8. his only reply was “Puh!” In the Danish original, the reply is “P,” a sound with no more significance than its English equivalent. Perhaps all that Andersen reached for here was a consonant with a brusque, dismissive sound.
9. “I’ll have every courtier punched in the stomach right after supper.” One Andersen scholar points out that “The Nightingale” presents a China “composed of all the West’s shallow misconceptions of the Celestial Empire: a sort of marionettetheater China where everything is of porcelain, gold, or silk, with people nodding their heads like dolls; where conventions are so ingeniously devised as to seem actually Chinese; where the emperor can have his courtiers punched in the stomach after supper when they have displeased him; where those in authority are ridiculously impressed with their own dignity and the common people foolishly ape their masters” (Grønbech, 103). In this ritualized culture, where arrogance, sophistry, and rigid hierarchies rule supreme with brutal results, the nightingale represents a unique instance of spontaneity and pleasure. The bird’s soulfulness and generosity contrast sharply with the courtiers’ selfserving callousness.
10. “Tsing-pe!” Most likely a variation of the Chinese “ch’in p’ei,” or “as you please,” but the phrase could also be nonsense. Andersen’s playful use of gibberish anticipates Lewis Carroll’s insights into the appeal of nonsense words for children. Both authors had a clear sense of how to use words to create wonders.
11. They finally found a poor little girl in the kitchen. The kitchen maid is a Cinderella figure who would seem the least likely person to locate the nightingale. Unlike the courtiers and imperial rulers in the tale, she is a person of humble origins who remains unimpressed by the royal entourage. But she is quite happy to accept a promotion to “Real Kitchen Maid,” a title that spoofs the 1717 Danish law that raised a person’s rank with the addition of the term “real.”
W. HEATH ROBINSON
The kitchen maid has a heavy load to carry as she makes her way to her mother’s home. On her way, she is stopped in her tracks by the arresting sound of the nightingale’s song.
W. HEATH ROBINSON
The kitchen maid has put down her bundle, and the courtly delegation stands in awe of a nightingale that combines a modest appearance with an enchanting song. Robinson’s humans have a real decorative solidity that contrasts powerfully with the airy lightness of the delicate objects in the sparse landscape.
12. “How plain it looks!” Nicolai Bøgh kept a diary during a journey taken with Andersen in 1873. He reported Andersen’s views on Jenny Lind: “They say Jenny Lind was hideous to look at, and maybe she was. The first time she walked on stage, I said the same: ‘She’s hideous’ . . . but then she sang and became divinely beautiful. She was like an unlit lamp when she came in, and then, when you lit the lamp and she began to speak, it was as if her spirit cast a divine radiance on the stage and every seat in the theater. You weren’t in the theater, you were in church” (Frank and Frank, 151).
Likewise, the nightingale itself is an unprepossessing bird, slightly larger than a robin, brown, with a broad tail and a plain appearance. Many illustrators emphasize the bird’s drabness and diminutiveness, which contrast with the lavish trappings of the court.
HARRY CLARKE
An intrigued emperor listens to the vibrant sounds of the nightingale.
13. “Shall I sing again for the Emperor?” The nightingale is not only gifted and modest but also completely obliging, willing to sing on command and to leave its home in the woods to sing at court. Moreover, unlike its mechanical counterpart, the nightingale is able to vary and improvise.
14. he ordered his own golden slipper to be hung around the nightingale’s neck. The European folktale “The Juniper Tree” features a bird that sings as melodiously as the nightingale of Andersen’s tale. In the Grimms’ recording of the tale, the bird asks for rewards while repeating its song. In one instance, it receives red slippers and picks them up with one claw, while holding a gold chain with the other.
15. Inside the box was a work of art, a mechanical nightingale. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” contains an echo of Andersen’s “Nightingale.”
16. it was covered with diamonds, rubies, and sapphires. The nightingale is covered with precious stones in the classic fairytale color combination of white, red, and blue. Fairy tales, as Max Lüthi has emphasized, are concerned with surface beauty: everything that glitters, sparkles, and glows. The mechanical nightingale represents the pinnacle of artifice and human invention, and it stands in stark contrast to the “plain” nightingale, who lives in the woods and sings of nature’s beauty and poetry. Artifice is set against art in the rivalry between the mechanical nightingale and the undomesticated avian creature that lives in natural surroundings. Similar themes come up in Andersen’s tale “The Swineherd.”
17. “You can explain it; you can open it up and take it apart.” The superiority of the mechanical bird is based on the principle that the familiar, rational, and logical are more comforting and reassuring than the mysterious, irrational, and magical. The music master represents Enlightenment views that elevate reason over emotion and celebrate the human capacity to demystify the world.
18. twenty-five volumes about the mechanical bird. Once again the written word is invoked as the source of pedantic and arcane efforts to explain the obvious. Just as nature is set in opposition to artifice, so too the melodious song of the nightingale is set against the desiccated written word. Writing fails to enrich or augment, and contributes nothing to the beauty created by the nightingale, even in its mechanical form. The figure of the music master mocks the pedantry of the renowned Danish writer and critic Johan Ludvig Heiberg.
19. “Zi-zi-zi! Click, click, click.” That the story is designed to be read out loud (and Andersen famously loved to read his fairy tales to captive audiences) becomes evident from the various amusing sounds in the text—ranging from the Chamberlain’s “Puh” to noises made by the mechanical nightingale. Andersen’s use of onomatopoeia becomes more pronounced over time. Beginning with the sound of the matches in “The Little Match Girl” through the chants of the robber girl in “The Snow Queen” to the sound of the fire drum in “The Golden Treasure,” Andersen used language expressively and in ways that suggest how attuned he was to acoustical effects. As Jens Andersen points out, he also created the “most splendid military title in all of world literature: ‘Billygoat-Leg-Field-Marshal-Brigadier-General-Commander-Sargeant’” (Andersen, 239) in “The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep.” Onomatopoetic effects and playful names and titles, as we know from the works of writers like Lewis Carroll and Roald Dahl, work magic in getting the attention of children.
20. They summoned a watchmaker. Deism, a system of thought prominent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, sometimes portrayed God as an indifferent watchmaker, who set up the universe and simply allowed it to run. Operating as precisely as the machines crafted by humans, the universe was seen to evolve in an orderly fashion.
21. He felt as if something was sitting on his chest. In describing the Emperor’s condition, Andersen is drawing on a medical condition known as “sleep paralysis,” in which an individual experiences hypnagogic hallucinations and partial muscle paralysis upon awakening. Sufferers report feeling an evil presence in the room, often in the form of a threatening incubus, hag, or monster. As in Henry Fuseli’s famous painting “The Nightmare,” there is the sensation that someone or something is sitting on the chest, causing suffocation. Episodes are often terminated through the perception of sounds emanating from the real world.
HARRY CLARKE
Both artificial bird and nightingale appear to be singing the Emperor back to life, as demons gather around his bedside. “Music! Music!” cried the Emperor. “You little precious golden bird, sing!” The illustrator does not seem concerned about fidelity to the text in this case. He also removes the oriental element from the story through the illustration.
22. Death nodded, like a Chinam
an The reference to the habit of nodding among the Chinese may be linked with the porcelain mandarin figures imported from China in the nineteenth century. The figures had heads attached to the body by a spring and would nod when tapped, much like today’s bobbleheads. In Danish, a yes-man is often referred to as a mandarin. The porcelain mandarin figure can be linked with the mechanical nightingale and with the notion of the automatonlike behavior that characterizes the Emperor before his transformation. In “The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep,” a porcelain mandarin figures prominently.
23. was listening. In ancient China, music was regarded as having transcendent power. In Andersen’s story, it even has the capacity to conquer death. For nineteenth-century philosophers and other contemporaries of Andersen, like Schopenhauer, music ranked highest in the hierarchy of the arts because it does not engage in any effort to imitate, copy, or duplicate. Instead music directly captures and expresses feelings such as misery, pain, sorrow, joy, or horror.
24. something sacred about your crown. All his life, Andersen harbored an ambivalent attitude toward monarchs and the nobility, combining contempt with reverence. However, some biographers, most notably Jack Zipes, see him as consistently “servile” and “opportunistic.” For Zipes, Andersen’s tales revealed a “false consciousness” and represented “literary exercises in the legitimation of a social order to which he subscribed” (Zipes 2005, 75). In “The Nightingale,” Andersen mirrors his own sycophantic relationship to the aristocracy when he restores “the relationship of servitude” between bird and emperor: “Feudalism has been replaced by a freemarket system; yet, the bird/artist is willing to serve loyally and keep the autocrat in power” (Zipes 2005, 67).
25. “You must not let anyone know that you have a little bird that tells you everything.” The bird takes on a supervisory role, monitoring and reporting on the behavior of the Emperor’s subjects. Note the emphasis on good deeds and bad deeds in the deathbed scene. The story ends on a moralizing note, suggesting that the nightingale does not just create beauty but also polices the ethical dimension of human actions. As in “The Little Mermaid,” the moral duties assumed by the main character seem like an afterthought, and it is odd to see the nightingale, who loves the solitude of the woods, suddenly take on a social function.
26. “Good morning!” The Emperor’s subjects are obviously receiving a shock, but the bright, sunny greeting comes as something of a surprise for the reader as well. The reversal in the Emperor’s health and fortune seems to usher in a new day marked by good cheer and enlightened rule. The Emperor will, presumably, no longer threaten his subjects with punches in the stomach.
The Ugly Duckling 1
Den grimme ælling
Nye Eventyr, Første Samling, 1843
The ugly duckling has led a charmed existence over the past century and a half, alluded to in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, celebrated in Sergei Prokofiev’s music, and, less surprisingly, taken up in Walt Disney’s films. The story of the abject, despised bird has taken hold in many cultures, becoming one of our most beloved—and most reassuring—childhood tales. It promises all of us, children and adults, that we have the capacity to transform ourselves for the better.
Like many a fairy-tale character, the ugly duckling is meek and small, the youngest in the brood. A misfit out of place in the barnyard, in the wilderness, and in the domestic arena, he is unable to find a bond with other creatures. But, like Andersen himself as a youth, he is adventurous and determined, resolving to go out into “the wide world.” His metamorphosis into a beautiful swan has been evoked for generations as a source of comfort to those suffering from feelings of social isolation and personal inadequacy.
Small, powerless, and often treated dismissively, children are likely to identify with Andersen’s “hideous” creature, who may be unpromising but who also, in time, surpasses the promising. As Bruno Bettelheim points out in The Uses of Enchantment, Andersen’s protagonist does not have to submit to the tests, tasks, and trials usually imposed on the heroes of fairy tales. “No need to accomplish anything is expressed in ‘The Ugly Duckling.’ Things are simply fated and unfold accordingly, whether or not the hero takes some action” (Bettelheim, 105). Andersen suggests that the ugly duckling’s innate superiority resides in the fact that he is of a different breed. Unlike the other ducks, he has been hatched from a swan’s egg. This implied hierarchy in nature—majestic swans versus the barnyard rabble—seems to suggest that dignity and worth, along with aesthetic and moral superiority, are determined by nature rather than by accomplishment. Whatever the pleasures of a story that celebrates the triumph of the underdog, it is worth pondering the full range of ethical and aesthetic issues raised by that victory in a story that is read today by children the world over.
“The Ugly Duckling” was published with three other tales in a collection called New Fairy Tales. It sold out almost immediately, and Andersen wrote with pride about its success in a letter of December 18, 1843: “The book is selling like hot cakes! All the papers are praising it, everyone is reading it! No books of mine are appreciated in the way that these fairy tales are!” (H. C. Andersen og Henriette Wulff, I, 349)
It was so beautiful out in the country—it was summertime! 2 The grain was golden, the oats were green, and hay was piled in stacks down in the green meadows. A stork with long red legs was strolling around and chattering away in Egyptian,3 a language he had learned from his mother. All around the fields and meadows lay vast forests dotted with deep lakes. Yes, it was really lovely out there in the country! Right in the sunshine you could see an old castle4 surrounded by a deep moat with huge burdock leaves5 covering the stretch from the walls down to the water. The leaves were so high up that little children could stand upright beneath the largest of them. It was just as wild in there as in the densest forest, and that’s just where you could see a duck sitting on her nest. The time had come for her to hatch her little ducklings, but it was such a slow job that she was growing tired of it. There were hardly any visitors. The other ducks preferred swimming around in the moat to sitting under a burdock leaf just for the sake of a quack with her.
At last the eggs cracked open, one by one. “Cheep, cheep,” they all said. The egg yolks had finally come to life and stuck their heads out.
“Quack, quack!” said the mother duck, and the little ones quacked as best they could and looked around quickly from under the green leaves all about. The mother let them feast their eyes, for greenery is good for the eyes.
“The world is so big!”6 all the ducklings said, for they now had much more room than when they were curled up in an egg.
“Do you really think that this is all there is to the world!” their mother exclaimed. “Why, it stretches way past the other side of the garden, right into the parson’s field. But I’ve never ventured that far out. Well, you’re all hatched now, I hope.” And she rose from the nest. “Wait a minute! Not everyone is out yet! The biggest egg is still lying here. How much longer is this going to take, anyway? I’ve just about had it!” And she sat back down in the nest.
“Well, how are you getting on?” asked an old duck who had come to pay a visit.
“One of the eggs is taking so long to hatch!” said the duck on the nest. “It just won’t open. But take a look at the others—the loveliest ducklings I’ve ever seen. They all take after their father, the scoundrel! He never even comes to pay a visit.” “Let’s have a look at the egg that won’t crack open,” said the old duck. “I’ll wager it’s a turkey’s egg. That’s how I was once bamboozled. The little ones gave me no end of trouble, for they were afraid of the water—imagine that! I just couldn’t get them to go in. I quacked and clacked, but it didn’t do any good. Let’s have a look at that egg. Oh, yes, that’s a turkey’s egg—you can bet on it! Leave it alone and start teaching the others to swim.”
“I think I’ll sit on it just a little longer,” said the duck. “I’ve been sitting so long that it can’t hurt to sit a bit more.”
“Suit
yourself!” said the old duck, and off she waddled.
Finally the big egg began to crack. The little one said, “Cheep, cheep!” as he tumbled out, looking ever so big and hideous.7 The duck took a look and said: “My, what a great big duckling that is! The others don’t look like that. But it couldn’t be a turkey chick, could it? Well, we shall soon see. Into the water he goes, even if I have to push him in myself!”
The next morning the weather was gloriously beautiful, and the sun was shining brightly on all the green burdock leaves. The mother duck came down to the water with her entire family and splash! She jumped right in. “Quack, quack,” she said, and one after another the ducklings plunged in after her. The water closed over their heads, but in an instant they were back up again, floating along serenely. Their legs paddled along on their own, and now the whole group was in the water—even the hideous gray duckling was swimming right along with them.
“He’s not a turkey, that’s for sure,” said the duck. “Look how well he uses his legs and how straight he holds himself. He’s my own little one all right, and he’s quite handsome, when you take a good look at him. Quack, quack! Now come along with me and let me show you the world and introduce you to everyone in the barnyard. But pay attention and stay close to me so that nobody steps on you. And make sure you watch out for that cat.”
And so they made their way into the duck yard. It was terribly noisy there, because two families were fighting over an eel’s head. In the end, the cat got it.
The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen (The Annotated Books) Page 14