Little Mermaid, The

Scandinavian Review, Summer 2003 by Dewey, Donald

Copenhagen's endearing harbor statue, inspired by the classic tale by Hans Christian Andersen, has greeted visitors to the Danish capital for 90 years and survived both decapitation and dismemberment in the process.

AT FIRST, I WAS A LITTLE DISORIENTED BY THE 90th anniversary of Denmark's Little Mermaid. There is something deeply contradictory about a mermaid having any kind of anniversary. Part of the fabulousness of fabulous creatures is that they aren't subject to calendars, clocks and other measures of human limitations. A Statue of Liberty-fine. She exists only to do her reading by torchlight in New York harbor and should have her milestones imposed on her. Timelessness is not one of her clarion attributes. But if a mermaid wants to have a celebration, I told myself, she should be able to do it whenever she swishes her tail. She's supposed to be part of an infinite flow, isn't she? So flow. Any fish in the ocean can be 90 after 90 years exactly.

But then I got over my discomfit. The anniversary, I remembered, is not for the mermaid, but for the Edward Eriksen bronze that has been sitting at Copenhagen's Langelinie Pier as a Danish national symbol since 1913. And that's just one of the many signal dates associated with it. The Little Mermaid may not be timeless, I realized, but she has attracted so many tribulations and recoveries over her nine decades that she is the next best thing-timeful. Not for her the whimsical faces of the French symbol Marianne, which has changed from generation to generation, calling for the nation to venerate Brigitte Bardot, then Catherine Deneuve, and most recently, supermodel Laetitia Casta, mainly familiar for her Victoria's Secret ads. The Mermaid might have lost her head a couple of times, but she has always recovered it, returning as herself and more venerable for the experience.

Where it all started, of course, was with Hans Christian Andersen, the teller of tales whose greatest story might have been his own life. However he dressed it up in later years, Andersen was born in Odense on April 2,1805, into the kind of poverty a rag-and-bone man might have had nightmares about. His mother Anne-Marie had been sent out of her own house as a child to beg and had had to work her way up to being a servant. His father Hans, a cobbler by trade, had come up with a family bed from a catafalque for a coffin, so that young Hans was born into the world from within a lot of black funeral fringe. From such beginnings, the boy had clearly had one of only two paths to follow: establishing a necrophiliac club on the island of Fyn or becoming an internationally renowned storyteller. He chose the latter.

By the 1830s, Andersen had secured a reputation as a generalist-having authored everything from travel books and poetry to novels and plays. But after extensive travels throughout Europe and Asia Minor, he found his true calling in 1835, with the publication of small pamphlets containing fairy tales. Two years later, "The Little Mermaid" appeared with "The Emperor's New Clothes."

As melancholy a tale as has ever been related to children, "The Little Mermaid" tells of the Sea King's daughter who, on her first swim up to the ocean's surface, saves the life of a shipwrecked prince and then sets off on a disastrous quest to turn human so she can win his love. Along the way, she enters into a demonic deal with a witch that costs her her lovely voice and mermaid's tail-and all to no avail anyway when the prince weds another. After coming ever so close to stabbing her lost love in his sleep, the mermaid flings her knife into the sea, then jumps after it, dissolving into cold foam. Salvation comes in the form of the transparent and beautiful Daughters of the Air who "fill the air with the scent of flowers and bring health and refreshment" and who recruit her as one of their own. "When we have striven to do good for three hundred years, we are given an immortal soul and eternal happiness," they tell her. Andersen concludes the story with the mermaid's final look at the prince and his bride:

On the ship she saw the prince and his beautiful bride looking for her. They stared sadly at the bubbling sea foam, as if they knew she had thrown herself into the waves. Unseen, she kissed the bride's forehead, smiled on the prince, then rose up with the other Daughters of the Air to the rosy cloud floating above.

"The Little Mermaid" bewitched artists from various fields for years. One was Hans Beck, who in 1909 staged a ballet of the story at Copenhagen's Det Kongelige Teater. Beck's timing couldn't have been better since one of the theater's biggest patrons, brewer Carl Jacobsen, was then considering some kind of gift to the Danish ballet corps. By his own testimony, Jacobsen entered the theater more or less resolved on financing some kind of public fountain, but left it committed to a statue of the Little Mermaid. Much of his enthusiasm stemmed from the star performance of ballerina Ellen Price, a Dane of English extraction.