Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen”
Episode 20
Let it snow! Let it snow! Let it snow! Or, maybe don’t, since the Snow Queen might come and kidnap you… Anyway, this week Professor Pipes is talking about Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale, “The Snow Queen.”
Transcript
Introduction:
Hello, and welcome to Piper’s Paraphrases. I’m Professor Pipes, and I’m here to tell you that the weather outside is frightful, but a fairy tale is always delightful, so today I’ll be talking about the classic Hans Christian Andersen story of “The Snow Queen.” Bundle up, everyone, because it’s about to get snowy!
Summary:
This tale is broken up into seven parts, and in the first, there’s a horrible, evil troll! Thanks, Cooper… Anyways, the troll has a magic mirror that makes everything look distorted and ugly, but it accidentally shatters and the pieces spread around the world. Anyone who is unlucky enough to get a piece of the mirror in their eye then sees only the ugly and bad parts of everything around them, and if they get a piece in their heart, their heart turns to ice! Uh oh!
In part 2, we’re introduced to two young friends, Gerda and Kay. Don’t worry - I’m sure the scary troll stuff was just totally random and nothing bad will happen to the little kids! The girl and boy live with their grandmothers next door to each other and play in a rose garden together. One winter, as they are watching snow fall, Kay’s grandmother tells them about the snow queen, who appears where the snow gathers together in a cluster. Kay sees the snow queen beckoning him through the window, but he jumps back and she disappears. The next summer, Gerda learns a little song, which she sings as she and Kay play in the roses together: “Roses bloom and cease to be, But we shall the Christ-child see.” Ok, then. One day, Kay gets a splinter of the goblin’s mirror in his heart, turning it to ice, and another in his eye, making him see only the bad around him. Double bad luck. Soooo basically Kay starts acting like a little brat to everyone, but he also starts enjoying puzzles and games of reason. Oh no! Puzzles? How terrible! When winter comes again, he goes out sledding and hitches his sled to the sleigh of the snow queen, who reveals her identity to him and invites him to sit with her. She kisses him to make him immune to the cold and then to make him forget his home, family, and even poor little Gerda. Then they sleigh away to her kingdom! Slay girl slay!
In part 3, everyone thinks Kay drowned in the river, but when Gerda goes there to see if she can offer a trade to get him back, she accidentally floats away in a boat. Welp. That’s two missing kids, now. Gerda lands ashore at the home of an old, magical woman with a beautiful garden. Gerda tells her the story of her search for Kay, but the old woman decides she wants to keep Gerda. CREEPY! So she magically wipes Gerda’s memory of Kay and makes all her roses disappear into the ground, lest they make Gerda remember her lost friend. The plan works for quite a while, and little Gerda happily plays in the garden and talks with the flowers. Cuz, you know, it’s a fairy tale, so flowers talk. However, dummy sorceress lady forgot to take the roses off her hat, so Gerda sees them and remembers her friend, and her tears magically bring the roses up from the ground, and they tell her not to lose hope because Kay is not dead! She runs away and realizes that months had gone by. Whoops.
In the fourth story, Gerda comes across a talking crow (giving me some major “Raven” vibes, to be honest), and he tells her about a princess who married a prince that sounds a heck of a lot like Kay. Umm... gross. He’s a little kid! Fortunately, after some help from the crow’s girlfriend, Gerda meets the royal couple and realizes that the prince is not Kay. Surprisingly, these monarchs are not upset that she broke into their castle, and after telling them her sad story, they give her new clothes and supplies to help her on her journey.
In the fifth story, Gerda is attacked by robbers, since she’s now dressed all fancy-like. The robbers are a mother and daughter duo. Aww… teaching her daughter the family business. The little robber girl is… odd. She seems to like Gerda and almost views her as entertainment while simultaneously threatening to kill her several times. However, yet again Gerda’s sad story does its magic, and when the little robber girl hears it, she gets her mom drunk so that Gerda can escape. Some talking birds told Gerda that Kay had been taken hostage by the snow queen, and that SHE lives up North in Lapland, so away Gerda goes on the back of a reindeer.
In the sixth story, Gerda and the reindeer meet up with a woman in Lapland who says that the Snow Queen is actually in Finland, so she gives them a note written on a dried fish to deliver to a woman she knows in Finland who can hopefully help. Who needs paper, when you’ve got fish!? While the woman in Finland supposedly can do magic, she says that Gerda needs no help, since she’s able to speak to and influence everyone around her, and if that isn’t enough to save Kay, nothing will.
In the seventh story, the Snow Queen conveniently heads out, leaving Kay alone and almost frozen and making patterns out of ice. Dang, for having the whole story named after her, she’s barely in this thing. Anyway, Gerda hugs Kay and her warm tears melt the ice in his heart. Then she sings the song about roses, which makes Kay cry, until the shard of glass leaves his eye. Restored, they leave the snowy castle, and happen to run into the little robber girl, now a young maiden, who informs Gerda that the prince and princess have traveled to foreign lands and the crow has died. Gerda and Kay then head home, and as they get there, they realize they’ve become adults. Apparently this journey lasted a lot longer than I thought! Kay’s grandmother reads to them a line from the Bible: “Except ye be as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of God.” And Gerda and Kay sit happily together, grown up, yet children at heart.
Analysis:
Soooooo… can we all just agree that fairy tales are super weird? I mean, Disney makes them seem kind of normal, but even then they have Hookah smoking caterpillars and dudes kissing passed out ladies. However, fairy tales are useful in teaching lessons, particularly to little kids, who haven’t yet learned to question the fact that there are talking birds and flowers. And in fact, that’s kind of the whole point of this story.
“The Snow Queen” seems a bit like a tale of good and evil, and it kind of is: we have the good Gerda overcoming the evil Snow Queen who kidnapped Kay. There are even numerous religious allusions, such as when Gerda’s prayers come to life as angels and fight off the snowflakes, allowing her to save Kay. However, it is even more a story of beauty or innocence vs reason. The innocent children enjoy the garden together, until Kay gets the ice in his eye. He doesn’t suddenly hate everything, and the shard doesn’t distort things so much that he sees lies. Instead, he starts to notice the flaws in things, like the worm-eaten and crooked roses, ignoring their beauty. He also starts to see beauty only in perfect, reasonable things, such as the perfect symmetry of snowflakes, or the “Mirror of Reason,” which he makes patterns with in the Snow Queen’s castle. Thankfully, he has the innocent love of Gerda to save him from cold, hard logic. This suggests that with age and reason comes a loss of innocence, and an inability to see the beauty in the world. The story even ends with a nod to the religious, suggesting that only those who are innocent, and child-like can enter Heaven. This may seem a bit drastic, since, afterall, only noticing the good in things or living without any reason at all can be similarly dangerous. However, it kind of makes sense, especially given the source. Remember, this is a fairy tale, written by a man who never got too old for fairy tales. Also, Hans Christian Andersen’s works were often criticized by his contemporaries, who felt his stories were not suitably educational, and he himself had a pretty miserable time in school, so it makes sense that he would view the rational, reasonable, logical adult world around him as flawed. He felt that you still needed to view the world with a bit of that childlike wonder, even when you grow up, just as Gerda and Kay did.
That said, this fairy tale is interesting because, while it does have a bit of the “love conquers all” romanticism about it, there isn’t a perfect, “fairy tale ending.” The Snow Queen and the troll get off scott-free, which is perhaps part of why Hans Christian Andersen’s stories have stood the test of time. They’re fairy tales with a dose of reality and darkness. There’s depth to them. And clearly the impact of this story has been long-lasting. The Snow Queen herself has appeared in various forms in short stories, novels, tv specials, anime, plays, and films. We see a very similar character in C. S. Lewis’ classic novel, The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Even the original idea for the movie Frozen involved a very similar plot, and while Disney ended up changing it drastically, a few things remained, like the journey that a childish girl goes on to save her loved one, a frozen heart, and the idea that love can save us. Sooo maybe fairy tales still have something to teach us after all.
Thanks for watching this episode of Piper’s Paraphrases. Now go forth, read a bunch, and be good people.
Food for Thought:
1. What do you think of the “little robber girl”? What might she represent or teach us and why do you think she reappears at the end of the story?
2. Take a look at the riddling tales that the sorceress’ flowers tell Gerda. What do their stories mean? What is their significance?
3. What place do fairy tales have in literature? Do they hold up against the works of other classics, like those of Austen or Dickens or Shakespeare? Why or why not?
