shelidonDecember 10, 2021Leave a Comment

Well, Gerda is running away from the old woman’s house and winter is coming again. Eventually she finds herself conversing with a crow, although she’s having a little trouble understanding him. There seems to be a difference between crows and sparrows, when it comes to talking to them: where her grandmother is well versed in the language of the beaked creature, Gerda has either forgotten or not yet mastered this skill. According to critics, Andersen is thinking of Odin’s crows, whose names are Thought and Memory: Gerda is just recovering from Amnesia.

The crow however tells Gerda that Kai might be the prisoner of a very particular princess, one so clever that she has read all newspapers in the world and forgotten all of them. We see her in this beautiful illustration by Edmund Dulac.

The Princess is looking for a husband and, since she’s clever, she wants someone who’s able to have a conversation, someone who knows how to speak when spoken to, instead of someone to simply stand around and look dignified. She places an ad in the newspaper and young men start to pour into the castle, seeking an audience, but no one seems to be able to gain some eloquence after seeing her.

Facing the princess who was seated on her throne, they couldn’t think of a thing to say and just repeated the last words she had uttered, which she did not particularly care to hear again. It was as if everyone in the room had swallowed snuff and dozed off.

She’s a figure normally indicated as “a riddle queen”, like the Turandot which was rendered famous by Giacomo Puccini and originally one of the seven stories in the epic Haft Peykar by twelfth-century Persian poet Nizami, and another famous figure who use riddles and tricks to find a clever husband is Portia in The Merchant of Venice, though the riddle is inherited from her father.

According to the crow who’s telling the story, the victor was a young boy and Gerda becomes convinced it has to be Kai, so she heads for the Princess’ castle.

With the aid of the crow and his sweetheart, who’s also a crow but a tame one who lives in the castle because fuck you Andersen, Gerds sneaks through the garden, where falling leaves remind us that it’s autumn already, and up a staircase.

”It feels like someone is on the stairs right behind us!” Gerda said, and something rushed past her like shadows on a wall: horses with flowing manes and slender legs, gamekeepers, lords and ladies on horseback.

”Those are nothing but dreams!”, the crow said. “They come and take the thoughts of their royal highnesses out of hunting, which is good because then you can get a better look at them in their beds”.

Some illustrators picked up on this brief picture, and one of them is Arthur Rackham. Andersen himself expanded a bit on the concept of shades and dreams in his “The Shadow”.

When they reach the Royal apartment, Andersen gives us another wonderful piece of description, with a sequence of rooms being each one more magnificent than the other, and eventually leading up to the bedroom, where the ceiling is a huge palm tree with glass leaves and the two beds are like hanging lilies. Yeah, they sleep separate. It’s Andersen.

The princess is sleeping in a white bed, while the prince is in a red one. Gerda sees “nape of a brown neck” and believes it to be Kai, so che reaches out for him, but she turns out to be mistaken. The Prince and Princess wake up and she tells them her story.

First of all, the Princess offers a prize to the crows for aiding little Gerda and she presents them with a choice: an official position to the wood crow to become a court crow, or freedom for the tame crow so that she can go be with him in the woods. What do you think they pick? Well, it’s Andersen: of course they prefer to give up their freedom so that they can be at court.

The Prince lets Gerda sleep in his bed (don’t worry, he gets out of it) and she is visited by the royal dreams. The next day, she is dressed in silk and velvet, given a carriage, a horse, a pair of boots, and a fur muff. There’s of course a high fetishizing of feet and hands, in this tale, which is typical of folklore but also particularly in contrast with the chaste bigotry of Andersen’s tale.

Thus equipped, Gerda departs the royal palace and so do we. See you tomorrow. Bring a gun.