If you sit through all the credits after the film Frozen, you will read the statement that Disney's latest princess blockbuster is based on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale "The Snow-Queen." I know that Disney has mastered the art of seducing twenty-first century viewers; but Andersen wrote in the late nineteenth century. I wondered: Just how much of Andersen's story was preserved in the adventures of Elsa and Anna?
Barnes & Noble sells a hardcover tome entitled Classic Fairy Tales (2012) which, though not stated to be "complete," is a thorough 697-page collection of Anderesen's fanciful stories. Reading through them all is a journey often strange (as mice questing to make "Soup From a Sausage Peg"), sometimes witty (as the lesson about pride in "The Emperor's New Clothes"), and occasionally laborious (as the drawn-out plot of "The Marsh King's Daughter"). The style, translated from nineteenth-century Denmark, quite reasonably takes some getting used to. But once the reader falls in with Andersen's cadence, his writing is easily followed.
Disney fairy-tales these are not. The vast majority of Andersen's tales do not end in a "happily ever after." Take, for instance, "The Little Mermaid." Instead of Disney's nuptial sail into a regal sunset, Andersen paints a painful scene of noble suicide, with a strange metaphysical twist. Like so many other Andersen tales, the denouement is death (as in the famous "The Little Match Girl" and less famous "Story from the Sand Hills"), inviting the reader to consider her own mortality and eternal destiny. Rather than lifting up redemption in the form of human love and romantic free-will, Andersen's stories reflect on death as the universal human experience, then point to the Christian message of eternal life.
What makes these "fairy tales" is not their optimism about mortal life but rather their insistence that beyond the thin veil of human experience is another world. Animals can reason and talk like humans (as in "The Story of the Year"); metal and stone objects have personalities (as in "The Money Pig," reminiscent of Disney's Toy Story); the commonest items may be magical (as in "The Galoshes of Fortune"). A glimpse through the gossamer curtain is a journey into the depths of reality, whose fathoms give insight into human dealings on the mundane surface.
That journey into a different, wondrous world may be the thread that stitches all of Andersen's tales together. To read his stories one must be ready to go the distance in imagination, or sometimes in plain geography. Many of the tales read like the fireside embellishments of a well-traveled uncle, mystifying young listeners with his adventures abroad. From a few of the yarns one might even be able to knit cogent maps (as in "The Ice Maiden," a zigzag narrative through the crags of Switzerland). Another world--through the veil or just down the road--waits to be discovered, if only one will risk danger, misfortune, and death to experience it.
Success and happy endings are God's reserve to grant or keep, according to Andersen. Only adventure for adventure's sake, travel for learning's sake, and suffering for wisdom's sake await the one who crosses familiar bounds. But even acknowledging the shadow behind the curtain, reading these classic tales might still inspire the twenty-first century reader to pierce the veils of life and discover the wonders beyond.
Andersen's Snow Queen is a chilling metaphysical kidnapper, nothing like the misunderstood Princess Elsa of Frozen fame. Kay and Gerda, the heroes of Andersen's original, do live happily ever after, but only because of the invocation of Jesus in pious verse. The ice-witch remains an unexplained phantom, beyond understanding or control. And perhaps this alteration of the tale is most telling for us. The enemies of the Disney tale are misguided parents, mistaken siblings, and a misogynist prince--human elements overcome by human love. Gone are Andersen's fairy depths, in which dwell forces beyond our ken and control.
Disney has mastered the art of seducing us with the pleasant diversion we have come to expect. But by giving up the dark depths of Andersen's fairy world, perhaps we lose what is most important in his tales: the haunting mystery and transcendent wonder waiting just behind the curtain.
~ emrys
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