The Complete Fairy Tales

by Hans Christian Andersen

  The service was over and the congregation were coming out of the church; the churchyard was barren then as it is today, not a bush or tree grew there. No flowers are laid on the graves. Little tiny mounds show where the dead are buried; and rough, stiff, wind-blown grass covers all the graves. A few of them have little markers; these are always the same: a piece of wood shaped like a coffin, with a name cut into it.

  The wood has been gathered in that “forest” that grows on the west coast: the raging sea. There can be found beams and planks already cut and planed, and the sea supplies both firewood and building materials for the poor fishermen. That morning a woman was standing deep in thought in front of such a wooden grave marker. It was a child’s grave. The western wind and salt air had already disintegrated the wood so much you could hardly read the name that had been cut into it. Her husband came up to her; they did not speak to each other, but he took her hand and together they walked across the moorland toward the dunes.

  “That was a good sermon,” said the man. “Yes, if one did not have God, then one would be alone and have nothing at all.”

  “Yes,” agreed his wife. “He gives us joy and He gives us sorrows and that is His right!—Tomorrow our little boy would have been five, if we had been allowed to keep him.”

  “Mourning won’t bring him back,” said her husband. “After all, he has escaped so much. He is where we have to pray to be allowed to go.”

  They walked on in silence. It was an old conversation, the kind that never ends. Their house was among the dunes. Suddenly from the top of a sandy hill, where no lyme grass grew, smoke appeared to rise. It was a puff of wind that was whirling the fine sand up into the air. Another gust of wind came; a little stronger than the first, it made the codfish, which were hung up to dry, bang against the walls of the cottage. Then everything was calm again. The sun was baking down.

  The couple disappeared into the house, to change from their Sunday clothes to weekday ones. Then they hurried across the dunes, which looked like gigantic waves. The sharp, blue-green blades of the lyme grass gave a little color to the white landscape. When they arrived at the beach they found some of their neighbors already there; together they pulled the boats farther up on the sand. Now the wind had really begun to blow. It was cold and, as they made their way back across the dunes, sand and tiny stones were blown into their faces. Out at sea the waves had white tops, and the wind blew the spray from the surf far inland.

  Toward evening the storm gathered force. It sounded as if a whole army of desperate spirits were moaning and groaning up in the sky; so loudly did they sing that it drowned out the noise of the surf breaking. The sand beat like rain upon the windowpanes of the little cottage, and every once in a while an especially violent gust of wind shook the walls, as if the wind thought it were master here on land as well as on the sea. Outside everything was dark; toward midnight the moon would be up.

  The sky was cloudless, but the storm blew worse than ever out over the dark sea. The fisherman and his wife had long ago gone to bed, but they had not closed their eyes.

  Someone knocked on the window. The door was opened, and a voice shouted: “There is a big ship aground on the outermost of the sandbanks.”

  Both man and wife jumped out of bed and put on their clothes.

  The moon had come out so that one would have been able to see a little, if only one could have kept one’s eyes open, but the wind whipped sand into them. So furiously was the wind blowing that when they came to the top of dunes they could not stand up but had to crawl on all fours. Here the foam from the surf flew like swan’s-down through the air. The sea looked like one mass of boiling turbulence; one had to have keen sight to be able to make out the wreckage. A beautiful two-masted ship she had been.

  Just as the fisherman and his wife joined the others, who were gathered as near to the water as they dared to go, a giant wave lifted the ship across the first sandbank; there were three in all. Now she stood solidly on the ground. It was impossible even to think of rescue. The sea was much too rough; wave after wave broke over the ship. Those on shore thought they could hear the people on board screaming in terror, in fear of death. Now that the ship was closer they could watch the useless efforts of the doomed crew as they ran back and forth in senseless activity. A great wave broke over the ship and took along a mast and the bowsprit. Another lifted the stern up high; at that moment two figures could be seen hurling themselves into the sea. They disappeared.

  A huge wave rolled up toward the dunes, broke, and retreated, leaving a body on the sand. It was a woman, or the corpse of one. Some of the fishermen’s wives dragged her up on the dry sand. They turned her over; she seemed to be still alive. She was carried up to the fisherman’s cottage.

  “So beautiful and delicate,” one of the women muttered. “She must be some highborn lady.”

  They put her to bed. Here were no linen sheets, only a woolen blanket, but that was good and warm. She opened her eyes, but a fever had hold of her mind and her body; she did not seem to remember what had happened or understand where she was. But maybe that was just as well, for that which was dearest in life to her rested at the bottom of the sea. Only she had not had the same fate as the people in the song, who had sailed with “The Son of the King of England”:

  The proud ship into small pieces split.

  How could one look without pity on it?

  Wreckage drifted up on the shore, but she was the only survivor. The wind kept on howling and screaming as it ran up the coast of Jutland. The woman slept for a little while, but then she cried out in pain. She opened her lovely eyes and spoke a few words, but in a strange language that no one could understand.

  She had suffered and fought, not only for her own life but for that of the child within her. The infant was born, that child who should have slept in a beautiful cradle, on embroidered sheets, in a house of wealth. That boy, whose birth should have been a cause of great joy and whose life would have been one of plenty, was now to live in a poor fisherman’s cottage, and not even receive a kiss from his own mother, because God had decided that thus it should be.

  The wife of the fisherman laid the child next to the woman who had borne it, next to her heart, but it no longer beat. She was dead. That child who should have been suckled by fortune and wealth the sea had thrown out into the world, to try poverty and know the lot of misery.

  Again one is reminded of a verse from the old folk song.

  A tear ran down the young prince’s cheek.

  By Christ, I fear that death us will seek,

  For we will be wrecked on Bovbjerg!

  If only there Master Bugge lived and reigned

  We need not fear that our blood be drained.

  The ship had been wrecked a little south of Nissum Fjord, on a beach that once, long ago, Master Bugge had called his own. But that period of history when those who were shipwrecked had to fear not only the waves but the people who lived as robbers on the west coast as well, had long since passed. Now the shipwrecked sailor would meet help and charity whichever stretch of the coast of Jutland misfortune threw him up upon. The dying mother and the newborn child would have been kindly treated no matter where the wind had blown them. Though no place would the child have been more welcome than in the cottage where the wife still mourned the death of her own little child, who on that very day would have been five years old, “if God had permitted him to live.”

  No one knew who the strange foreign woman was or from which land she had come. The wreckage did not solve the mystery.

  No letter came to the house of the rich merchant in Spain; no message told of the young couple’s fate. They had not arrived at their destination; heavy storms had raged in the area for weeks. Finally, a month later, word was brought: “The ship was totally destroyed, all on board lost their lives.”

  But in the fisherman’s cottage among the dunes there was a little boy again. Where God supplies food for two, a third mouth will find something to eat. Near the ocean there are
always fish. The infant was named Jurgen.

  “I think he is Jewish,” said some. “He looks so dark.”

  “He could just as well be an Italian or a Spaniard,” said the minister.

  To the fisherman’s wife it did not matter which of the three peoples her son had belonged to. He was hers now and had been baptized in her own church. The boy thrived. His noble blood gained warmth and strength from the dried fish and potatoes of the poor. The Danish language as it is spoken on the west coast of Jutland became his native tongue. The pomegranate seed from Spain had become a lyme-grass plant on the dunes that face the North Sea. These things can and do happen to people. To this, his new home, the roots of his life—long as the years—would cling. He would experience hunger and cold, the want and need of the poor, but he would also have his part of their joys.

  One’s childhood has its periods of happiness which shine with a special light that lasts a lifetime. Jurgen loved to play and he had a whole beach miles wide filled with toys. A great mosaic of colorful stones: some as red as coral, others as yellow as amber, and still others as white and round as birds’ eggs; they were every shade of color, and all worn smooth by the ocean. Even the dried skeletons of fishes, the seaweed with its strange forms were things to play with.

  The boy was clever, there was no doubt about that. Rich gifts lay dormant in him. He could remember all the songs and stories he heard, and he could make pretty pictures of ships out of shells and small stones that looked nice enough to hang on a wall. His foster mother said that he could carve a stick into any shape that he chose. He could sing, too; he had a lovely voice and learned a melody as soon as he had heard it. There were many strings in that little chest that might have been plucked so they could have been heard all over the world, had he not been born in a poor fisherman’s cottage on the west coast of Denmark.

  One day a ship was stranded and a box of rare flower bulbs drifted to shore. Some of them the fishermen cooked, others lay rotting in the sand. None of them was ever allowed to fulfill its mission in life. The beauty, the gay colors within them, were never given a chance to bloom. Would Jurgen fare better? The bulbs were soon destroyed; he had years of trial before him.

  Neither Jurgen nor anyone else who lived on the coast ever thought that their days were monotonous and alike. There was always something to do, something to look at. The ocean itself was like a big book, and each day a new leaf was turned. Storms, dead calm, breeze, or swells from a storm far away: on no two days was the sea ever alike. Every stranding was a high point that children never forgot; but also the Sunday service was festive. What Jurgen liked best of all were visits from his foster mother’s uncle. He had a small farm near Bovbjerg but lived mainly from catching and selling eels. He came in a red-painted wagon with a chest on top of it that looked like a coffin; this had blue and white tulips painted on it, and in it he kept his eels. Two steers pulled this strange vehicle, and Jurgen was allowed to ride in it.

  The eelman was a clever fellow and a merry guest. He always brought a little barrel of schnapps with him and gave everyone a drink. If there weren’t glasses enough, then coffee cups would do. Even when Jurgen was still a little boy he was given a few drops in his mother’s thimble. “It helps you to hold onto the fat, slimy eels,” his uncle explained. Then he would always tell the same story and, if people laughed at it, he would repeat it. This is something that most very talkative people have a habit of doing. Since Jurgen, throughout his youth and early manhood, often used expressions from this story, we will have to suffer through hearing it:

  “There were some eels living in a stream. One day all of the mother eel’s daughters asked for permission to swim upstream. ‘Don’t go too far, or the wicked eelman will catch you, every one,’ their mother warned. But the eels swam as far as they pleased; and of the eight who had set out, only three came home. ‘We had just stepped outside the door,’ the three wailed, ‘when the wicked eel catcher came and killed our five sisters.’ ‘They will come back,’ said the mother eel. ‘No,’ cried the sisters, ‘for the evil eelman skinned them, cut them in pieces, and fried them.’ ‘They will come back!’ repeated their mother. ‘But he ate them,’ the little eels wept. ‘They will come back,’ the mother eel insisted. ‘But he drank a schnapps when he finished eating them,’ the sisters said. ‘Oh … oh … then they will never come back!’ wept their mother, ‘for a schnapps buries an eel.’

  “And that is why,” said the eel merchant, “one always has to drink a schnapps when one eats an eel.”

  This particular silly story became important in Jurgen’s life. It was a family joke and that is not always appreciated by strangers. He, too, begged to be allowed outside the door, to swim a little up the stream. He wanted to sail on a ship, but his mother answered as the mother eel had: “Out in the world there are many wicked people who might hunt my little eel.”

  But he did go on a short journey to the world outside the dunes. Four whole days, a magic time, in which the happiest hours of his childhood were concentrated. All the beauty of Jutland, all the happiness of his home, seemed revealed and symbolized in that short time. He was going to attend a party. True, it was a wake, a funeral, but that was a kind of party too.

  A wealthy member of the family had died, a farmer whose farm lay to the east, “and two points north,” from their home, as his father described it. His parents had been invited to the funeral, and they decided to take Jurgen along.

  From the dunes they walked across the moor and the peat bogs until they came to the green meadows near Skaerum Stream. Here the mother eel lived with her daughters, those that the wicked eel hunter caught and cut into pieces. But often man does not treat his fellow men much kindlier.

  Master Bugge, the knight mentioned in the old song, had finally been killed by evil men. But Master Bugge himself, who in the song is described as good, what kind of a man had he been? Jurgen and his parents were standing on the very spot where his castle had once stood, near the point where Skaerum Stream runs out into the fjord of Nissum. According to one legend, he had wanted to kill the man who had constructed his castle. As the master builder was leaving, after the heavy walls and the proud tower were finished, Master Bugge had called one of his servants to him and told him to ride after the master builder. “Before you catch up with him,” instructed Master Bugge, “call out as loud as you can, ‘The tower leans! The tower leans!’ If he turns around to look, then kill him and take the money I have paid him and bring it back to me. But if he does not look back, then let him go in peace.”

  The servant did as he was told. But the master builder had not turned around. He had only said, “The tower is straight; it does not lean. But one day a man who wears a blue cape will come from the west and he will make the tower lean.” And it happened, a hundred years later, during a terrible storm, the North Sea broke in over the land and destroyed the castle and the tower fell. Predbjørn Gyldenstjerne owned the castle then, and he built a new castle on higher ground, above the meadows. That one is still standing; it is called Nørre Vosborg.

  During the long winter evenings Jurgen had often heard about the places he was seeing now. His foster parents had told him about the castle with its double moat, trees and bushes, its ramparts overgrown with ferns. What Jurgen found most beautiful of all were the tall linden trees that reached up to the roof of the castle and filled the air with the sweetest fragrance. In the northwestern part of the garden there was a tree that seemed to be covered by snow. It was a flowering elderberry, the first that Jurgen had ever seen. The memory of this and the linden trees, the child’s soul kept for the sake of the old man he would one day become.

  The journey continued a little more comfortably; they met some other people who had been invited to the funeral and they were offered a ride. True, all three of them had to sit in the back of a wagon on a little wooden chest, but they thought it was better than having to walk. Here began the great heath, the immense moor that stretches over most of central Jutland. The road was bumpy
and filled with holes; the steers that pulled the wagon went none too fast. When they spied some green grass they stopped and grazed.

  The sun shone warmly down upon them, and the air was clear. They could see far. Out toward the horizon a column of smoke rose. It twirled and danced in the still air.

  “It is Loke driving his sheep,” said someone. The remark was made for Jurgen’s sake. And truly, the boy felt that he was driving right into a fairy tale country, and yet it was real.

  Like a costly carpet stretching in all directions lay the heath. The juniper bushes and scrub oaks made green bouquets amid the blooming heather. The place seemed so inviting for a boy to run across, but the grownups warned Jurgen about the vipers. They also talked about the many wolves that once had lived there; the district was still called “wolves’ castle.” The old man who was driving told stories from his father’s youth, which had been long before the last of the wolves were killed. The horses and the wolves used to fight. His father had come out one morning and found a horse still stamping on the dead body of a wolf, but one of the horse’s front legs had been chewed to the bone.

  Far too short was the road across the heath; and far too soon, thought Jurgen, did they arrive at the house of mourning. There were guests everywhere: both inside the farmhouse and in the fields. Wagons, carriages, and carts crowded the yard. Oxen and horses grazed together, sharing the meager grass there was. Behind the farm there were some great sandy dunes like the ones by the sea. How had they come here, fifteen miles inland? The wind had moved them there; there was also a legend about that.

  Psalms were sung and some tears shed, but only by a few old people; otherwise everything was most amusing. There was plenty of food and drink; lovely fat eels were fried every day, and properly “buried” in schnapps as the eelman had said they should be. Here indeed his advice was followed.