title: The Little Mermaid
author: Hans Christian Andersen
genre: short story/fantasy/classic/fairy tale
published: 1837
first line: Far out in the ocean the water is as blue as the petals of the loveliest cornflower, and as clear as the purest glass.
source: http://www.americanliterature.com/
The original story of The Little Mermaid is one of my favorite fairy tales. As a child I watched an animated version (non Disney) and enjoyed the beauty and sadness of the story.
This bittersweet fairy tale is about a little mermaid who gives her life up in the sea for the chance to have a human soul and to be with her true love, a Prince.
In Hans Christian Andersen's version, the little mermaid lives in the ocean with her father, grandmother and five sisters.
They were six lovely girls, but the youngest was the most beautiful of them all. Her skin was as soft and tender as a rose petal, and her eyes were as blue as the deep sea, but like all the others she had no feet. Her body ended in a fish tail.
When she sees a young Prince, and saves him from drowning, the little mermaid falls in love with him and cannot think of anything else. She longs to have human legs and live on shore with her Prince.
I found it sad how the mermaid longs to be something she is not. After she rescues the Prince, she often visits the shore just outside his home in hopes of seeing him.
Many evenings and many mornings she revisited the spot where she had left the Prince. She saw the fruit in the garden ripened and harvested, and she saw the snow on the high mountain melted away, but she did not see the Prince, so each time she came home sadder than she had left. It was her one consolation to sit in her little garden and throw her arms about the beautiful marble statue that looked so much like the Prince. But she took no care of her flowers now. They overgrew the paths until the place was a wilderness, and their long stalks and leaves became so entangled in the branches of the tree that it cast a gloomy shade.
The little mermaid goes to the sea witch and asks her to make her human. This part of the story was creepy. The witch agrees to give the mermaid a potion that will give her human legs....but for a price. The witch wants her beautiful voice in exchange for the potion.
The witch tells the mermaid that her human legs will be always unbearably painful, like walking on knives. She also tells her that if the prince doesn't love her completely and marry her, she will die.
If he marries someone else, your heart will break on the very next morning, and you will become foam of the sea.
Despite all of this, the mermaid agrees and the sea witch cuts off her tongue and gives her the potion.
The little mermaid takes the potion and finds her Prince. He does end up loving her, but eventually he marries someone else. She gave her life and her family up for him and she saved him from the shipwreck, but the little mermaid can't explain herself to him, since she is now mute.
All she can do is watch the wedding ceremony brokenhearted, knowing that this will be her last night alive. She was always taught that mermaids do not go to heaven after they die, there is no afterlife for them.
Her sisters appear to her that night and give her one chance to save herself. The cost would be to stab the prince with the sea witches knife. The little mermaid cannot kill her true love, so the following morning, she becomes the foam on the sea.
But when she dies, the mermaid becomes a spirit, because of the selfless act she committed by not stabbing the Prince to save herself.
She now has a chance of going to heaven if she does good deeds for 300 years. So the little mermaid gets a chance at her happy ending after all.
For me this is the most moving moment in the story since mermaids cannot cry because they have no tears. However after the little mermaid dies and becomes a spirit, she can finally cry:
The little mermaid lifted her clear bright eyes toward God's sun, and for the first time her eyes were wet with tears.
Hans Christian Andersen's story is beautiful, sad and scary all at once. I enjoyed the descriptive storytelling, and found myself easily able to imagine the mermaid's undersea world. The part where the sea witch chops off her tongue was creepy, I would think young children would be scared by that.
One thing I wasn't thrilled with was the part at the end where the little mermaid would get to heaven after 300 years of helping children. Seems a bit harsh no?
I would have thought she had already redeemed herself by sacrificing herself instead of the prince.
All in all, this is a favorite fairytale of mine and I enjoyed reading it.
Moral of the story? Perhaps that we shouldn't try to be something we are not? Or maybe that selfless acts will grant us a spot in heaven?
The photo above is of the Little Mermaid statue located in Copenhagen, Denmark.
This has been a part of Once Upon a Time
