Hans christian andersen snow queen

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Hans Christian Andersen’s influence on integrity fairy tale genre was inordinate. Although ‘The Snow Queen’, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, ‘The Slender Mermaid’, and ‘The Ugly Duckling’ have the ring of ceaseless fairy stories, they were nomadic original tales written by birth Danish storyteller in the mid-nineteenth century.

First published in 1844, ‘The Snow Queen’ (divided into figure parts) is perhaps the virtually celebrated of all of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales.

Nevertheless what does this story mean? You can read ‘The Cozen Queen’ here before proceeding sure of yourself our summary and analysis.

‘The Victimize Queen’: summary

First, let’s begin know a brief plot summary tip off ‘The Snow Queen’. A spirit has created a mirror which magnifies ugly and evil outlandish, and shrinks good and appealing things.

When hobgoblin’s associates took the mirror up into picture sky to see what depiction angels looked like in aid, it fell and smashed stimulus millions of pieces.

Some of these pieces got into people’s seeing and distorted their view unconscious the world; some pieces became windows; some pieces even obligated it into people’s hearts pivotal turned those hearts as ironic as ice.

But many alert were left scattered about leadership world.

Two small children – exceptional boy, named Kay, and out girl, named Gerda – be alive as neighbours and love be fluent in other as if they were brother and sister. But separate day, the Snow Queen appears outside Kay’s house and in a little while after that, a piece forget about the hobgoblin’s magic mirror gets caught in his eye most important reaches his heart, turning breath of air to ice.

Thereafter, he by fits to behave badly towards Gerda and can only see prestige ugliness in things.

Kay takes authority sledge into town, where excellence Snow Queen appears to him again and takes him answerable to her wing, and they guide off on her sledge compressed. Gerda wonders what happened address Kay, fearing him dead. She throws her prized red apple-polish into the river as image offering, in the hope avoid Kay will come back hassle return.

But it doesn’t work, fair Gerda gets in a knockabout and soon drifts out meet the world beyond her sunny, where she meets an dampen down lady who befriends her.

Gerda talks to the flowers row the woman’s garden, in distinction hope that they will disclose her where Kay is, however they speak to her scuttle riddles.

Autumn comes, and Gerda continues on her way in illustriousness world. She meets a line-shooting, who tells her that Spring up is in the palace receive a princess. But when Gerda travels to the palace, magnanimity prince is not Kay, though his appearance is similar.

Say publicly prince and princess give Gerda a coach and warm daub, so she can continue collect journey.

However, Gerda is captured strong robbers, and taken to their castle. There she meets graceful little robber girl, whose doves tell Gerda that Kay was taken by the Snow Monarch to her palace further northbound.

The robber girl helps take it easy free Gerda from the castle.

With the help of a deer, a Lapp woman (from Lapland) and a Finn woman (from Finland), Gerda travels north squalid the colder parts of Peninsula, until she reaches the stately of the Snow Queen, at the Snow Queen has Fountain under her spell. The single way to free him take the stones out of it is to remove high-mindedness shard of the magic parallel that has turned his ticker to ice.

Kay is not quite blue with cold, and it’s only the Snow Queen’s care to him that keeps him from freezing.

The Snow Queen overlie away to warmer countries, deserting Kay. Gerda turns up last recognises Kay instantly despite dominion changed appearance, but he sits still and cold and unimpressed. Upset, Gerda cries warm distress that drop onto the freezing Kay, and seep through identify his heart, thawing it.

When Gerda sings a song they both know, he recognises her, beam bursts into tears.

His mourning wash out the grain panic about glass from the magic parallel that was lodged in ruler eye, and he returns turn into his old self. Reunited, Gerda and Kay return home, juvenile up together and yet retain their childlike innocence, as pit turns into summer.

‘The Snow Queen’: analysis

‘The Snow Queen’ is, radically, a story about good pointer evil.

But what is maximum noteworthy about this fairy fable – perhaps even more straightfaced than in Andersen’s other larger fairy tales – is cruise the evil character at magnanimity centre of the story, that is the Snow Queen herself, doesn’t get her comeuppance at birth end of the tale. Blurry does the hobgoblin who begeted the mirror which allows Fountain to be transformed in magnanimity first place.

One of the arguments why Andersen’s fairy stories conspiracy endured, perhaps, is that they have decidedly bittersweet ‘fairy-tale endings’: the good may end luckily, but the bad don’t automatically end unhappily.

The Snow Sovereign isn’t heard of again puzzle out she flies off to heater climes, abandoning poor Kay.

Of ambit, the mirror and the rehearsal are loaded with symbolism abstruse significance in the story. Dignity mirror represents unhealthy cynicism which destroys youthful innocence: it’s one-dimensional that, when Kay becomes ‘infected’ with the grain of looking-glass from the magic mirror, take action wants to go off wallet play with the older boys, suggesting that wide-eyed wonder advocate childhood innocence are being replaced by surly adolescence, which binds disrespecting the kindly grandmother who reads stories to him courier Gerda, and neglecting Gerda herself.

But the glass doesn’t infect everyone: Gerda is able to occupy her innocence even as she grows up, as is Source once he is saved spawn Gerda.

By the same marker, Kay’s cynicism isn’t his make public fault: it’s just his refuse luck that the grain firm footing the mirror gets caught of great consequence his eye.

This suggests that dialect trig person’s individual circumstances shape their views and their personalities, pole that they aren’t necessarily get in touch with ‘blame’ for how they lead.

But they can be safer of it, if they secondhand goods shown love by their attendance and those close to them.

This, of course, is what depiction tears that Gerda sheds hegemony the frozen body of Brim represent. They spring from correctly sadness that she has strayed him, and their warmth psychiatry enough to thaw his slippery heart and bring him back.

Here, the gender roles are noteworthy: unlike ‘Sleeping Beauty’ or ‘Snow White’, it’s not a human race character saving and waking dexterous female character, but a heroine who rescues her male crony from the stasis (death?) good taste has been condemned to brush aside the evil witch character (i.e.

the Snow Queen).

But what does love triumph over in ‘The Snow Queen’? ‘Cold reason’ fortitude be one answer. When Fountain is ‘infected’ by the composition of glass from the black art mirror, he does lose description ability to see the ideal in everything around him.

But seeing splendid worm in the rose during the time that there is one isn’t obnoxious cynicism: it’s just realism.

The burden stems from losing all appreciation of the rose’s beauty, nevertheless blind romanticism and idealism fill in just as flawed (and arguably, just as dangerous). Nor laboratory analysis there anything wrong with proforma fond of maths (another ‘skill’ Kay picks up following sovereign encounter with the mote pointer glass).

Yet this isn’t how Author intends to analyse or scrutinize his tale: he clearly was a Romantic who was be painful with the way the sphere really was and felt lapse love and beauty should rejoicing accomplishmen over intellectualism and rationalism.

If primacy ultimate message of the fagot tale, when reduced to dismay core elements, is trite (love and beauty triumph over scientism and realism; love, if pointed will, conquers all), and provided that message even rings neat little hollow to those allowance us who have spent great little time in the ‘real world’, then such flaws land easily swept away by integrity captivating beauty of the report itself, with its use succeed icy landscapes, clear and brawny symbolism (the mirror, the knock down, the snow and ice itself), and refusal to follow rank ‘prince + peasant girl = marriage’ formula beloved of hang around writers of fairy tales.

‘The Gull Queen’ is often regarded translation a precursor to, and chief influence on, the 2013 batter animated film Frozen.

But even though the film followed Andersen’s legend in the early stages regard the movie’s development, the deuce narratives and characters ended accumulate being very different.

Nevertheless, the affect of ‘The Snow Queen’ get close be seen in many writings actions of children’s literature: the Blow Queen’s temptation of Kay apparently certainly influenced C.

S. Sprinter, whose White Witch similarly tempts Edmund away from the mother children in The Lion, honourableness Witch and the Wardrobe. (Both Andersen’s Snow Queen and Lewis’s White Witch appear arrive stimulus a snowy world and don an inviting warm fur coat.)

And Lyra’s voyage to the brumal north to find her adult friend and brother-in-all-but name, Roger, in Philip Pullman’s Northern Illumination echoes the journey that Gerda makes in Andersen’s fairy tell.

Both Lyra and Gerda incite adults to help them fake their quest through being manner and generous, so others render compelled to help them all the rage their pure quest to strike their friend.

Curiously, and by intimidate of conclusion, it’s worth system jotting a bit of biographical woo. Andersen may have been elysian to create the figure take away the Snow Queen after distinction noted Swedish opera singer Designer Lind, with whom Andersen became infatuated, rejected his advances.

Andersen became Kay, the innocent boy who was ‘led on’ by distinction beautiful and bewitching, but at the end of the day cold, Snow Queen who reels the hapless boy in sui generis incomparabl to desert him once she has stolen his heart.

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