing children’s fantasies about what money could buy, and the sugar pigs, tin soldiers, and rocking horses are much like the toys enumerated in “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” or “the whole world and a pair of new skates” in “The Snow Queen.”
9. “chop your head off!” With his knapsack and sword, the soldier can be seen to embody ruthless greed and violence—filling his knapsack with as much gold as possible and killing with his sword anyone who crosses him. Decapitation was a common punishment in European fairy tales, and Andersen’s tales include both this scene of decapitation and one of amputation (Karen’s feet are chopped off in “The Red Shoes”). Jack Zipes sees in the soldier’s acts of violence a reflection of “Andersen’s hatred for his own class (his mother) and the Danish nobility (king and queen),” which is “played out bluntly when the soldier kills the witch and has the king and queen eliminated by the dogs” (Zipes 1999, 94). He also sees in the tale a “formula” that leads to economic success: “Use talents to acquire money and perhaps a wife, establish a system of continual recapitalization (tinderbox and three dogs) to guarantee income and power, and employ money and power to maintain social and political hegemony” (Zipes 2005, 35).
10. for they were all so fond of him. Although the soldier inhabits a fairy-tale world in which the social actors are limited to those who help or harm the hero, Andersen persistently embedded biting satirical remarks into the plot. The friends seem to have no other function in the tale but to serve as reminders of shameless hypocrisy. These are the same friends who will find themselves unable to climb a flight of stairs to visit the penniless soldier.
11. Everyone says that she is very beautiful. The legendary beauty of the princess becomes intensified by the fact that she is kept in a mausoleum-type domicile. The copper castle resembles the tower Rapunzel inhabits—both are structures designed to wall in the heroines and keep them out of sight. The soldier’s appreciation of beauty, his desire to set eyes on the princess because of her storied beauty, makes him a true hero in Andersen’s fairytale pantheon.
12. anyone could tell she was a real princess. The beauty of this princess makes superfluous a test such as the one in “The Princess and the Pea.” Like the prince in “Snow White” and in “Sleeping Beauty,” the soldier cannot stop himself from planting a kiss on the lips of the slumbering princess.
13. marked every door in the city. The dog knows his fairy tales, for the marking of other doors to detract attention from the right door is a form of trickery used to outwit robbers in “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.”
14. She took a pair of big
golden scissors. In the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense can be found the large scissors that Andersen used to make nearly 1,500 paper cuttings on social occasions and while he was telling stories. Kjeld Heltoft’s Hans Christian Andersen as an Artist has a photograph of those scissors and reproduces many of the intricate paper cuttings. Heltoft quotes Baroness Bodild Donner’s description of Andersen at work: “When I was a child, I looked forward to his cutting out little dolls in white paper, all joined together, which I could place on the table and blow at so that they moved forward. . . . He always cut with an enormous pair of scissors—and I simply couldn’t understand how, with his big hands and enormous scissors, he could make such pretty, dainty things” (Heltoft, 207).
15. cut a tiny little hole in it. The strategy is familiar from tales like “Hansel and Gretel” and “The Robber Bridegroom,” in which breadcrumbs and ashes mark a path. In Andersen’s story, the plan works, but, in the Grimms’ “Hansel and Gretel,” birds eat the breadcrumbs, obliterating the trail that was to help the two children find their way back home.
16. rushing to the outskirts of the city where he would be hanged. As a schoolboy, Andersen was given the day off to travel to the outskirts of Skælskør, where the wife of a farmer, his daughter, and a manservant were hanged for conspiring to murder the farmer. The event left a deep impression on the young Andersen, who later wrote about it in his autobiography: “I shall never forget seeing the criminals driven to the place of execution: the young girl, deadly pale, leaning her head on the chest of her strapping sweetheart; behind them the manservant, livid, his black hair disheveled, and nodding with a squint at a few acquaintances, who shouted ‘Farewell’ to him. Standing by their coffins, they sang a hymn together with the minister; you could hear the girl’s voice above all the others. My legs could scarcely hold me up. These moments were more horrifying to me than the moment of death” (The Fairy Tale of My Life, 52). Note that the story begins with a decapitation and nearly ends with an execution.
Capital punishment was entirely eliminated as a possibility in Denmark in 1994. The last public execution was carried out in 1882, and 1892 marked the last year in which capital punishment was carried out in Denmark.
17. now, let’s hear what happened! Mimicking the style of the folk raconteur surrounded by listeners, Andersen seems to take his cue from the soldier’s query (“What’s the rush?”) and slows down the narrative pace by inserting a question of his own.
18. their eyes wide with wonder. The dogs, who themselves aroused wonder with their eyes as large as teacups, mill wheels, and the Round Tower, now gaze with astonishment at the wedding celebration for the soldier and his beautiful princess-bride. Ending the story with the image of wideeyed wonder points to Andersen’s deep commitment to providing the old-time enchantments of oral storytellers. In many ways, Andersen’s efforts to arouse wonder also anticipate Lewis Carroll’s use of stories to capture the attention and imagination of children by arousing their sense of wonder. Recall the ending of Alice in Wonderland, with Alice’s sister imagining that she might be able to “gather about her other little children, and make their eyes bright and eager with many a strange tale.”
The Wild Swans
De vilde svaner
Eventyr, fortalte for Børn, 1838
Andersen’s source for this tale was Matthias Winther’s “The Eleven Swans” (included at the end of the annotations to this tale),published in his Danish Folktales of 1823. It is easy to imagine why Andersen would have been drawn to a tale that included majestic birds that represented for him mys-tery,spirituality,and sublime beauty. Andersen must also have been drawn to the mute heroine of the tale, who, like the little mermaid, suffers in silence until her moment of glory and transfiguration. Raised as an only child and always seeking “brothers” and “sisters” in his friendships, Andersen saw in this story a fantasy of sibling solidarity that he could never realize in real life.
The Brothers Grimm had included versions of this tale type in their Children’s Stories and Household Tales published in 1812 and 1815. In “Twelve Brothers,” a girl accidentally turns her brothers into ravens; in “Seven Ravens,” a father curses his sons, transforming them into ravens; and in “Six Swans,” a wicked queen casts the spell that enchants her stepsons. All of these tales show how curses can be undone with heroic determination and heartfelt generosity. For the cultural critic Marina Warner, these stories were childhood favorites, for they tell a tale of female heroism: “I had no brothers, but I fantasized, at night, as I waited to go to sleep, that I had, perhaps even as many tall and handsome youths as the girl in the story, and that I would do something magnificent for them that would make them realize I was one of them, as it were, their equal in courage and determination and grace” (Warner, 392). “The Wild Swans,” like its many folkloric cousins, is the stuff of dreams, but its heroine accomplishes her task with unwavering resolve, and the bond between her and the brothers remains tender, strong, and indissoluble.
W. HEATH ROBINSON
Elisa picks nettles in a field covered with flowers. She herself wears a dress that, with its floral designs, reveals her alliance with nature.
Far, far away, where the swallows fly when it’s winter here,1 there lived a king who had eleven sons and one daughter named Elisa.2 The eleven brothers, princes all, went to school wearing stars on their chests and swords at their side. They did their writing on golden tablets with pencils of diamond, and they could recite their lessons just as well from memory as from a book. You could tell at once that they were princes. Their sister, Elisa, used to sit on a little stool made of mirror glass3 and look at a picture book that cost half the kingdom.4
Oh, those children were truly happy, but it was not to last forever.
The children’s father was king of all the land, and he married an evil queen who was not at all kind to the poor children.5 That was obvious from the very first day. During the festivities at the palace, the children played at entertaining guests.6 But instead of letting them have, as usual, all the cakes and baked apples that they wanted, the queen just gave them some sand in a teacup and told them to pretend that it was something special.
The next week the queen sent little Elisa out to the country to live with peasants. And it wasn’t long before she tricked the king into believing so many lies about the poor princes that his heart turned against them.
“Go out into the world and fend for yourselves,” the wicked queen told the boys. “Fly away like great big birds without voices.”7 But she could not harm the princes as deeply as she intended, for they turned into eleven beautiful white swans. Uttering strange cries, they flew out the castle windows, over the park and into the woods.
It was still quite early in the morning when they reached the farmer’s house, where their sister, Elisa, was sleeping. They hovered above the roof, craning their long necks and flapping their wings, but no one heard them or saw them. They had to keep flying, climbing up toward the clouds, far away into the wide world until they reached a vast, dark forest that stretched all the way down to the shores of the sea.
Inside the farmer’s house, poor little Elisa was playing with a green leaf, for she didn’t have any other toys. She poked a little hole in the leaf and looked at the sun through it. It was like looking at her brothers’ bright eyes. Whenever the warm sunshine touched her cheek, she was reminded of their kisses.
One day was just like the next. When the wind stirred the rosebushes outside the farmhouse, it would whisper: “Who could be more beautiful than you?”8 But the roses would shake their heads and say “Elisa is!” And when the old farmer’s wife sat by the doorway on Sunday, reading her hymnal, the wind would rustle the pages asking the book: “Who could be more devout than you?” “Elisa is,” the hymn book replied. And what the roses and the hymnal said was the plain truth.
When she turned fifteen, Elisa returned home. The queen saw how beautiful she had become and was filled with anger and resentment. She would have liked to turn her in
to a wild swan, along with her brothers, but she did not dare do it right away, because the king wanted to see his daughter.
Early the next morning, the queen went to the baths, which were built of marble and furnished with soft cushions and the loveliest tapestries. She took three toads, kissed them, and said to one of them: “Hop onto Elisa’s head when she gets into the bath so that she will grow to become as sluggish as you are.” And to the second she said: “Cling to her forehead so that she will become as ugly as you are, and her father won’t recognize her.” And to the third toad she whispered, “Settle on her heart and give her an evil soul so that she will suffer.” Then she lowered the three toads into the clear water, which promptly turned a greenish color. She called Elisa, undressed her, and made her get into the bath. Once Elisa was in the water, one of the toads climbed into her hair, another onto her forehead, and the third against her heart. Elisa did not seem to be aware of them at all, and, when she stood up, three red poppies were floating on the water.9 If the toads had not been poisonous and the witch had not kissed them, they would have turned into red roses, but they became flowers nonetheless, merely by touching Elisa’s head and heart. She was too innocent and devout for witchcraft to have any effect on her.
When the evil queen realized this, she rubbed Elisa all over with walnut juice until she turned dark brown, smeared her beautiful face with a vile ointment, and left her lovely hair in a tangled mess. You could not recognize the beautiful Elisa. When her father set eyes on her, he was horrified and insisted that she could not be his daughter.10 No one else would have known who she was except the watchdog and the swallows, but they were humble creatures and had no say in the matter. 11
Poor Elisa began to weep as she thought of her eleven brothers, who were all so far away. With a heavy heart, she stole out of the palace and spent the day wandering over fields and moors until she came to a vast forest. She had no idea where to turn, but she was full of sorrow and longed to be with her brothers, who had also been driven out into the wide world. She set her heart on finding them.