And the work of art disappeared without a trace, but the candles all around the church turned into flowers of light, and the gilded stars in the dome cast down rays of light. The organ began to play on its own.9 Everyone said that that was the most astonishing thing they had ever seen.
“Should we summon the right man now?” asked the princess. “The one who made that work of art will be my husband and my lord.”
In a flash he was right in the church, accompanied by everyone in town. They were overjoyed and gave him their blessing. Not a soul there felt envy10—and, yes, that was really the most astonishing thing.
1. Two ate themselves to death. Andersen borrows from folklore the motif of excessive eating and drinking as part of a contest to reveal strength. Gluttony also figures as one of the seven deadly sins that march out of the clock.
2. But that was not how it was meant to be. Feats accomplished by the body will not win this particular contest. The narrator alerts us to the fact that real astonishment will be produced by something very different from displays of excess.
3. a huge clock in a case. The most astonishing thing is a work of art with “lifelike” figures. But it is also a mechanism that marks the passage of time on an hourly basis and memorializes ephemerality.
4. writing the first commandment on the tablets. It is deeply ironic that the first figure to emerge is Moses, who, in the Bible, enunciates the commandment forbidding representation. Words about images follow the warning about having no other gods: “You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth” (Exodus 20:3).
5. the sun had baked him. Similar ideas about skin color are presented at the beginning of “The Shadow,” and they become more significant in that text. Andersen’s notions of race remain quite naïve, and he habitually works in terms of the binary black/white, with black representing a “baked” quality (as he puts it). It is a hue associated with Italy rather than Africa, while white is generally the color of innocence and purity, though, when applied as an attribute to skin, it can take on a demonic quality.
6. a procession of the five senses. Synesthesia, the engagement of all the senses, plays an important role in Andersen’s aesthetics. It is therefore no accident that the work of art contains within it a group of allegorical figures representing all five senses.
7. The whole thing had been destroyed. The act of destruction came to have representative importance. “The Most Astonishing Thing” was reprinted in 1942 in a volume of stories edited by a group of scholars who were to become leaders of the Danish Resistance Movement. As Jackie Wullschlager points out: “Radical new illustrations were used to smuggle past the censors a message of hope and resistance to a wide readership. In the final picture, the night watchman who strikes down the destroyer is a Jewish rabbi with hat and beard, standing in condemnation of a brawny, semi-naked Aryan pinned to the floor by the tablets of Moses inscribed in Hebrew letters, watched by a crowd of ‘ordinary’ Danes in contemporary 1940s dress. . . . ‘Andersen would have been pleased to know that some of his works became a useful tool against the oppressors at a time when Denmark was not master in her own house’ ” (Nunnally and Wullschlager, 437).
8. dressed in her costly garments. Like many of the royal female personages in Andersen’s tales (most notably the princess in “The Swineherd”), this young woman focuses on material wealth and remains perfectly happy as long as she has a comfortable throne and fine dresses to wear.
9. The organ began to play on its own. The work of art is miraculously reconstituted. In the sacred setting of the church, miracles continue to happen, first when the figures come to life, then when the organ produces sounds on its own.
10. Not a soul there felt envy. Once the villain is vanquished, the envy that initially invaded the town during the contest disappears, and the story ends on a utopian note.
The Story of a Mother
Historien om en moder
Nye Eventyr. Anden Samling, 1848
Andersen’s moving story about mother and child was first published in English as a “Christmas book” in London in 1847. It was intended by Andersen as a tribute to his British audience, and he entitled the volume (which included four other tales) A Christmas Greeting to My English Friends. Dedicated to Charles Dickens, whom Andersen had met in the summer of 1847 (“I musch see Andersen,” Dickens is reported to have said about the Dane whose English was notoriously difficult to understand), the collection was warmly received. Andersen’s British fans, a group that included publishers, journalists, bankers, ministers, along with dukes and duchesses, swarmed his lodgings at Leicester Square. Andersen had reached what he believed to be the “pinnacle of success,” but he complained bitterly about how the British appreciated him in ways that his fellow Danes never could.
Andersen wrote to Dickens on December 6, 1847, about the stories dedicated to him:
I am back again in my quiet Danish room, but my thoughts are still with you in England. While occupying myself with a longer work, five stories sprang from my head, as flowers sprout up in the woods. I feel moved to bring you these fresh flowers from the garden of my poetry. I admire all of your books, and since we met, you yourself have become a fixture in my heart. Dear, noble Charles Dickens, you were the last to say good-by to me on the shores of England, so it is natural that I should want you to be the first to receive my greeting from Denmark, which only an affectionate heart can send.
(Travels, 287)
On his seventieth birthday, Andersen’s publishers presented him with a special volume entitled The Story of a Mother: In Fifteen Languages. “The Story of a Mother” may have been inspired by the mid-nineteenth-century pictorial tradition of representing the dying and deceased child. In July 1846, a year before the story was published, Andersen had visited the poet Jean Reboul in Nîmes and described in his diary the portraits on display in his home: “On the wall were two pictures illustrating his poem. One showed a dying child, a serious angel, and the mother who has fallen asleep while keeping a painful vigil. The other was an oil-painting. In it, the angel soared off with the child while the mother remained draped over the cradle.” Andersen said that the plot of the story came to him out of the blue, one day while he was taking a walk.
A mother was sitting at her child’s bedside.1 She was full of sorrow, so afraid that he might die. The child was very pale, and his little eyes were shut. His breath was faint, but every now and then he would sigh deeply and struggle for air. Then the mother would gaze with even greater sorrow at the little soul.
There was a knock at the door, and in walked a gloomy old man, wrapped in what looked like a big horse blanket. It kept him warm, and that’s what he needed to protect him from the chilly winter air. Everything outdoors was covered in ice and snow,2 and the wind was blowing so hard that it would sting your face.
The old man was shivering from the cold. The child was sleeping quietly for the moment, and so the mother put a little pot of beer on the stove to warm it up for the old man. The old man began to rock the cradle, and the mother sat down on a chair nearby. She watched over her ailing child, who was laboring with each breath, and she lifted his little hand.
“I’ll be able to keep him, won’t I? Surely the good Lord won’t take him from me!”
The old man, who was Death himself, nodded his head in a strange way that could mean yes but could also mean no. The mother bowed her head, and tears ran down her cheeks. Her head began to grow heavy.
For three days and three nights, she had not closed her eyes, and now she was dozing off, but only for a moment. She gave a start and awoke, shuddering from a chill in the air.
“What was that?” she asked, looking all around her. The old man had vanished, and her little child was gone as well. Death had taken the child away. The old clock in the corner was spinning and whirring. Its heavy lead weight dropped to the floor with a thud. Bam! The clock stopped.3
/> The poor mother rushed out of the house, calling for her child.
Out there in the snow she saw a woman, dressed in long black robes. “Death was in your house,” she said. “I just saw him rush off with your child in his arms. He moves faster than the wind, and he never returns what he takes with him.”
KAY NIELSEN
Death heads in a direction that is filled with clouds and flowers and illuminated by a heavenly body. The mother, whose hair has turned white, is in mourning, while Death, with a scythe in his pocket, has his back turned as he walks away with the child.
“Tell me which way he went,” the mother pleaded. “Only tell me which way, and I will find him.”
“I know the way,” said the woman wearing black. “But before I tell you, you must sing all the songs you once sang to your child. I am Night, and I love lullabies.4 I hear them often. When you sang them, I saw your tears.”
“I shall sing them again. You shall hear every one of them,” said the mother. “But don’t slow me down and keep me from finding my child. I’m in a hurry and have to catch up with them.”
Night remained silent and still. The mother sang and wept, wringing her hands all the while. She sang many songs, but she shed even more tears. At last, Night said to her: “Take the path to the right into the dark pine forest. That’s where Death was headed with your child.”
Deep in the forest, the mother reached a crossroads and had no idea which path to take. A hawthorn bush was growing at the crossroads.5 It had neither leaves nor flowers, since it was wintertime, and its branches were covered with frost.
“Did you see Death pass by here with my child?”
“Yes, I did,” the hawthorn bush replied. “But I won’t tell you where he went unless you warm me up against your heart. I’m freezing to death. I’m turning into ice.”
The mother pressed the hawthorn bush to her breast to warm it up.6 Its thorns dug so deeply into her flesh that big drops of red blood began to flow. The hawthorn bush felt such warmth at the heart of a sorrowful mother that it put forth fresh green leaves and blossomed on that cold winter night. And the hawthorn bush told her where she should go.
Soon the mother reached a great lake, where there were neither ships nor boats. The ice on the lake was too thin to hold her weight, and the waters were not open enough or shallow enough to let her wade across. But she had to figure out a way to cross if she wanted to find her child. She stooped down and was planning to drink the lake dry, even though she knew that it was not humanly possible. The unfortunate woman was hoping for a miracle.
“That will never work,” the lake told her. “Why don’t the two of us make a deal instead? I collect pearls, and your eyes are the clearest I have ever seen. If you promise to cry them out for me, then I will carry you over to the great greenhouse where Death dwells and tends his trees and flowers. Each one is a human life.”
“Oh, I would give anything to find my child,” the mother said in tears, and she began to cry even harder. Her eyes sank to the bottom of the lake7 and turned into two precious pearls. The lake lifted her up as if she were on a swing, and she flew in one great swoop to the other side of the lake where there was the strangest house you could imagine. It rambled on for many a mile, and it was impossible to tell whether it was a cavernous mountain covered with forests or whether it had just been hammered together. The unfortunate mother was not able to see it, for she had cried her eyes out.
“Where can I find Death, who took my little child from me?” she asked.
“He has not yet returned,” said the old woman who was taking care of the graves and was in charge of Death’s great greenhouse. How did you find your way here, and who helped you out?”
“The good Lord helped me,” she said. “He is so merciful, and you must be as well. “How can I find my little child?”
“I can’t tell which one is your child,” the woman said. “And you can’t see! Many flowers and trees have withered overnight, and Death will soon be here to transplant them. As you know, all humans have a tree or flower of life, depending on what kind of person they are. The ones here look just like other plants, but they have a heart that beats. A child’s heart beats too. You know the sound of your child’s heartbeat. Listen for it, and maybe you will recognize it. If I tell you what else you have to do, what will you give me?”
“I have nothing left to give,” the unfortunate mother said. “But I will go to the ends of the earth for you.”
“There’s nothing there that I need,” said the woman. “But you can give me your long black hair. You must know how beautiful it is, and I really like it. I will give you my white hair in return. That’s better than nothing.”
“Is that all you want?” the mother asked. “I’m happy to give it to you.” And she gave her beautiful black tresses away8 in exchange for the old woman’s white hair.
They both went into Death’s great greenhouse, where flowers and trees were growing with astonishing abundance. There were delicate hyacinths kept under glass bells, and around them big, hardy peonies. Water plants were growing there as well, some thriving, others ailing. Water snakes were resting on them, and black crabs had attached themselves to their stalks. You could see tall palm trees, plane trees, and oaks. Parsley was growing there with fragrant thyme. Each tree and flower had its own name, for each was the life of someone still living in China, in Greenland, or in some other part of the world. There were some big trees whose roots were about to burst the small pots confining them. There were also some wretched little flowers that had failed to thrive in spite of the attention lavished on them and the rich soil, with its mossy surroundings, in which they were planted. The sorrowful mother bent over the smallest plants and listened to their heartbeats, and among the millions she recognized her child’s.
“This is the one!” she cried, reaching toward a little blue crocus that had wilted and was drooping sadly to one side.
“Don’t touch that flower,” the old woman said. “Stay here. Death will be along any minute now, and you can try to keep him from pulling it up. Threaten to pull up other plants. That will frighten him, because he has to account to our Lord for each one. They can’t be uprooted without his permission.”
Suddenly a chilling wind blew through the room, and the blind mother knew that Death had arrived.
“How did you find your way here?” he asked her. “How did you get here before me?”
“I am a mother,” she said.
Then Death stretched his long hand out to the little wilted flower, but she cupped her hands around it, afraid that she might touch one of the petals. Death blew on her hands, and his breath was chillier than the coldest wind. Her hands fell limply to her sides.
“You have no power over me,” Death said to her.
“But the Lord does,” she said.
“I merely carry out his will,” Death said. “I am his gardener. I take his flowers and trees and transplant them to the great Garden of Paradise in the unknown country.9 But I can tell you nothing about how they fare there or what their life is like.” “Give my child back to me,” the mother pleaded, weeping. Suddenly she seized hold of two beautiful flowers, and, clutching one in each hand, she shouted at Death: “I’m desperate enough to start tearing your flowers out by the roots.” “Don’t touch them!” Death said. “You talk about how miserable you are, and yet you are willing to make another mother just as miserable.”
“Another mother!” the woman said, and she let go of the flowers.
“You can have your eyes back,” Death said. “They were shining so brightly that I fished them out of the lake. I had no idea they were yours. They are even clearer than they were before. Take them and look down into the deep well over here. I’ll give you the names of the flowers that you were about to uproot, and you’ll be able to see their future—the lives that you were planning to disturb and destroy.”
The woman looked down into the well, and it was sheer delight to see how one of the lives turned into a blessing f
or the world, spreading joy and happiness all around. Then she looked at the other life and saw nothing but sorrow and misery, fear and suffering.
“Both are God’s will,” Death said.
“Which one is condemned to misery and which one is blessed?”10 the mother asked.
“I can’t tell you,” Death replied. “But I can tell you this much: One of those two flowers represents your own child. You saw your own child’s fate, your own child’s future.”
The mother shrieked with terror. “Which of the two was my child? Tell me! Save the innocent one! Spare him such wretchedness. Better to take him from me. Deliver him to God’s kingdom. Ignore my tears. Ignore my pleas and everything I’ve said and done.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Death said. “Do you want your child back, or should I take him inside, to the land unknown to you?”
The mother began wringing her hands, and she fell to her knees, praying to God: “Do not listen to me when I defy your will, for you know better. Don’t listen to me! Don’t listen to me!”
She bowed her head deeply.
And Death went with her child to the unknown land.11
KAY NIELSEN
KAY NIELSEN
Time has stopped, with a clock that has neither numbers nor hands, in the simple room where the cradle stands that was rocked by the mother. The moonlit landscape reveals a bare tree that is a portent of what is to come.
1. A mother was sitting at her child’s bedside. The tableau that begins the story depicts a scene that was not uncommon in nineteenth-century life and literature. Given the high mortality rate for children in an earlier age, parents faced bleak odds and could prepare themselves for the worst with tales that offered some kind of solace. The folklore of many cultures has stories like this one, meant to comfort mothers grieving the loss of an infant. It is possible that Andersen was inspired by Danish tales that he had heard in the spinning rooms of Odense as a child.