The people who lived outside the town, where the houses are farther apart with gardens and small fields in between them, could see the magnificent sky more clearly and hear the sound of the bell more distinctly. It was like the sound of a church buried deep inside the silent, fragrant forest. When people looked in that direction, they turned quite solemn.
Many years went by, and people began to talk with each other about the sound: “I wonder if there really is a church out there in the forest. That bell does have an unusual mysteriously enchanting sound. Shouldn’t we go out there and see what it looks like?”
The rich took carriages, and the poor went on foot, but the road seemed terribly long to all of them. When they reached a grove of willow trees growing right at the edge of the forest, they sat down, looked up into the branches, and imagined that they were right in the heart of the forest. The town baker went out there and set up a tent, and then another baker came, and he hung up a bell right above his tent. It was a leather bell, tarred to withstand the rain, and it did not have a clapper.
When everyone returned home, they said that it had all been so romantic, and more amusing than a tea party.2 Three people claimed to have walked all the way to the far side of the forest, and they kept hearing the mysterious bell over there, but at a certain point it sounded to them as if it were coming from the direction of town. One of them wrote an entire ballad about it and said that the bell sounded like a mother’s voice speaking to a beloved child. No melody was sweeter than the sound of that bell.
The emperor of the land learned about the bell and issued a proclamation declaring that whoever discovered the source of the sound would be given the title Bell-Ringer of the World,3 even if the bell was not the source of the sound.
Many people began to go to the forest for the sake of acquiring that fine title, but there was only one person who returned with any kind of explanation. No one had traveled deep enough into the forest—and neither had he, for that matter. But just the same he said that the sound came from a very large owl inside a hollow tree, a wise owl that was constantly beating its head against the trunk of the tree. He could not say with certainty whether the sound was made by the owl’s head or whether it came from the hollow tree trunk. And so he was appointed “Bell-Ringer of the World,” and every year he wrote a little tract about the owl. But no one was the wiser for it.
Confirmation Day4 arrived. The minister delivered a sermon that was splendidly moving. The candidates for confirmation had been deeply touched by it. It was an important day in their lives, for on that day they would be transformed from children into adults, and their childlike souls would migrate into the bodies of grown-ups. It was a gloriously sunny day, and, just as the newly confirmed children were walking out of the town, the great unknown bell began to peal with mysterious clarity from the forest.
All at once the children felt a powerful desire to find it, except for three. One needed to go home and try on her ball gown—it was only for the sake of that gown and that ball that she had been confirmed this time, otherwise she would have had to wait a year! The second was a poor boy who had borrowed his confirmation clothes and boots from his landlord’s son, and he had to return them on time. The third said that he never went anywhere strange without his parents and that he had always been an obedient child and wanted to stay that way, even after his confirmation. No one should make fun of that! But everyone did.
The three of them did not go along, but the others skipped off into the woods. The sun was shining, and the birds were singing. The children sang too, walking hand in hand. They had not yet received any offices or responsibilities and were all newly confirmed in the sight of our Lord.5
Two of the youngest children grew tired and returned to town. Two other little girls sat down and began to weave garlands, and so they did not go any farther. The others continued until they reached the willow trees, where the baker had set up his tent. “Just look,” they said. “Now that we’ve arrived out here, it’s clear that the bell doesn’t really exist. It’s just something people imagined.”
At that very moment, deep within the forest, the bell rang so sweetly and solemnly that four or five of them decided to go a little deeper into the forest after all. The underbrush was so thick and so full of leaves that it was difficult to make any progress. Woodruff and anemone were growing almost too high, and the branches of blooming bindweeds and blackberry bushes were draped in the trees, where nightingales sang and sunbeams were playing in the leaves. Oh, it was enchanting, but there was no path for the girls to follow. They would have ripped their dresses to shreds.
Giant boulders stood everywhere, overgrown with moss of every color. Fresh spring water gurgled and made a “glug, glug” sound.
“Could that be the bell?” one of the boys wondered, and he lay down to listen to it. “I had better listen carefully.” He remained behind and let the others go on.
The other children reached a hut made of bark and branches. A large tree with apples hung over the roof covered with rose blossoms. It seemed to be showering blessings on the house. The long branches clung to one of the gables, where a little bell was hanging. Could that be what they were hearing? They all agreed that it must be, except for one boy, who said that the bell was too small and fine to be heard from so far away and that its tones did not move the heart in the same mysterious way. The boy who spoke was a prince, and so the others said, “Someone like that always thinks he’s right.”
They let the prince go on alone, and the farther he went, the more his heart was filled with the solitude of the forest. He could still hear the little bell that the others were playing, and, occasionally, when the wind came from the direction of the bakery, he could also hear voices singing at the tea table.
The deep tones of the mysterious bell swelled up above everything else, almost as if an organ were accompanying it. The sounds came from the left, from the side where the heart is located.
Suddenly there was a rustling in the bushes, and a little boy stood before the prince, wearing wooden shoes6 and a shirt so tight that the sleeves did not come down to his wrists. The two knew each other, for the boy was one of the newly confirmed, the one who couldn’t come along since he had to go home and return his clothes and boots to the landlord’s son. Once he had done that, he had set out on his own, wearing his wooden shoes and shabby clothes, for the bell had sounded so powerfully and so deeply that he had to follow its call.
“Let’s go together,” said the prince. But the poor boy in the wooden shoes was very shy. He tugged on his sleeves, which were too short, and said that he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to keep up. Besides, he thought they should search for the bell to the right side, where everything looked more grand and beautiful.
“Then I’m afraid we won’t be able to go together,” said the prince, and he nodded to the poor boy, who went into the darkest, deepest part of the forest, where thorns tore his shabby clothes to shreds and drew blood from his face, hands, and feet.
The prince received some scratches too, but at least the sun was shining on his path. He is the one we will follow, for he was a lively lad.
“I must find the bell and I will!” he said. “Even if I have to go to the ends of the earth!”
High up in the trees nasty monkeys sat and grinned, gnashing their teeth at him. “Shall we pelt him with something?” they chattered. “Let’s pelt him! After all, he’s a prince!”
He continued on his way unharmed, going deeper and deeper into the woods, where the most wondrous flowers were growing. White star-lilies with blood-red stamens were growing there; sky-blue tulips gleamed in the breeze; and apple trees bore fruit that looked every bit like shining soap bubbles. You can imagine how the trees must have sparkled in the sunlight! All around, on the loveliest green meadows, where stags and does played in the grass, massive oaks and beeches were growing. If there was a crack in their bark, mosses and long tendrils grew out of them. There were large stretches of forest with quiet lakes, where bea
utiful white swans floated and flapped their wings. The prince often stopped to listen, for it seemed as if the tones of the bell were rising from the depths of one of the lakes. But, then again, he was sure that the sounds were coming from a place even deeper in the forest.
As the sun went down, the clouds began to turn a fiery red. Everything became quiet, so very quiet in the forest. The prince fell to his knees and sang his evening hymn. “I will never find what I am looking for,” he said. “The sun is setting, and night is coming, the dark night. And yet perhaps I can catch one more glimpse of the round, red sun before it sinks below the horizon. I’ll climb up the cliffs over there, for they are as high as the tallest trees!”
Grabbing hold of vines and roots, he made his way up the slippery rocks, where water snakes were curled up and toads and frogs seemed to be croaking at him. He managed to reach the summit before the sun had gone down completely. What a magnificent sight!7
The ocean, the great, glorious ocean that rolled its long waves against the coast, stretched out before him, and the sun stood like a great, shining altar out there where the sea and sky meet. The whole world seemed to melt together in glowing colors. The forest was singing; the ocean was singing; and the boy’s heart was singing too. Nature was a vast, sacred temple, with the trees and floating clouds as columns, flowers and grass as the woven altar cloth, and the sky itself as the great dome. Up above, the red colors vanished as the sun disappeared, but millions of stars lit up, like millions of diamond lamps, and the prince spread out his arms in joy to the skies, the sun, and the forest.
Just then, from the right-hand path, the poor boy with the short sleeves and the wooden shoes appeared. He had arrived there just as quickly by his own path. Overjoyed, they ran toward each other and joined hands8 in the great temple of nature and poetry, while above them sounded the invisible, holy bell. Blessed spirits floated around them and lifted their voices in a joyful Hallelujah!
1. clouds were shimmering like gold up above the chimneys. The appearance of radiant light marks a moment of arresting beauty that evokes the sound of celestial music that, in turn, stops people in their tracks. The hustle and bustle of the city conceals the transcendent beauty of nature (the “silent, fragrant forest”) and the heavenly sounds of man-made art in the service of religion (the ringing of the bell).
2. more amusing than a tea party. The aside about tea parties is intended to deride the fashionable literary tea salons of the day, where new literary works or unpublished manuscripts were read aloud. The trivialization of authentic art was a source of constant irritation for Andersen.
3. Bell-Ringer of the World. In “The Nightingale” and in other tales, Andersen ridicules the invention of absurd honorific titles and rituals that have no substance.
4. Confirmation Day. Confirmation is a rite in many Christian churches, and it is usually marked by the taking of the sacrament at a time when a child is believed to have attained the age of reason, and also of faith. The children of the story, even though they have been confirmed, remain in a state between childhood and adulthood. Like Kai and Gerda in “The Snow Queen,” they possess the innocence of the child and the wisdom of the adult.
5. newly confirmed in the sight of our Lord. The phrase alludes to the pronouncement “We are all sinners in the eyes of the Lord.”
6. wearing wooden shoes. Wooden shoes are a sign of poverty—as opposed to the boots borrowed for Confirmation Day. The pairing of prince and pauper famously became the subject of Mark Twain’s novel of that name, although in that work, the two trade places. It is in the woods that the two boys become equals, joined in their humility before the splendors of nature suffused with divine meaning through the art of the bell’s song.
7. What a magnificent sight! Andersen strains his verbal resources to paint a picture of nature that is suffused with beauty and sacred meaning. This description will usher in the allegorical union of nature and poetry in the final paragraph. Anticipating turn-of-the-century aesthetics, Andersen presents nature as a place of plenitude, rich in sensation and laden with meaning.
8. they ran toward each other and joined hands. The reunion of the prince and the pauper takes place when land, sky, and ocean melt into each other to produce a scene of arresting beauty, in which sights, sounds, colors, and aromas melt into each other. As the two join hands, they stage a fantasy that preoccupied Andersen his entire life: acceptance as a man equal in rank to a prince. The poor boy with “short sleeves” and “wooden shoes” has had a rough ascent, but unobtrusively he has made it to the summit and witnesses with the prince the triumph of beauty.
A Fairy-Tale Life?
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN
Andersen constructed myriad fictional doubles, shadows, and reflections, but he also did not resist the temptation to represent himself in more prosaic terms. In fact, he gave in to that temptation multiple times, writing no fewer than three full-length autobiographies, each an effort to shape a life in ways that would enable him to live on like his fictional characters.1 Making a name for himself, pursuing fame and fortune, achieving immortality: these were the motives behind many of the autobiographical writings, as Andersen himself conceded. “Every day I get a better sense of how much I am recognized,” he declared with undisguised glee. “In Germany it seems as if my name will soon be as well known as it is here at home. Yesterday I completed my biographical sketch, which will be placed at the beginning of Only a Fiddler.”2
It is no accident that two of the three versions of his life contained the term “fairy tale” in their titles and that even the third is entitled The Book of My Life. The True Fairy Tale of My Life was commissioned by a publisher to introduce a German edition of Andersen’s works and was written in 1846. It was later published in English as The True Story of My Life. It is to that life that I will now turn, for, even if it does not take us more deeply into the fairy tales, it provides background and context for them, bringing to life the author and the culture in which he wrote the tales. For that reason, I have also not hesitated to include annotations that reveal something about Andersen the man, for the fairy tale of his life is as absorbing, improbable, and captivating as many of the tales he produced.
All three of Andersen’s autobiographies were, despite a commitment to getting out the facts, exercises in making fiction, in creating the illusion of an untroubled life and indulging in cheerful self-promotion. Consider the opening paragraphs of The Fairy Tale of My Life, published in 1855 as the definitive autobiography:
My life is a lovely story, happy and full of adventures. If, at the time when I was still a boy and going out into the world poor and without friends, a good fairy had come along and said, “Choose your course in life and the goal of your efforts. . . . I will guide and protect you until you attain it,” my destiny could not, even at that time, have been guided more happily, more prudently, or more fortunately. The history of my life will reveal to the world what it tells me—there is a loving God who directs all things for the best.3
Andersen continues with a description of his parents (who, according to him, doted on each other), and he draws on all his verbal resources to describe the two as loving, compassionate, hardworking, and thoughtful. He paints the picture of a childhood in which he is the adored center of attention. The household becomes the site of art (with pictures, books, songs), and even domestic objects sparkle with beauty (the plates as well as the pots shine).
In the year 1805 there lived in Odense, in a small, humble room, a young married couple, who were extremely attached to each other. He was a shoemaker, scarcely twenty-two years old, a man with a richly gifted and truly poetical mind. His wife, a few years older, did not know much about life and the world, but she possessed a heart full of love. . . . During the first day of my existence, my father is said to have sat by the bed and read Holberg out loud, but I ended up crying all the time. . . . Our little room, which was packed with the shoemaker’s bench, the bed, and my crib, was the abode of my childhood. The walls were covere
d with pictures, and over the workbench was a cupboard containing books and songs. The little kitchen was full of shining plates and metal pans.4
Reality was quite different from the childhood paradise described by Andersen. It also diverged sharply from the Hollywood fantasy of Andersen as portrayed by Danny Kaye singing “wonderful, wonderful Copenhagen.” As the Swedish novelist Per Olov Enquist puts it: “He did not grow up in a Danish idyll. He was born into the ragged proletariat, in among dirt, decay, promiscuity, and prostitution—and into a family where there was a great deal of mental sickness. . . . His maternal grandmother was a prostitute with three illegitimate children, one of whom was Hans Christian’s mother. In her turn, she appears to have spent time as a prostitute; she became an alcoholic at an early age and died of delirium tremens in the workhouse in Odense.”5 Andersen’s life story may have ended with “happily ever after,” and, somewhat ironically, it reads exactly like a real fairy tale. Its beginnings are marked by classic dysfunctional family behavior and by all the horrors of what emerges right after “once upon a time” and before “happily ever after.”
In the last years of her life, Andersen’s mother, the woman with a “heart full of love,” sent a steady stream of letters to her son, asking for financial help. The promising young writer ignored most of those pleas while he was on the road, traveling on a royal stipend to Rome, where he worried about his teeth, and to Naples, where he took careful notes about items in the Secret Room (a private collection once known as the Cabinet of Obscene Objects). Andersen was, to be sure, worried that any money he sent might be wasted on spirits, but it is clear that he was never as attentive to his mother as might be expected from the testimony in his autobiography. “All my childhood memories, every spot seems dark to me,” Andersen later confessed in a letter to his friend Edvard Collin, written from Odense a year before his mother’s death. On hearing news of his mother’s death, he mourned her loss with characteristic narcissistic grief: “Her situation was a harsh one, and there was almost nothing I could do for her. . . . I am truly alone—no one is bound by nature to love me.” Twenty years later, he repeats the sentiment while reminiscing about his “endlessly bitter anguish”: “I wept but could not accustom myself to the idea that now I have not a single person in the world who, by blood and nature, must love me. . . . I cried my heart out and had a feeling that the best had happened for her. I would never have been able to make her last days bright and free of sorrow. She died with a joyous faith in my happiness, that I was somebody.”6
The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen Page 48