I have to live for just one day as a human and then to share in the world of heaven!”
“You mustn’t think about that!” said her old grandmother. “We are much happier and much better off than the people up there.”
“So I shall die and float as foam on the sea, not hear the music of the waves, nor see the lovely flowers or the red sun! Isn’t there anything at all I can do to win an immortal soul?”
“No!” said the old queen. “Only if you became so dear to a human that you meant more to him than his father and mother, if he clung to you with all his mind and heart, and if you let the minister lay his right hand in yours with promises of faithfulness here and for all eternity, then his soul would flow into your body and you would share in the happiness of humanity. He would give you a soul and yet keep his own. But that can never happen! What is so lovely here in the sea—your fish tail—they find ugly up there on earth. They don’t know any better because there you must have two clumsy props that they call legs to be considered beautiful!”
The little mermaid sighed and looked sadly at her tail.
“Let’s be satisfied with what we have,” said the old grandmother. “We’ll spring and skip about during the three hundred years we have to live. It’s a good long time. Later we can so much the better rest in our graves.1 This evening we are going to have a court ball!”
That was also a splendor you never see on the earth. The walls and ceiling of the big dance hall were made of thick clear glass. Several hundred colossal sea shells, rosy red and grass green, stood in rows on each side with burning blue fire that lit up the whole hall and shone out through the walls so that the sea outside was quite illuminated. You could see all the countless fish, big and small, swim towards the glass walls. On some of them the scales glistened a purplish red, on others silver and gold. Straight through the hall a wide stream flowed, and mermen and mermaids were dancing on it to their own lovely song. People on the earth do not have such beautiful voices. The little mermaid sang more beautifully than all the others, and they clapped for her so that she felt joy in her heart for a moment because she knew she had the prettiest voice on earth or in the sea! But soon she began thinking of the world above once again, and she couldn’t forget the charming prince and her sadness over not having an immortal soul like he did. So she sneaked out of her father’s castle, and while there was nothing but joy and song inside there, she sat sad and alone in her little garden. She heard a horn sound down through the water, and she thought, “Now I guess he’s sailing up there, he whom I love more than my father and mother, he who holds all my thoughts, and in whose hands I would place my happiness in life. I would risk everything to win him and an immortal soul! While my sisters are dancing there in father’s castle, I’ll go to the sea witch. I’ve always been so afraid of her, but maybe she can advise and help me.”
Then the little mermaid went out from her garden to the roaring whirlpools; the sea witch lived behind them. She had never gone this way before. There were no flowers growing there, no sea grass, only the bare gray sand bottom that stretched towards the whirlpools, where the water swirled around like roaring mill wheels and pulled everything they grasped down into the deep. She had to walk right between these crushing eddies to enter the sea witch’s property, and for most of the way there was no other approach than over a warm bubbling mud that the witch called her bog moss. Her house lay behind it in a strange forest. All the trees and bushes were polyps, half animal and half plant. They looked like snakes with hundreds of heads growing out of the ground. The branches were long slimy arms with fingers like supple worms, and from joint to joint they moved from the root to the outermost tip. They wrapped themselves around everything they could grasp in the sea and never released them. The little mermaid was terrified as she stood outside. Her heart beat fast from fear, and she would have turned around, but then she thought about the prince and about the human soul, and these thoughts gave her courage. She tied her long streaming hair tightly to her head so the polyps couldn’t grasp it, folded her arms across her chest, and darted ahead. She moved as fish swim through the water, in between the awful polyps, who stretched out their elastic arms and fingers after her. She saw how they all had something they had caught with their hundreds of small arms holding on like strong bands of iron. People who had died at sea and sunk deep down to the sea bottom peered as white skeletons from the polyps’ arms. They were holding fast to ship rudders and chests, skeletons of land animals, and a little mermaid, whom they had caught and strangled. That was almost the most frightful for her.
Then she came to a big slimy clearing in the forest, where large, fat water grass snakes slithered around and showed their ugly whitish-yellow bellies. In the middle of the clearing there was a house built from the white bones of shipwrecked people. The sea witch was sitting there, letting a toad eat from her mouth, much like people let little canaries eat sugar. She called the hideous fat grass snakes her little chicklets and let them squirm around on her large, swampy breast.
“I know what you want,” said the sea witch. “It’s stupid of you! Nevertheless, you’ll get your way because it will just lead to catastrophe for you, my lovely princess. You want to be rid of your fish tail, and instead have two stumps to walk upon just like people do so that the young prince will fall in love with you, and so that you can win him and gain an immortal soul!” Then the sea witch laughed so loudly and dreadfully that the toad and the snakes fell down writhing on the ground. ”You came just in time,” said the witch. ”After sunrise tomorrow, I wouldn’t have been able to help you for a year. I’m going to fix you a drink, and before the sun rises, you are to swim to land with it, sit on the bank there, and drink it. Then your tail will separate and turn into what people call lovely legs, but it will hurt. It will be as if a sharp sword were cutting through you. All who see you will say that you’re the most beautiful child of man they’ve ever seen. You’ll keep your floating gait; no dancer will float like you, but every step you take will be like stepping on a sharp knife so the blood flows. If you’ll suffer all this, I’ll help you.”
“Yes!” said the little mermaid with a trembling voice as she thought about the prince and about winning an immortal soul.
“But remember,” said the witch, “when you have taken a human shape, you can never again become a mermaid. You can never sink down through the water to your sisters and to your father’s castle, and if you don’t win the prince’s love, so that he forgets his father and mother for your sake, thinks of you constantly, and has the minister place your hands in each other’s as man and wife, you won’t gain an immortal soul! The first morning after he marries someone else, your heart will break, and you’ll become foam on the water.”
“I want to do it!” said the little mermaid, pale as death.
“But you’ll have to pay me too,” the witch said, “and it’s not a small thing I demand. You have the most beautiful voice here on the ocean floor, and you think you’re going to bewitch him with it, but you must give that voice to me. I want the most precious thing you have for my priceless drink. After all, I have to add my own blood so the drink will be as sharp as a double-edged sword!”
“But if you take my voice,” said the little mermaid, “what will I have left?”
“Your beautiful appearance,” said the witch, “your graceful gait, and your expressive eyes. You should be able to capture a human heart with those. Well, have you lost your courage? Stick out your little tongue so I can cut it off in payment, and then you’ll get the potent drink.”
“Let it happen,” the little mermaid said, and the witch prepared the kettle to cook the potion. “Cleanliness is
