The Snow Queen, Parts 1 and 2

Beautiful, but cold as ice

 

Hello friends! For those of us in the Northern hemisphere, we're deep into winter, so this story is pretty apt. For those in the Southern hemisphere, I suppose you can remember winter as you're deep into summer.

I've wanted to talk about Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen for quite awhile. The only reason I haven't is because it's so long. It's not a novel, but it's much longer than the short stories I usually choose for this blog. However, I was looking at fairy tales online the other day, as you do, when I found that some places have this story split into seven different stories, which are much more manageable. So, I hope you like Hans Christian Andersen's writing, because we'll be looking at The Snow Queen for the next several weeks. Today, we'll look at the first and second stories because the first one is so short. In future weeks, it will probably just be one story at a time. So, go ahead and read stories one and two at the link above, then join me below to analyze them.

The concept in the first story is really interesting to me. People could get into a whole lot of trouble by looking at things thought a mirror that distorted everything good and magnified everything bad. I'm really intrigued by someone who used some of that glass for glasses on their face. If their vision was really bad, they'd have their glasses on all the time and they'd be convinced that everyone and everything around them was terrible. What a life. Hopefully, they'd get new glasses and see things as they were again.

I also like this as a prologue because it gives us an interesting idea, the mirror that distorts good and bad things, and give us a hint about what is going to happen with it in this story. That is, people getting pieces of it stuck in them. It also gives us a good explanation for why Kay changes so much. While it's true that people can get more surly when they become teenagers, it's a much bigger change to have pieces of this mirror get stuck in your eye and heart. We also don't know how old Kay is, so we might not expect the teenage surliness to hit him yet.

Unfortunately for him, I think that piece of the mirror in his heart is why the Snow Queen chose him. We see that after she kisses him, he forgets things, but I'm assuming her kisses are only that effective because his heart is already turned to ice. Once she's done with him, he isn't worried about leaving his life, friends, and family behind. He's just interested in this beautiful woman next to him.

I also feel badly for Gerda. Her best friend changed seemingly overnight into someone much meaner. From what we've seen of the two of them before, they are incredibly good. The kind of good children that you only find in fairy tales. It's almost worse that other people are saying he's so clever for his imitations. Gerda was probably upset about the imitations and all the other mean things that Kay was doing, but it would be hard to complain about that to someone who thought it was a good thing. I'm kind of impressed that Gerda stayed friends with him, but maybe there were times she thought he was funny too.

The second story leaves off right after Kay disappears. We'll see how Gerda reacts to his disappearance in the next story.

The moral of these stories is either: don't be mean and make a mirror that distorts everything, or somehow avoid getting any pieces of it in your eye or your heart.

Have a different moral? Like this format? Wondering if the Snow Queen was the reason Kay got the pieces of that mirror in his eye and his heart? Comment below! And don't forget to subscribe if you like what you're reading.