Now it was the teapot’s turn to sing, but it had a cold, and said it couldn’t sing unless it was boiling. But that was just snobbery: it didn’t want to sing unless it could stand on the table in front of the master and mistress.
Over in the window sat an old quill pen that the maid used for writing. There was nothing unusual about it, except that it had been dipped far too deeply into the inkwell, and it was quite proud of that. “If the teapot doesn’t want to sing,” the quill said, “then leave it alone. There’s a cage right outside with a nightingale in it that can sing. It hasn’t studied music, of course, but we won’t say anything mean about that tonight.”8
“I find it quite inappropriate,” said the tea kettle, who was the kitchen singer as well as half-sister to the teapot, “that we should listen to a foreign bird like that. Is that patriotic? I’ll let the market basket decide.”
“I am just annoyed,” said the market basket. “I am more deeply annoyed than you can imagine! Is this an appropriate way to spend the evening? Wouldn’t it be much better to put the house to rights? Everything would be in its proper place and I would direct the whole show. That would be something!”
“Yes, let’s put on a show!” they all said together. At that very moment, the door opened. It was the maid, and so they all fell quiet. No one let out a peep. But there was not a pot among them that did not know what it was capable of and how fine it was. “Yes, if I had wanted to,”9 they thought, “it would have been quite a lively evening!”
The maid took the matches and struck them—God almighty, how they spluttered and burst into flame.
“Now everyone can see that we are the finest,” they thought. “How we gleam! What light!”10—and then they burned out.
“That was a lovely fairy tale,” said the queen. “I felt just as if I was in the kitchen with the matches. Yes, you shall have our daughter now.”
“Certainly,” said the king. “You shall have our daughter on Monday.” They now addressed him informally, since he was going to be part of the family.
The wedding was arranged and the night before the ceremony, the whole town was illuminated. There were rolls and pastries for the masses; street urchins stood on their toes, crying “Hurrah!” and whistling through their fingers. It was really magnificent.
“Well, I had better do something as well,”11 thought the merchant’s son. He bought rockets, noisemakers, and as many kinds of fireworks as you can imagine, put them into his trunk, and flew up into the air with it.
Boom, how the fireworks crackled! How they sparkled!
All the Turks jumped in the air when they saw the fireworks, and their slippers flew up to their ears. They had never before seen such a sight in the heavens. Now they knew that it was indeed the god of the Turks who was going to marry their princess.
As soon as the merchant’s son landed back down in the forest on his trunk, he thought: “I’ve got to go into town to hear what people have to say about it!” And it was completely clear why he wanted to do that.
Well, people surely were talking! All the people he asked had seen it in their own way, but it had been lovely for all of them.
“I saw the god of the Turks himself,” one of them said. “He had eyes like shining stars and a beard like foaming waters!”
“He flew in a cape of flames,” said another. “The loveliest angel children peeked out of the folds of it.”
He heard lovely things, and he was going to be married the next day.
The merchant’s son returned to the forest to get back in the trunk—but where was it? The trunk had burned up. A spark from the fireworks had been smoldering and caught fire, and the trunk had turned into a pile of ashes. He could no longer fly, and he could not go back to his bride.
All day she stood on the roof, waiting for him. And she is still waiting while he is traveling all around the world, telling fairy tales.12 But they are not as funny as the one he told about the matches.
KAY NIELSEN
The patient princess, with a crescent on her head, waits serenely for the merchant’s son.
1. His friends no longer cared about him. The merchant’s son resembles in many ways the soldier in “The Tinderbox.” Both fellows lose their friends as soon as the money runs out. Both court princesses whose parents are opposed to a marriage.
2. in the land of the Turks. The South and the Orient were Andersen’s destinations as a tourist, and he avoided traveling in northern regions. As he wrote to Henriette Hanck in 1835: “I do not belong here in the Northern countries and regard it as one of my earthly accidents that I was born and brought up on the corner of Greenland and Novaja Sembla” (Kleivan 289). Andersen traveled to the Orient, as he called it, over a period of nine months in 1840 and 1841. After seeing Athens, he sailed through the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara to Constantinople. According to Jens Andersen, no Dane before Andersen had made that journey.
3. “some man will make her very unhappy.” The same prophecy appears in “The Tinderbox,” and the princess in that story is also kept isolated from the rest of the world.
4. She was so beautiful that the merchant’s son had to kiss her. A sleeping princess (again, as in “The Tinderbox”) is irresistible, and the merchant’s son awakens his sleeping beauty with a kiss. The attractions of beauty are so powerful that they lead to an irrepressible desire for erotic contact.
5. “will be here for tea.” The mix of the bourgeois and the banal with the regal and the poetic is more pronounced here than in many other works by Andersen. The mingling of high and low, aristocratic and ordinary, foreign and familiar imparts a certain charm, as it does in “The Nightingale.”
6. “one that will also make us laugh.” The requirement that stories be both instructive and entertaining goes back to Horace’s dictum that poets can strive to delight or instruct (aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae). The merchant’s son must combine the two in order to satisfy both the sultan and his wife.
7. “We can all relate to that kind of thing so well.” The clay pot’s notion of “safe” narratives that merely evoke the familiar and remain in the register of the idyllic is a jab at Danish critics, who veered away, in Andersen’s view, from anything that was exotic, edgy, and controversial.
8. “we won’t say anything mean about that tonight.” Andersen mocks his critics by representing one of them as a quill pen who believes that birds need to study music before they sing rather than creating song spontaneously. “The Flying Trunk” contains Andersen’s most sustained critique of the Danish critics who disparaged him for his lack of education, and he delighted in reading the story out loud.
9. “if I had wanted to.” Like many of the inanimate objects in Andersen’s stories, most notably the tin soldier, the objects claim voices and agency yet are unable to speak or move when humans enter the room. Note how the maid’s entrance produces stillness and silence.
10. “What light!” In “The Little Match Girl,” the light from the matches supplies only a brief moment of illumination, but one that is incandescently poetic. Here the matches claim to offer the same kind of luminosity, but in fact they seem to sputter and fizzle quickly, providing none of the sparklingly brilliant effects found in the visionary experiences of the match girl. Andersen intended them to represent his critics.
11. “I had better do something as well.” Up until this point in the narrative, the merchant’s son has relied on words alone to impress first the princess, then her parents. Inspired by the lighting up of the city, he decides to use sound and light to impress its inhabitants. But note that these brilliant effects consume themselves, turning into nothing but ashes. The matches too can only flare up and then expire, leaving nothing behind but burnt flint or ashes.
12. traveling all around the world, telling fairy tales. Just as Andersen represents himself at the end of “The Nightingale” as the poet at whose window the nightingale has made a nest, he provides a self-portrait here by presenting the merchant’s son as a traveler famous for
telling fairy tales that combine wit and humor with moral instruction.
Heartache
Hjertesorg
Historier, Anden Samling, 1853
This gem of a story encapsulates many of the major themes in Andersen’s works, taking us from death and existential anxiety to suffering and social grief. It can be seen as a poetics in a nutshell. Its origins lie in a diary entry of May 26, 1847, in which Andersen described the incidents of “part one,” then turned to the description of a beggar, an abject figure who arouses both empathy and fear: “There was somebody knocking at the door. A dreadful tramp had managed to find my room. I gave him 24 pennies. ‘Were you not born in the neighborhood of Odense?’ he asked. I got him out but feared he might hide and return in the dead of night to steal” (Thomas Bredsdorff, 7). In contrast to the beggar, the girl in “Heartache” arouses empathy. Seen from above and at a distance, she elicits aesthetic pleasure by combining beauty, youth, poverty, and suffering.
Despite the narrator’s insistence that the prelude is unnecessary, the story in fact needs both parts, with one introducing the narrator as a “heartless” figure who is unable to connect with the widow’s deeper reason for coming to sell her shares and the other presenting the narrator as equally “heartless” in his inability to act to relieve the girl’s “heartache.” The author sees in these encounters nothing more than an opportunity for telling tales, for positioning himself as an agent of art, relentlessly keeping himself spatially above and emotionally beyond the heartaches of the real.
The story we have for you is really in two parts. The first part could be left out,1 but it provides some background information that will be useful!
We were staying at a manor house in the country, and it happened that the owner was away for a day or two. In the meantime, a lady arrived from a neighboring town, bringing her little dog with her. She explained that she had come to sell her shares in the tannery. She had her certificates with her, and we advised her to put them in an envelope and to write on it the address of the proprietor of the estate, “General War Commissary, Knight, etc.”
She listened to us carefully, picked up a pen, hesitated, and then asked us to repeat the address, this time saying it slowly. We did that, and she started writing, but as soon as she got to “General War,” she stopped, took a deep breath, and said: “I’m only a woman!” Her little pug was down on the floor while she was writing, and he was growling, for the dog had come with her for pleasure and for his health, and he shouldn’t have been obliged to stay on the floor. He could be recognized by his snub nose and fleshy back.
“He won’t bite,” the lady said. “He doesn’t have any teeth. He’s really like one of the family, devoted but grumpy, but my grandchildren are to blame for that. They put on weddings and want him to play the bridesmaid, but that’s just too much for the poor old fellow.”
She left the certificates and picked her little dog up. That’s the first part of the story, which I could have left out!
Moppsie died!2 That’s part two.
About a week later we went back to town and stayed at an inn. Our windows looked out into a courtyard,3 which was divided in two by a wooden fence. One section had skins and hides, raw and tanned,4 hung up to dry. You could see all the equipment needed to run a tanning business, and it belonged to the widow.5 Moppsie had died that morning and was supposed to be buried in that part of the yard. The widow’s grandchildren, that is, the tanner’s widow’s—for Moppsie had never married—had filled in the grave, which was so beautiful that it must have been a real pleasure to lie in it.
The grave had a border of broken flowerpots with sand strewn all over it. At its head, someone had put a bottle of beer, with the neck turned upward, and that wasn’t at all symbolic.
The children performed a dance around the grave, and the oldest of the boys, a practical lad of seven, proposed charging admission of one trouser button to give everyone on the street the chance to see Moppsie’s grave. Any boy could afford that, and boys could also pay for girls. The proposal was adopted by acclamation.
All the children living on the street, and even those living on the little lane behind it, came marching in, and each one paid one button. Many of them could be seen that afternoon with just one suspender, but then again they had seen Moppsie’s grave, and the sight of that was worth far more than a button.
Outside near the entrance to the tannery you could see a little girl dressed in rags.6 She was beautiful, with the prettiest curls and with eyes so clear and blue that it was a pleasure to look into them. She didn’t say a word, and she wasn’t crying, but every time the gate opened, she gazed into the yard for as long as she could. She didn’t have a button, as she knew very well, and so she had to stand sorrowfully outside until all the others had seen the grave and everyone was gone. Then she sat down, put her little brown hands up to her eyes and burst into tears. She alone had not seen Moppsie’s grave.7 It was the kind of heartache that usually is experienced only by grown-ups.
We witnessed all this from above—and from above you can always smile8 at this incident as well as at many of our own heartaches and those of others! That’s the story, and whoever doesn’t understand it should go buy a share in the widow’s tannery.9
1. The first part could be left out. The bridge between the two parts seems indeed to be quite slight. The first part of the story offers background on the owner of the tannery and on the dog for whom the funeral is staged by the children in part two. Death is introduced early on in the form of the status of the old lady as widow who is liquidating her assets in a business that traffics in death.
2. Moppsie died! The hinge between the two parts of the story is provided by the death of the dog, whose owner appears in part one and whose grave is prepared by the children in part two. The sentence is italicized and given an exclamation mark to make it more momentous, and it forms an odd contrast to the fact that the tanner’s death is never mentioned and is signaled only by his wife’s status as a widow and in her selling of the shares in the tannery.
3. Our windows looked out into a courtyard. The narrator, whose identity is concealed behind a “we,” is looking down on a scene that involves children. The courtyard, like the story, is divided in two, but half of it remains invisible—only the area with the tannery is described. The narrator’s “other half” also remains concealed, and it is odd to find Andersen the bachelor presenting himself here as part of a couple.
4. skins and hides, raw and tanned. A tannery is the site of death for animals, and there is an important contrast between the pampered dog (who resents being on the floor) and the animals who have been slaughtered and skinned.
5. it belonged to the widow. The widow, and not just her deceased husband, is implicated in the business of death.
6. a little girl dressed in rags. Like the little match girl, this waif is alone, isolated from the others through her poverty and, despite her beauty, unable to elicit sympathy from the other children.
7. She alone had not seen Moppsie’s grave. It is not at all clear that the girl is grieving for Moppsie. She seems instead to be disconsolate because she is excluded from the childhood ritual and from seeing the artful gravesite created by the other children. But this is, of course, the narrator’s reading of her grief.
8. from above you can always smile. The view from above makes the entire incident poignant rather than wrenching. But it also suggests that distance—whether seen in terms of space, class, or generation—promotes empathy even as it produces an ironic gap, allowing the narrator to derive pleasure (“smile”) at the sight of suffering.
9. should go buy a share in the widow’s tannery. In this, one of his most impenetrable stories, Andersen adds a provocative statement directing readers who fail to understand his meaning to turn to commerce rather than poetry. And yet the narrator himself could be accused of lacking “understanding” and of failing to engage with the characters he presents in any meaningful way. He dismisses the widow’s state of mourning,
smiles at the girl’s grief, and becomes emphatic only when it comes to the death of the dog. He presents scenes that require his reader to understand more than he does.
The Bell
Klokken
Maanedsskrift for Børn, 1845
The motif of the bell is a favorite one among German and Danish Romantic poets, evoking reverence through its religious associations and awe through its acoustical wonders. The renowned “Song of the Bell” (1799) by the German poet Friedrich Schiller was familiar to Andersen, and he wrote a story about its composition called “The Old Church Bell” (1862), in which he clearly identifies with Schiller, who grew up in poverty but rose to artistic distinction. Schiller’s poem takes a political, ideological turn rather than moving in an aesthetic, religious direction. Twelve years after writing “The Bell, “ Andersen published “The Bell Deep” (1857), a story capturing the main features of a legend about a river ghost in Odense and about a mysterious bell that rings from the river. “The Bell” is a deeper, broader staging of Andersen’s poetics, enacting an allegory that unites poetry with nature and broadcasting a democratic ideal in which a prince joins hands with a pauper.
The tale provides a crowning utopian moment in Andersen’s literary work, and the scenes describing the beauties of the forest remind us that visual delights were as important to Andersen as the arresting acoustical enchantments of the bell. As in “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the child is more knowing than adults, and Andersen’s moving portrait of prince and pauper joining hands reminds us that deep cynicism about human nature is not inconsistent with a bedrock of faith in our capacity for transformation.
Toward evening in the narrow streets of a big town, when the sun was about to set and clouds were shimmering like gold up above the chimneys,1 you could often hear a strange sound, like the ringing of a church bell, but only for a moment, for it was soon lost in the racket of rumbling carriages and loud voices. “The evening bell is ringing,” people would say. “Now the sun will be going down!”