On her grave, close to the wall of the churchyard, was planted a rose tree; and every year it bloomed, and the nightingale sat on its branches and sang. From inside the church came the sound of the organ, playing the hymns that were printed in the book, upon which the dead woman’s head rested. The moon shone down upon the grave; but the dead are not there. Any child could come, even at midnight, and pluck a rose from the tree. The dead know more than we living do; they know our fear of ghosts and, being kinder than we are, they would never come to frighten us. There is earth inside as well as above the coffin. The hymnbook and the rose, which was the keeper of so many memories, have become dust. But up on the earth new roses bloom and there the nightingale sings; and inside the church the organ plays. And there are those who remember old Grandmother with the sweet, eternally young eyes. Eyes cannot die! And ours shall see her once again, young and beautiful as she was the first time that she kissed the fresh, newly plucked rose that now is dust in the grave.
34
The Hill of the Elves
Some lizards were darting in and out of the cracks and crevices of an old oak tree. All of them could speak lizard language, so they understood each other.
“Have you heard all the rumbling and grumbling inside the old hill where the elves live?” asked one of the lizards. “I haven’t been able to sleep a wink these last two nights. I might as well have had a toothache.”
“Oh yes, something is going on up there, for sure,” began another lizard. “Last night they put the hill on four red pillars and let it stand like that until it was almost time for the cock to crow. They certainly gave their home a good airing. The elfin maidens have to learn a new dance in which they stamp their feet. There is no doubt about it, something is up.”
“I have talked with an acquaintance of mine, an earthworm,” declared a third lizard. “I met him as he was coming out of the hill, where he has been digging for the last two days. He has heard a good deal.—The poor creature can’t see but he’s a master at both hearing and feeling.—The elves are expecting very important guests. The earthworm wouldn’t tell me who they were, but that’s probably because he didn’t know. The will-o’-the-wisps have all been hired to make a torchlight procession, as it’s called. All the gold and silver in the whole hill—and there’s enough of it—is to be polished and set out in the moonlight.”
“Who can the visitors be?” cried all the lizards. “What is going to happen? Listen to the humming! Listen to the buzzing!”
Just at that moment the hill of the elves opened and an old elfin lady came tripping out. She had the same hollow back that all elves have, and she was very respectably dressed. She was the elfin king’s housekeeper, and distantly related to him; that was why she wore an amber heart on her forehead. Goodness, how she could run. Away she went down to the marsh where the night raven lived.
“You are invited to the Mount of the Elves this very night,” she said. “But you will have to do us the favor of delivering the invitations. Since you have no home of your own and cannot return our hospitality, you will have to make yourself useful instead. We are expecting distinguished guests, trolls of the greatest importance, and the elfin king wants to impress them.”
“Whom am I to invite?” asked the night raven.
“Well, to the grand ball, anyone can come,” began the old elfin lady. “Even human beings are invited; that is, those who have some small talent akin to ours: such as being able to talk in their sleep. But the party tonight is to be more select; only those of the highest rank are to attend. I argued with the elfin king about the guest list, for in my opinion neither ghosts nor spooks should be on it.… The old merman and his daughters, the mermaids, must be the first ones you invite. They don’t like to be where it’s dry, so tell them that they can count on having a wet stone each to sit on, if not something better. Remember to say that that’s a promise; and I don’t think they’ll refuse. After that call on all the older trolls of the highest rank who have tails, the river spirit, and the gnomes. Then there are the graveyard sow, the Hell horse, and the three-legged church monster; it wouldn’t do to forget them. They belong to the clergy; but that is their profession, so I shan’t hold it against them. Besides, we are all related, and they visit us regularly.”
“Caw!” said the night raven, and flew away to deliver the invitations.
The elfin maidens were already dancing on top of the hill. Over their shoulders were long shawls woven from mist and moonlight. They looked very pretty, if you like that sort of thing.
The great hall in the middle of the mount had certainly been done up. The floors had been washed in moonlight, and all the walls had been waxed with witches’ grease till they shone like tulip petals.
Out in the kitchen frogs were being roasted on spits, and snakes stuffed with children’s fingers were baking. The salads were made of toadstool seeds, garnished with moist snouts of mice; and for dressing there was hemlock juice. Saltpeter wine that had been aged in tombs and beer from the bog-witch brewery had been poured into decanters. Altogether a festive—though a bit conservative—menu. Rusty nails and bits of colored glass from a church window were the desserts.
The old elfin king’s crown had been polished with powder ground from slate pencils. For this purpose only pencils that have belonged to especially studious boys may be used; and those are hard to find. In the bedchambers the newly washed curtains were being made to stick to the walls with the help of snakes’ spit. Everywhere, everybody was busy. There were bustle and commotion throughout the hill.
“Now I’ll burn some horsehair and swine bristles, and then I shall have done my share,” remarked the old elfin lady who was the elfin king’s housekeeper.
“Dear … dear Father,” pestered the youngest of the elfin king’s daughters, “won’t you tell us who the distinguished guests are?”
“Well, I suppose I have to,” began the king. “Two of you had better be prepared to get married because two of you are going to get married. The old troll king of Norway is coming. Dovre—his castle—is made of granite, and it is large and so high that on the roof of the great hall there is always snow. He has a gold mine, too; and that is nothing to sneeze at, even though some people do. He is bringing his sons along, and they are thinking of getting married. The old troll is a real Norwegian: honest, full of life, and straightforward. I have known him a long, long time. We became friends at his wedding. He had come to Denmark for a wife. She was the daughter of the king of the chalk cliffs of Möen; but she’s been dead a long time now.
“How I look forward to seeing the old fellow again. I have been told that his sons are a spoiled couple of cubs: cocky and bad-mannered. But who knows, such talk may all be slander. Time will rub the nonsense off them, anyway. Let me see you show them how they ought to behave.”
“When are they coming?” asked his oldest daughter.
“That depends upon the wind and the weather,” sighed the king. “They are traveling by ship. I wanted them to journey through Sweden, but the old troll is conservative. He doesn’t keep up with the changing times, which in my opinion is very wrong of him.”
At that moment two will-o’-the-wisps came running into the hall. One ran faster than the other and that was why he came first.
“They are coming! They are coming!” they both shouted.
“Hand me my crown and I shall go out and stand in the moonlight,” said the king of the elves and, followed by the elfin maidens, he went to meet the guests.
His daughters lifted their shawls and curtsied all the way to the ground.
There he was: the troll king from Dovre! His crown was made of ice and polished pine cones. He was wearing a bearskin coat and heavy boots. His sons, on the other hand, were lightly dressed: their collars were open and they weren’t wearing suspenders. They were two big strapping fellows.
“Is this a hill?” laughed the younger one. “In Norway we would call it a hole in the ground.”
“Don’t be silly,” said the old tr
oll king. “Holes go inward and hills go upward. Don’t you have eyes in your head?”
The thing that surprised the two young men most was that they could understand the language; and they said so.
“Don’t make fools of yourselves,” scolded their father, “or everybody will think that you were born yesterday and put on the stove to dry overnight.”
They entered the great hall where all the guests were gathered; they had arrived so fast you would think that the wind had blown them there. The old merman and his daughters were sitting in tubs full of water and feeling right at home. Except for the sons of the troll king, everyone exhibited his or her best table manners, while the two young men put their feet on the table. But they thought that anything they did was becoming.
“Take your feet out of the dishes!” bellowed the old troll king.
His sons obeyed him, but not right away. They tickled their dinner partners—two young elfin maidens—with pine cones that they had brought in their pockets from Norway. In the middle of the dinner they took off their boots to make themselves more comfortable and handed them to the elfin maidens to take care of.
But the old troll king was a different sort than his sons. He described so well the proud mountains of Norway, the rivers and streams that leaped down the cliffs, white and bubbling, and sounded like both a thunderclap and an organ playing, when they plunged into the valleys far below. He told about the salmon that could leap up the swiftest waterfall, while the river nymphs played on their golden harps. He made them imagine a still winter night, when you can hear the sound of sleigh bells and see the young people skate, carrying burning torches, across the glasslike surface of the lakes, when the ice is so transparent that the skaters can watch the fish fleeing, in terror, below them. Yes, he knew how to tell a story well; it seemed to all the other guests that they could hear the buzz of the great sawmills and the singing of the young men and women as they danced the Halling dance.
“Hurrah!” the troll king suddenly cried; and in the midst of his storytelling kissed the old elfin lady so that it could be heard throughout the hall. “That was a brotherly kiss,” he explained, in spite of their not being related at all.
Now the young elfin maidens danced. First the simple dances and then the new one in which they stamped their feet. The final one was the most difficult and was called “Stepping Outside the Dance.” How they twirled and twisted. One could hardly make out which were legs and which were arms, or which end was up and which was down. The poor Hell horse got so dizzy watching it that he began to feel sick and had to leave the table.
“Whoa!” shouted the old troll king. “They have got legs, and they can dance; but what else can they do?”
“Judge for yourself,” said the elfin king, and called his youngest daughter to him. She was as fair as moonlight and the most delicate of the sisters.
She stuck a white wand in her mouth and vanished—that was her accomplishment.
The old troll king said that this was not the kind of talent he would want his wife to have, and he was sure that his sons agreed with him.
The second sister could walk beside herself, so that she looked as if she had a shadow; something that neither elves nor trolls possess.
The third sister’s talent lay in an entirely different direction. She had been apprenticed to the bog witch and knew both how to brew beer and how to garnish elder stumps with glowworms.
“She will make a good housewife,” said the troll king, and winked at her. He would have drunk a toast in her honor but he thought he had drunk enough already.
Now came the fourth sister. She had a golden harp. When she struck the first string, they all lifted their left legs—for trolls and elves are left-legged—and when she struck the second string they all had to do exactly what she commanded.
“She is a dangerous woman,” said the troll king. His two sons sneaked out of the hall; they were bored.
“And what can the next one do?” asked the troll.
“I have learned to love Norway,” she said softly. “And I will only marry a Norwegian.”
But the youngest of the elfin king’s daughters whispered to the old troll king, “She says that because she once heard a Norwegian verse in which it was prophesied that, when the world went under, the mountains of Norway would stand as a tombstone over it; and she is terribly afraid of dying.”
“Ha-ha!” laughed the old troll king. “And you let the cat out of the bag.… And what can the seventh and last of them do?”
“The sixth comes before the seventh,” said the elfin king, who knew how to count.
The sixth daughter was so shy that she did not want to step forward. “I can only tell people the truth,” she finally whispered, “and that no one likes to hear, so I am busy sewing on my shroud.”
Now came the seventh; and she was the last of the sisters. What could she do? She could tell fairy tales, as many as anyone wanted to hear.
“Here are my five fingers, tell me a fairy tale for each of them,” demanded the troll king.
The elfin maiden took his hand in hers and began. The king of the trolls laughed so hard that he almost split his sides. When she came to the finger that was encircled by a gold ring—it looked as if it knew that there was an engagement in the air—the troll cried, “Hold onto what you have got! My hand is yours. You I shall marry myself!”
But the elfin maiden protested that she still had two stories to tell: one for the ring finger and one for the little finger, which would be short.
“They can wait,” said the king of the trolls. “We can hear them next winter. And you shall tell us about the pine trees, the birches, the crinkling frost, and about the gifts that the river nymphs bring; for we do so love a well-told tale in Norway, and no one there knows how to tell them. We shall sit in my granite hall that is lighted by pine pitch torches and drink mead out of golden horns that once belonged to Viking kings. The river nymph has given me a couple of them. The echo—he is a tall, thin fellow—will come and sing for us. He knows all the songs that the milkmaids sing when they drive their herds into the meadows. Oh, we’ll have a good time! The salmon will leap and knock on our granite walls, but we won’t let him in. Oh, believe me! Norway is a dear old place! … But where are my sons?”
Where were his sons? They were racing about on the field blowing out the poor will-o’-the-wisps, who had been peacefully assembling for the torchlight parade.
“What do you mean by running about like this?” scolded their father. “I have chosen a mother for you. Now you can find wives for yourselves among your aunts.”
But the boys said they would rather drink toasts and make speeches, for they had no desire to get married. So they made speeches and they toasted each other, and when they were finished they turned their glasses upside down so that everyone could see that they were empty. Then they took off their shirts and lay down on the table to sleep, for, as they said, they didn’t “stand on ceremony.”
The old troll king danced with his young bride and exchanged boots with her, for that is more refined than exchanging rings.
“Now the cock crows!” shouted the old elfin lady who was the housekeeper and kept an eye on everything. “We have to close the shutters or the sun will burn us all.”
And the hill of the elves closed. But outside the lizards were running up and down the old oak tree.
“Oh, I did like that old Norwegian troll king,” said one of the lizards.
“I liked his sons best,” said the earthworm, but the wretched little creature couldn’t see.
35
The Red Shoes
Once there was a little girl who was pretty and delicate but very poor. In the summer she had to go barefoot and in the winter she had to wear wooden shoes that rubbed against her poor little ankles and made them red and sore.
In the same village there lived an old widow whose husband had been a shoemaker; and she sat sewing a pair of shoes from scraps of red material. She did her very best, but the shoes loo
ked a bit clumsy, though they were sewn with kindness. They were meant for the poor little girl, whose name was Karen.
Now on that very day that her mother was to be buried, Karen was given the red shoes. Though they weren’t the proper color for mourning, she had no others, so she put them on. Raggedly dressed, barelegged, with red shoes on her feet, she walked behind the pauper’s coffin.
A big old-fashioned carriage drove by; in it sat an old lady. She noticed the little girl and felt so sorry for her that she went at once to the minister and spoke to him. “Let me have that little girl, and I shall be good to her and bring her up.”
Karen thought it was because of her new red shoes that the old lady had taken a fancy to her. But the old lady declared that the shoes looked frightful and had them thrown into the stove and burned. Karen was dressed in nice clean clothes and taught to read and to sew. Everyone agreed that she was a very pretty child; but the mirror said, “You are more than pretty, you are beautiful.”
It happened that the queen was making a journey throughout the country, and she had her daughter, the little princess, with her. Everywhere people streamed to see them. When they arrived at a castle near Karen’s village, the little girl followed the crowd out there. Looking out of one of the great windows of the castle was the little princess. So that people could see her, she was standing on a little stool. She had no crown on her head but she wore a very pretty white dress and the loveliest red shoes, made from morocco. They were certainly much prettier than the ones the old shoemaker’s widow had made for Karen. But even they had been red shoes, and to Karen nothing else in the world was so desirable.
Karen became old enough to be confirmed. She was to have a new dress and new shoes for this solemn occasion. The old lady took her to the finest shoemaker in the nearby town and he measured her little foot. Glass cabinets filled with the most elegant shoes and boots covered the walls of his shop. But the old lady’s eyesight was so poor that she didn’t get much out of looking at the display. Karen did; between two pairs of boots stood a pair of red shoes just like the ones the princess had worn. Oh, how beautiful they were! The shoemaker said that they had been made for the daughter of a count but that they hadn’t fit her.