The stork began to tell them about how hot it was in Africa, about the pyramids, and about ostriches that can run across the desert like wild horses. But the ducks could not understand what he was saying and again they nudged each other: “We all agree, don’t we, that he’s a fool.”
“Yes, a real fool,” the turkey declared with a “gobble, gobble,” while the stork kept silent and turned his thoughts to his beloved Africa.
“Those are nice thin legs you have,” the turkey said. “How much are they a yard?”
“Quack, quack, quack,” chuckled the ducks, and the stork pretended not to hear.
“You may as well join in,” the turkey told him, “for that was a really witty remark, but maybe it went over your head! No, indeed, he is not very bright, so we will have to rely on ourselves for fun.”
The hens clucked away, and the ducks kept on quacking. It was dreadful to see how they made fun of him among themselves.
Hjalmar went over to the chicken coop door and called over to the stork, who hopped out on the deck. He had had a chance to recover, and it looked as if he was thanking Hjalmar by nodding in his direction.12 Then he spread out his wings and flew away to the warm countries. The hens went on clucking, the ducks quacked, and the turkey gobbled until he was red in the face.
“Tomorrow we shall make a soup out of you,” said Hjalmar, and then he woke up in his own little bed. The voyage arranged by Ole Shut-Eye had been truly astonishing.
THURSDAY
“What’s next?” Ole Shut-Eye asked.
“Now don’t be afraid if I show you a little mouse.” And there sat the quaint little creature, right in Ole Shut-Eye’s hand. “It has come,” he said, “to invite you to a wedding. Two little mice are about to enter the state of holy matrimony tonight. They are living under the wooden boards in your mother’s pantry in a most charming little flat.”
“How will I ever be able to squeeze through that tiny mouse hole in the floor?” Hjalmar asked.
“Leave that to me,” Ole Shut-Eye said. “I’ll make you small enough.” And as soon as he used some of the magic spray on Hjalmar, the boy became smaller and smaller13 until he was no taller than your finger. “Now you will be able to wear the tin soldier’s uniform.14 It should fit perfectly, and uniforms are always so smart for parties.”
“Rather!” Hjalmar said, and the next moment he looked like the most dashing tin soldier.
“If you’ll kindly be seated in your mother’s thimble,” the mouse said, “I shall have the honor of pulling you.”
“Are you really willing to go to all that trouble?” Hjalmar cried out. And, with that, he was whisked off to the mouse wedding.
At first they went down a long passage under the floorboards. There was just room enough for them to drive through in the thimble, and the whole passage was lit up with touchwood.15
“Doesn’t it smell delightful here?” said the mouse. “This whole road has been greased with bacon rinds, and nothing can beat that.”
Then they entered the wedding hall. To the right stood all the little lady mice, whispering and giggling as if they were making fun of each other. To the left stood all the gentlemen mice, twirling their mustaches with their forepaws. The bridegroom and bride stood in a hollow cheese rind in the center of the floor and began kissing each other like mad, in plain view of all the guests. Well, after all, they were engaged and about to be married.
Guests kept arriving, and the mice were nearly trampling each other to death. The bridal couple had posted themselves in the doorway, so that no one could come in or go out. Like the passage, this whole hall had been greased with bacon rind, and that was the complete banquet. But for dessert, a pea was carried in. A little mouse in the family had gnawed the name of the bridal couple on it—or at least the first letter of the name. That was really something out of the ordinary.
The mice all agreed that it had been a charming wedding, and all the conversations had been just perfect. Hjalmar drove back home again. He had spent time in very smart society, but he had had to put up with no end of shrinking in order to be small enough to fit in that tin soldier’s uniform.
FRIDAY
“It’s amazing how many grown-ups are anxious to get hold of me,” Ole Shut-Eye said. “Especially the ones with bad consciences. ‘Dear little Ole,’ they tell me, ‘we can’t shut our eyes. We lie awake all night long staring at our wicked deeds sitting on the edge of the bed like ugly little goblins and making us soak in perspiration. Can’t you chase them off so that we can have a good night’s sleep?’ And then they add with a deep sigh: ‘We’re only too glad to pay. Good night, Ole. The money’s on the windowsill.’ But I don’t do anything for money,” Ole Shut-Eye declared.
“Well, what should we do tonight?” little Hjalmar asked.
“I’m not sure if you care to go to another wedding. But it will be quite different from last night’s. Your sister’s big doll, the one that looks like a man and is named Herman, is supposed to marry a doll named Bertha. It’s Bertha’s birthday too, and that means there will be presents galore.”
“Yes, I know what that means,” Hjalmar said. “Whenever the dolls need new clothes, my sister lets them have a birthday or a wedding. It’s happened at least a hundred times already.”
“And tonight’s wedding is the one hundred and first, and when this one’s over, there won’t be any more. That’s why it’s going to be so splendid. Just take a look.”
Hjalmar looked over at the table. He could see a little cardboard house with lights in the window. Tin soldiers were presenting their arms outside it. The bride and bridegroom were seated on the floor, leaning up against the leg of the table and looking very thoughtful, and with good reason. Ole Shut-Eye, rigged out in Grandmother’s black petticoat, conducted the ceremony. When the wedding was over, all the furniture in the room joined in to sing the following beautiful song, written for the occasion by the pencil, and sung to the tune of the soldier’s tattoo:
Our song will greet through wind and weather
These two that love has brought together.
Neither knows quite what’s been done,
And who’s to say what has been won?
Wood and leather blend together,
Hurrah for them in wind and weather!
Next came the wedding presents. The pair said that they didn’t need any food at all, because they were planning to live on love.
“Shall we go to the country, or would you rather travel abroad?”16 the bridegroom asked. They consulted the swallow, who was a great traveler, as well as the old hen, who had hatched five broods of chicks. The swallow described the lovely warm countries, where grapes hang in heavy, ripe bunches, and where the air is soft. The colors on the mountains are something we never see here.
“Still, they don’t have our green cabbage,” the hen declared. “I once spent the summer with all my chicks in the country. There was a gravel pit there in which we could scratch all day, and then we had the use of a garden where there were cabbages. Oh, how green they were! I can’t imagine anything more lovely!”
“One cabbage looks just like the next,” the swallow said. “And the weather is often so bad here.”
“Oh, well, we’re used to that,” the hen replied.
“But it’s so cold here. It’s often freezing.”
“That’s good for the cabbage,” said the hen. “And besides, we have warm weather at times. Don’t you remember that hot summer we had four years ago? It was so hot for five weeks that you could barely breathe. Then too, we don’t have all those poisonous creatures that live abroad. And we don’t have robbers.17 Anyone who doesn’t believe that ours is the most beautiful country is a scoundrel who doesn’t deserve to live here!” Tears came into the hen’s eyes. “I’ve done a bit of traveling myself. I once made a twelve-mile trip in a coop, and there was no joy in it at all.”
“That hen is a sensible woman!” Bertha the doll said. “I don’t fancy traveling in the mountains either, because all you
do is go up and then down. No, let’s move to the gravel pit and take walks in the cabbage patch.”
That settled the matter.
SATURDAY
“Any stories tonight?” little Hjalmar asked, as soon as Ole Shut-Eye had got him to bed.
“We haven’t time this evening,” Ole told him, as he opened his umbrella with the prettiest pictures on it. “Take a look at these Chinese figures.” The entire umbrella looked like a large Chinese bowl, with blue trees and arched bridges, with little Chinese figures nodding their heads.
“We must have the whole world spruced up18 by tomorrow morning,” Ole Shut-Eye said. “You see, it’s Sunday, a holiday. I have to go over to the church tower to make sure that the little church elves are polishing the bells so that they will sound their best. I must check the fields to make sure that the wind is blowing the dust off the leaves and grass, and then there is my hardest task, taking down all the stars and polishing them. I put them in my apron, but, before that, I have to number each one along with the place it comes from so that they can return to their proper places, otherwise they won’t fit tight and we would end up with too many shooting stars, because one after another would come tumbling down.”
“Oh, I say here, Mr. Shut-Eye,” an old portrait hanging on the wall of Hjalmar’s bedroom said. “I am Hjalmar’s greatgrandfather. Thank you for telling the boy your stories, but you mustn’t put strange ideas in his head. The stars can’t be taken down and polished. The stars are globes just like the earth. That’s the beauty of them.”
“Thanks very much, Great-grandfather,” Ole Shut-Eye said. “I’m grateful to you. You are the head of the family, of course, the Grand Old Man, but I’m even older than you are. I’m an ancient heathen. The Greeks and Romans called me the Dream God. I visit the homes of the best families all the time. I know how to get along with all kinds of people, big and small. Now you may tell the stories on your own.” Ole Shut-Eye picked up his umbrella, and off he went.
“Well! Nowadays you can’t even express an opinion,” the old portrait grumbled.
And just then Hjalmar woke up.
SUNDAY
“Good evening,” Ole Shut-Eye said, and Hjalmar nodded, and then he turned his great-grandfather’s portrait to the wall so that it wouldn’t interrupt them, as it had the night before.
“Please tell me some stories,” he said. “The one about the five peas living in a pod, the cock-a-doodle-doo that courted the hen-a-doodle-doo, and the darning needle who gave herself such airs19 because she believed she was a sewing needle.”
“That might be too much of a good thing,” said Ole Shut-Eye. “I’d rather show you something. In fact, I’m going to introduce you to my own brother.20 He is also named Ole Shut-Eye, but he never comes more than once to a person. When he comes, he takes you for a ride on his horse and tells you stories. He only knows two: one is more beautiful than anyone on earth can imagine, and the other is so ghastly that it’s beyond description.”
Ole Shut-Eye lifted Hjalmar up to the window and said: “Look, there’s my brother, the other Ole Shut-Eye. He’s also known as Death. You can see that he doesn’t look nearly as bad as he is made out to be in pictures, where he is nothing but a skeleton. No, his coat is embroidered with silver. It’s like the magnificent uniform of a hussar, with a cloak of black velvet billowing behind him over his horse. See how he gallops along!”
Hjalmar saw the other Ole Shut-Eye riding away, carrying both young and old on his horse. He placed some in front of him, others behind, but he always asked them first: “What does it say in your report card?” “Good,” they all replied. Then he would say: “Let me see for myself.” And then they had to show him the cards, and the ones who had “very good” or “excellent” would get to ride in front of him and hear a beautiful story.21 But those who had “mediocre” or “poor” had to ride behind him and hear a ghastly tale. They trembled and sobbed and tried to jump off the horse, but they couldn’t do that because they were stuck fast to it.
“Why, Death is a most wonderful Ole Shut-Eye,” Hjalmar exclaimed. “I’m not at all afraid of him.”
“No, you needn’t be,” Ole Shut-Eye told him. “But be sure that you always have a good report card.”
“Most enlightening!” the portrait of Great-grandfather muttered. “It does some good, after all, to speak your mind.” And he was quite satisfied.
There! That’s the story of Ole Shut-Eye. Tonight he can tell you some more himself.
1. they have had no dreams at all. Ole Shut-Eye, like Santa Claus and other benevolent figures, differentiates between naughty and nice, providing an instructive moral example in this bedtime story. Being deprived of the beautiful images in bedtime stories proves to be a powerful punishment, but not quite as bad as the one for “poor” or “mediocre” marks in school, as described at the end of the tale.
2. until the room had become a beautiful bower. The child’s bedroom turning into a place where things grow will be familiar to readers of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are. E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Golden Flower Pot, which also influenced Andersen’s “The Goblin and the Grocer,” similarly describes a writing studio turning into an outdoor landscape. From Hoffmann (one of the three writers whom Andersen acknowledged as the most important influences on his writing—the other two were Sir Walter Scott and Heinrich Heine), Andersen learned how to build the transition from the ordinary to the extraordinary, finding poetry and magic in everyday objects and in the diminutive mode.
3. No one has ever seen anything like it! With a few deft strokes the narrator manages to evoke a vivid new world and coax it into being. Moving from the visual (“prettier than a rose”) to the olfactory (“with a fragrance so sweet”) to the gustatory (“if you tasted it”), he not only “spruces things up” but creates beauty that is drenched in light (“the fruit gleamed like gold”) and full of savory delights (“buns filled with currants”).
4. over in the drawer where Hjalmar kept his schoolbooks. The imaginative and fantastic are often shadowed by the instructive and pedagogical in Andersen’s stories for children. Just when Hjalmar seems to be set free for the pleasures of storytelling and dreaming, the slate and the copybook demand attention and turn the volume up so high that they cannot be ignored. Andersen saw deep conflicts between education and imagination, and he mourned how schooling banishes enchantment from the child’s world: “As long as the little one has never been further than Copenhagen, and their grandmother or nurse has filled their heads with enchanted princes and princesses, with mountains of gold and talking birds, the little heads will dream about this fantasy land and will look over the sea which meets the sky between the Danish and Swedish coasts. That’s where it must be, they think, as they paint a picture of the lovely new world, but they grow older and go to school, and this immediately destroys the fantasy land, because they learn that beyond the water lies Prussia and all of Germany” (Travels, 289).
5. until they were just as elegant and straight as their models. Beautiful handwriting is important for Andersen, and he makes a point of emphasizing the capabilities of the artist student in “The Goblin and the Grocer.” Ole Shut-Eye has the power to transform Hjalmar’s handwriting, but only for the duration of his stay. The magic loses its effect with the dawning of a new day.
6. every piece began chattering. In “The Goblin and the Grocer,” the supernatural creature in the title also has the ability to endow objects with the power to speak. He does so by placing a human tongue on pieces of furniture and other objects.
7. Ole Shut-Eye used his magic spray on the painting. The landscape described in the painting is one that appears frequently in Andersen’s works, most notably in “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Nightingale.” A forest, a lake, a castle, and flowers seem to be the primary features in many of the nature scenes, and Andersen did not hesitate to repeat those elements with little variation. Just as Hjalmar’s room can transform itself into an outdoor scene, so too the painting can come to life, a
llowing Hjalmar to enter its domain and to travel on a boat down its river through forests and towns. The painting as portal to a wonder world functions like the books and mirrors of many fantasy worlds, for example Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.
8. the trees were telling tales about robbers and witches. Hjalmar enters a world that contains many allusions to other tales by Andersen. The description of the landscape echoes that of other tales, but there are also swans with golden crowns (“The Wild Swans” and “The Ugly Duckling”), tales about robbers and witches that recall “The Snow Queen,” and flowers, elves, and butterflies that indulge in activities reminiscent of what goes on in “Thumbelina.”
9. the woman who had looked after him when he was a small boy. In meeting up with his nanny, Hjalmar seems to be regressing, moving back into the past rather than maturing and moving forward. But like Gerda and Thumbelina, he is drawn into a world of light, beauty, and poetry, thereby developing an artistic sensibility that runs counter to what he learns in school.
10. There he was on the deck. Like the swallow in Thumbelina, this stork is unable to keep up with the others and collapses from exhaustion. Thumbelina revives the swallow through her tender ministrations, unlike Hjalmar, who is both kind in liberating the stork from the henhouse and aggressive in threatening to use the turkey for the next day’s dinner.
11. asked the stork who he was. The cruelty of the barnyard is well known from “The Ugly Duckling,” which shows the newly hatched bird attacked as a misfit by the other animals.
12. he was thanking Hjalmar by nodding in his direction. The motif of the grateful animal is found in the folklore of many cultures. “The White Snake” and “The Queen Bee” in the Grimms’ collection show the hero benefiting from interventions to protect the safety of animals. The hero’s humility and suitability for a rise in rank are often demonstrated through his willingness to assist those who are lower in social station (beggars), less strong (old men and women), and lower on the food chain. Hjalmar’s willingness to liberate the stork from the taunts of the other animals demonstrates his kindness and maturity, but at the same time it does not signify pure benevolence, for Hjalmar is not at all loath to contemplate the slaughter of the turkey for tomorrow’s soup.