‘Snow Queen, The’ (‘Sneedronningen’)was published in Hans Christian Andersen's second collection of tales: Nye Evyntyr, Anden Samling (New Tales, Second Collection, 1845). Composed of seven individual stories and thus one of Andersen's longest tales, it is an imaginative blend of the natural and supernatural and of Christian and folk elements.

In the devil's mirror, what is good and beautiful diminishes while what is evil and ugly intensifies. When the mirror accidentally smashes into ‘hundreds of millions, billions and even more pieces’, two of the glass splinters pierce the eye and heart of a little boy named Kay. Hitherto content to play simply and affectionately with little Gerda next door, Kay now disdains everything he previously valued, his heart a lump of ice. Science displaces imagination, and he prefers the neighbourhood boys to his former playmate. One day, a sleigh appears in the square, its driver barely visible. Recklessly hitching his small sled to the larger one, Kay is drawn through ice and snow to the realm of the Snow Queen. Terrified, he tries to escape but when ‘he tried to say the “Our Father”, all he could remember was the multiplication table’. Enchanted by the Snow Queen's beauty, his protests stilled by her chilling kiss, he forgets his past and devotes himself to arithmetic and science.

The rest of the story follows Gerda's quest for her beloved playmate. Fully at home in the natural world, her faith in Kay's survival never waning, she is assisted on her journey north by several fantastic companions, including talking flowers, an assertive princess, two bourgeois crows in domestic service, and a wild robber girl. At the Snow Queen's palace, she finds Kay, almost black with cold, beside a frozen lake (named the ‘Mirror of Reason’), where he tries in vain to arrange pieces of ice into the one word—‘Eternity’—that can free him from the Snow Queen's domination. Gerda embraces him, and her hot tears penetrate his heart, ‘melting the lump of ice and burning away the splinter of glass’. When she sings a favourite hymn, Kay bursts into tears, washing the splinter from his eye. Now ‘both adults, yet children still—children at heart’, they retrace Gerda's journey, arriving at last at their old home where ‘it was summer, warm, glorious summer’.

Juxtaposing doctrinaire piety with colloquialism, sentimentality with irony, ‘The Snow Queen’ addresses both child and adult audiences. On one level about ‘the victory of the heart over cold intellect’ (Andersen, in a letter), it is also a perceptive psychological allegory of male adolescence, depicting an evolution from alienation to sensibility through the power of love. In modern times, the story has inspired a science‐fiction novel by Joan Vinge (1980), several dramatic and ballet versions, an orchestral suite, an interactive video game, and a song by Elton John (1976).

Bibliography

• Andersen, Celia Catlett, “‘Andersen's Heroes and Heroines: Relinquishing the Reward’”, in Francelia Butler and Richard Rotert (eds.), Triumphs of the Spirit in Children's Literature (1986).
• Bredsdorff, Elias, Hans Christian Andersen: The Story of his Life and Work 1805–75 (1975).
• Conroy, Patricia L., and Rossel, Sven H. (trans. and intro.), Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Andersen (1980).
• Lederer, Wolfgang, The Kiss of the Snow Queen: Hans Christian Andersen and Man's Redemption by Woman (1986).
• Rubow, Paul V., “‘Et Vinterevyntyr’” (“‘A Winter's Tale’”) in Reminiscencer (1940).

— Joan G. Haahr

The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Copyright © 2000, 2002, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.