Writing Up A Storm

The Snow Queen: The Ending

To conclude this week's posts on The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen, the ending begins when Gerda finds Kay on the floor of the ice palace. He is surrounded by pieces of ice. The Snow Queen has told him that if he can make the ice spell the word "Eternity," he may have the whole world plus a pair of ice skates. Oh, how I puzzled over this as a child! I could not spell this word myself when my mother first read this story to me, and so it did seem very much like an impossible task.

My mother used to let me play outside with a bowl of ice cubes and try to spell "Eternity." On a cold winter day sitting on top of our cold concrete driveway, this was wonderful playacting indeed. And what a fine word Andersen chose for this ice puzzle! A word that is very hard for a small child to spell, and harder still to understand the meaning of.

And equally puzzling was the prize ~ the whole world plus a pair of ice skates? What a stroke of genius for Andersen to add those ice skates!

And I love how the saving of Kay takes place. Gerda weeps when she sees that Kay does not even recognize her, and her tears wash away the sliver of the mirror in his heart. He then weeps himself, and the splinter of mirror in his eye is washed away. It is such a sweet and graphic description of love saving someone. If you have ever been awash with your feelings of love for someone, you know that this feeling can cause your eyes to fill with tears. 

And, alas, if you have ever wept before someone you love who is on a very dark path, you also know that tears are usually not enough to save them.

The Snow Queen has what we have come to think of as "the fairy-tale ending." In teaching story-telling to young children, I always tried to teach them the difference between the "solution" and the "ending." The solution in The Snow Queen is the shedding of tears that wipe away the mirror. The ending is the two children walking out of winter into spring, where they say goodbye to the Robber-maiden, but they are all changed, for they are older and wiser now, and by the time Gerda and Kay arrive back home, "it was summer, glorious summer."

Yes, the fairy-tale ending! And you can tell by the expression on children's faces how much they love this kind of ending.

Not all fairy tales have happy endings, but there are some schools of thought that would say without the happy ending, they are not truly "fairy tales." In a broad sense, myths are usually tragic, fairy tales have happy endings, and fables are the cautionary tales. At any rate, long before there were self-help books, and long before there was a branch of knowledge called psychology, there were the fairy tales, and we still love them and need them today.

These fairy tales have traveled very far to get to us. They come from so very long ago and so very far away. I would hate to ever see them taken away from childhood.

Long live the fairy tale! And may you have a wonderful fairy-tale weekend!!

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The Snow Queen: The Pursuit

Continuing from yesterday's post, the pursuit in The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen begins when Gerda takes off on her own to find Kay. As a child, I was very much in awe over this part of the story when the girl goes in search of her friend and will not give up on him. I wanted to be as brave as Gerda, too!

Thinking that perhaps Kay fell in the river, Gerda offers up her red shoes to the river if the river will give him back again, and so begins the fairy-tale quest.

The journey to find Kay is long and hard and it is fraught with both dangers and well-wishers: an old enchantress (shown above) who tries to keep Gerda for her own, a Prince and Princess, a Robber-maiden, Wood-pigeons, a Reindeer, the Lapp woman, the Finn woman, and an army of polar bears.

And how I both feared and marveled over the little Robber-Maiden! For she was scary and yet wonderful at the same time. I loved how fierce she was and how she was the one who helped Gerda to escape from the terrifying clutches of the band of robbers. It is a very big lesson to find out that sometimes help comes to us from the most unexpected places.

As Gerda draws closer to the ice castle of the Snow Queen, it is from the Finn woman that we learn that only Gerda's love can save Kay. I like it very much that in this fairy tale there is no magic potion, no magic kiss, even. No, we are told that the power to save Kay lies in Gerda's heart.

I am older now, and I do (still) believe that we need to believe that love can conquer all, although I know now that sometimes it does not. Even so, I would not give up the message in The Snow Queen for anything in the world, for it is in believing the impossible that we sometimes make impossible things come true.

Tomorrow: The Snow Queen: The Ending

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The Snow Queen: The Plight

Continuing The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen from yesterday, the plight of the story begins when the boy Kay gets a grain of sand from the mirror in his eye and a sliver of the mirror in his heart, and everything good and beautiful in the world appears poor and mean to him, and vice versa. He turns his back on his friends and runs after the Snow Queen, for she seems beautiful to him. And, yes, how very beautiful she is in her snowy sledge and her clouds of snowy robes!

I love how these old fairy tales delve into the depths of the human condition. They never pretend that the world is a safe place. Some of them challenge the deepest realms of psychological interpretations. I would imagine that The Snow Queen would be a treasure-trove for many a dissertation.

At first Kay attaches his little sledge to the Snow Queen's much larger sledge, and, later, when he tries to get away, it is too late. She has captured him. In my lifetime I have seen many a person, including myself, fall into the clutches of choices that take them way too far off the beaten path, and sometimes they never find their way back again.

Here is the exact moment when Kay latches on to her sledge. How powerful this fairy tale is!

When I was teaching, I felt that every child in my class was as vulnerable as little Kay. The interior of a classroom is so safe. Fifteen or twenty children all sitting cross-legged on the rug for story time, surrounded by all the trappings of an elementary school classroom: chalk and crayons and lined paper and readers and little desks with little chairs behind each one, bulletin boards crowded with children's drawings and children's handwriting. And then, at the end of the day, you let all the children out your door into the big wide world.

Most of my students came from two large housing projects that surrounded our school on both sides. When I made home visits, I marveled to myself that the only reason in the world that I felt safe walking into these projects was because I was holding the hand of a little six-year-old child. If I had been alone, I would have been terrified inside those dark mazes.

I remember having the idea, when I was about six years old, that kidnappers drove around in a truck. The truck, I was sure, said "Kidnappers" in large letters on the side, so you could see it coming for you and get away in time. If I had grown up where it snowed, perhaps I would have imagined a very large sledge instead.

But The Snow Queen, to my way of thinking, is not about stranger-danger. I was not afraid that my students would be kidnapped before they got home. I was afraid that they would attach their lives to the allure of the drugs and the gangs that lived everywhere around them, that they would drop out and disappear, and that all the Gerdas in the world would never be able to find them or rescue them.

Every story needs a beginning and then a problem. The Snow Queen gives us our problem when Kay disappears into thin air, and only little Gerda believes he can be found.

Tomorrow: The Snow Queen: The Pursuit

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The Snow Queen: The Beginning

The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen begins long before this scene, in a long ago time when hobgoblins made a mirror in which everything good and beautiful looked poor and mean. The mirror fell to earth and broke into pieces, some as small as grains of sand. Sometimes these little pieces got into people's eyes or into their hearts and changed how they saw the world.

As a child, I did not like this beginning. My mother read this story to me any number of times, and I quietly put up with this prologue in order to get to the real beginning. For to me, the story began here, with the girl Gerda and the boy Kay sitting in this wonderful place just outside their dormer windows on a little ledge that connected their two attic rooms. (Very different attics, I might point out, from the attic in A Little Princess from last week's post.)

They each had a wooden box in which there were roses growing, and here they read and talked to each other. I don't know what it is that prevents children from literally plunging headfirst into illustrations that cast such a magical enchantment upon them.

This version of Andersen's story is in a 1937 printing of My Book House books. In some versions of the story, the boy's name is Kai, which I suspect might be in the original, but since this version uses the K-a-y spelling, so will I.

I no longer have all 12 volumes of My Book House. The pages of the ones that I do have are becoming very browned, and often the corners will flake away at the touch. They are like pie flakes browning in an oven.

This was my all-time favorite fairy tale growing up. I loved this illustration so much that sometimes, when I begged for this story to be read to me one more time, I did not want to leave this page. Perhaps I wanted to stay here where it was safe for as long as possible before I ventured forth into the danger that I knew was forthcoming.

Tomorrow: The Snow Queen: The Plight

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