shelidonDecember 8, 2021Leave a Comment

Well, yesterday we saw the first part of this long and complex tale, and it involved a magic mirror whose splinter can turn someone’s heart to ice. And if you’re thinking you already saw that in a cartoon, you’re right: it’ one of the very few inspirations Disney took from this tale to weave the narrative in their Frozen. I would have preferred a proper Snow Queen rendition, but we all have to leave with our sorrows.

Anyway, the first portion of the tale is a prelude: this part is the one in which we meet our two main characters, a boy and a girl who live next door and consider themselves as brother and sister. Andersen takes up upon himself to specify that they are very poor and have no garden, as no child can be rich and happy in a fairy-tale, and during summers they play on rooftops. Arthur Rackahm gives us this beautiful illustration to introduce them.

I should specify that I saw this illustration in this way and also mirrored, so I don’t know which version is right.

Anyway, enters winter and our two friends can play no more.

The windows were often completely frosted over, but the children would heat copper pennies on the stove, press them against the frozen windowpane, and make the best peepholes you can imagine, perfectly round.

Our two main characters are finally introduced: they’re named Gerta and Kai. And while it’s snowing outside, they are told the story of those white bees (the snowflakes) and their queen who flies among them. I am grateful for that description, as it gives us one of the most beautiful illustrations by Edmund Dulac.

Eventually, little Kai is able to witness the beautiful creature, but it’s an ill-fated encounter.

A few snowflakes were still falling outside, and one of them — the largest of all — landed on the edge of one of the flowerboxes. The snowflake grew and grew until it suddendly turned into a woman wearing a dress made of white gossamer so fine and sheer that it looked like a million sparkling snowflakes. She was both beautiful and elegant but made of ice, dazzling, sparkling ice. And yet she was alive. Her eyes glittered like two bright stars, but there was nothing peaceful or calm about them.

Dugald Stewart Walker‘s illustration for the 1914 edition is equally beautiful.

According to Maria Tatar in her Annotated Andersen Fairytales, one of my favourite sources when it comes to things like this, Andersen described being haunted by the vision of this maiden, particularly writing about it in his autobiographical The Fairy Tale of My Life. And of course, being Andersen, things get dark and haunted really really fast.

I recollected that, in the winter before, when our window-panes were frozen, my father pointed to them and showed us a figure like that of a maiden with outstretched arms. ‘She is come to fetch me’, he said in jest. And now, while he was lying there on the bed, dead, my mother remembered this, and I thought about it as well.

Well, shit, as we say in Paris. The Snow Maiden is, in Andersen’s intention, an agent of death. He came back to that picture years later when he wrote his tale “The Ice Maiden”, about a spirit who inhabits the Swiss glaciers and kisses people to death. There’s of course a subtext, as we’ll see, about this figure being female and deadly.

For now, winter comes and goes in the Snow Queen story, and our friends go back to playing in the garden, but one day Kai feels a sharp pain in his eye and in his heart, and a splinter of the devil’s mirror finds a way inside him. He starts behaving differently: he tears down roses and, when winter is back again, he starts looking at snowflakes with a magnifying glass, claiming they are more beautiful than flowers. And, apparently, this is a bad thing.

Being in this fancy mood, one day the boy goes sledging in the main square and this is where he meets the Queen.

Right in the middle of the games, a huge sleigh pulled up. It was white all over, and the only person sitting inside it was wrapped in a thick white fur coat and wearing a fleecy white hat.

Kai immediately ties his sleigh to the big one and it looks like he and the rider know each other. Even when the sleigh starts going really fast, the boy doesn’t pull free. They pass the town gates and when he tries to do so, it is no use: his little sleigh behaves as if it’s still fastened to the big one.

My favourite, however, has to be Hans Tegner’s one from 1900 sharp, as it keeps the mystery surrounding the rider.

Again, if you think you’ve seen this somewhere, it’s because The Snow Queen is the inspiration for C.S. Lewis’ witch in The Chronicles of Narnia. They ride and ride, into the Snow Queen’s realm. As it happened with the Little Mermaid, Andersen kicks some serious asses with descriptions. Eventually, they stop.

The driver stood up. It was a woman, and her fur coat and cap were made of pure snow. She was tall and slender, brillantly white. It was the Snow Queen.

We see her here in another illustration by Harry Clarke, not one of my favourites.

In Norse mythology, Niflheim is the realm of ice and it’s some sort of hell, where people go to sleep after they have died of old age instead of dying gloriously in battle. The ruler of Niflheim is Hel, the Queen of Death. Another female figure in German folklore is Mother Holle, much less seductive but still a bringer of winter by shaking her comforter and bringing the snow.

The Snow Queen kisses Kai a couple of times and with every kiss, he feels less cold, more dead, and forgets everybody back at home. Eventually, the Queen takes him up with her, in her kingdom in the sky.

He looked up at the great big sky above, and she soared away with him, high up into the black clouds. The storm whistled and roared, as if it were sining old ballads. They flew over forests and lakes, over sea and land. Beneath them the wind blew cold, wolves howled, and the snow glittered. Black crows screeched above them. But way up high the moon was shining brightly and clearly. Kai fixed his gaze on it all through the long winter’s night, and during the day he slept at the feet of the Snow Queen.

Scottish illustrator Anne Anderson picks the scene of the flight for this beautiful illustration. She was an art nouveau illustrator and you’ll like her very much if you liked the works by Charles Robinson and Jessie Marion King we’ve been looking at throughout in my Alice in Wonderland series.

But what’s dear Gerta doing? It’s the less wintery part of the tale, so tomorrow we’ll get slightly warmer.