Fairy Tales

other and lasting for several minutes. It was as bright as sunlight in the lightning flashes. You could see each individual grapevine as if at midday, and then the brooding black darkness returned. The lightning came in ribbons, rings, and zigzags, struck all around the lake, and flashed from all sides, while the thunder claps grew in echoing rumbles. On land people pulled boats up on the shore. Everything living sought shelter. And the rain came streaming down.

“Where in the world are Rudy and Babette in this terrible weather?” asked the miller.

Babette sat with folded hands, her head in her lap. Mute with grief and from her screams and sobs.

“In the deep water!” she said to herself, “Deep down, as if under the glacier, is where he is!”

She thought about what Rudy had told her about his mother’s death, and his rescue, when he was pulled as a corpse from the cleft of the glacier. “The Ice Maiden has taken him again.”

And there was a flash of lightning as blinding as the sun on white snow. Babette jumped up. The lake rose in that instant like a shining glacier. The Ice Maiden stood there—majestic, pale blue, shining—and at her feet lay Rudy’s corpse. “Mine!” she said, and then there was pitch darkness again, and pouring water.

“It’s horrible,” whimpered Babette. “Why did he have to die just as our day of joy had come? God! Help me understand! Enlighten my heart! I don’t understand your ways. I’m groping for your omnipotence and wisdom.”

And God enlightened her heart. A flash of thought, a ray of mercy—her dream from last night, large as life— flew through her in a flash, and she remembered the words she had spoken: the wish for the best for Rudy and herself.

“Woe is me! Was the seed of sin in my heart? Was my dream my future, whose string had to be snapped for the sake of my salvation? Miserable me!”

She sat whimpering in the pitch dark night. In its deep stillness she thought Rudy’s words still rang out—the last thing he said here: “The world has no more joy to give me.” Words uttered in an abundance of happiness, repeated in a torrent of grief.

A few years have passed since then. The lake is smiling. The shores are smiling, and the grapevines are heavy with grapes. The steamship with its waving flags hurries by, and the pleasure boats with their two out-stretched sails fly like white butterflies across the mirror of the water. The railroad above Chillon is open and runs deep into the Rhone valley. Tourists get off at every station. They consult their little red bound travel guides to learn what attractions there are to see. They visit Chillon, see the little island with the three acacia trees out in the lake, and read about the engaged couple who rowed over there early one evening in 1856. They read about the bridegroom’s death and how “only the next morning did those on shore hear the bride’s screams of despair.”

But the travel guide doesn’t say anything about Babette’s quiet life with her father. Not at the mill—strangers live there now—but in the pretty house by the railroad station from where she can still see on many evenings the snow-capped mountains above the chestnut trees where Rudy once played. In the evenings she sees the Alpenglow. The sunshine’s children camp up there and repeat the song about the wanderer whom the whirlwind tore the cloak from and carried away. It took his covering but not the man.

There’s a rosy radiance on the mountain snow, and a rosy radiance in every heart that believes that “God lets the best happen for us!” But it’s not always as apparent to us as it was for Babette in her dream.

NOTES

1 Schreckhorn (13,379’) and Wetterhorn (12,142’) are mountains in the Bernese (Swiss) Alps.

2 Canton in southern Switzerland that is predominantly French speaking.

3 Waterfall in south-central Switzerland, near Interlaken.

4 Swiss mountain (13,642’) not far from Grindelwald.

5 I have omitted “As we know” from this sentence. Andersen had given information about Rudy’s father in an earlier version of the story. This “as we know” reference is evidently a remnant from an earlier version overlooked by Andersen in the final story.

6 Cretinism, mental and physical retardation caused by a lack of thyroid hormones, was more common in Switzerland than in other European countries because of an iodine deficiency in the water of the Swiss Alps. A survey carried out in 1810 in what is now the Swiss canton of Valais revealed 4,000 cretins among 70,000 inhabitants.

7 Mountain pass in the Alps in southern Switzerland.

8 Pass in the Bernese Alps connecting Bern and Valais cantons.

9 Warm dry wind that blows down the northern slopes of the Alps.

10 English Romantic poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), wrote The Prisoner of Chillon after visiting the castle with fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in the summer of 1816. The castle, on Lake Geneva, was for the most part built by the counts of Savoy in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, although the site had been occupied for hundreds of years. During the sixteenth century the castle was used as a prison.

EVANGELICAL AND RELIGIOUS TALES

THE SNOW QUEEN AN ADVENTURE IN SEVEN STORIES

THE FIRST STORY

WHICH IS ABOUT THE MIRROR AND THE FRAGMENTS

ALL RIGHT! Now WE’LL begin. When we’re at the end of the story, we’ll know more than we know now, for we’ll know just how evil this troll was. He was one of the absolute worst. He was “the devil” himself! One day he was in a really good mood because he had made a mirror that caused everything good and beautiful it reflected to shrink to almost nothing, and anything that was worthless and ugly to stand out and look even worse. The most