Fairy Tales

the spirit could travel. Wherever I am, there are miseries that press on my heart. I want something better than the present. Yes, something better, the best. But where and what is it? After all, I do know what I want—to go to a happy place, the happiest place of all!”

And when the word was spoken, he was in his home. The long white curtains hung in front of the windows, and in the middle of the floor stood the black coffin. He lay there in the quiet sleep of death. His wish was granted—his body rested, his spirit traveled. “Call him till he dies, not happy but fortunate,” said Solon.¹⁵ These words were reaffirmed once again.

Every corpse is the Sphinx of Immortality. And the sphinx here in the black coffin couldn’t say what the student had written only two days earlier:Oh strong death, dread is your silent token,

Your only footprint does the churchyard save.

Shall the Jacob’s ladder of thought be broken—

Shall I arise as grass upon death’s grave?

Our greatest sufferings here we don’t impart,

You who were alone at last, and often;

Know that in life much presses harder on the heart

Than all the soil that’s cast upon your coffin.

Two figures moved in the room, and we know both of them. It was the Fairy of Sorrow and Good Fortune’s messenger. They leaned over the dead man.

“Do you see what Good Fortune your galoshes brought to humankind?” asked Sorrow.

“At least they brought the man who’s resting here a lasting good!” answered Good Fortune’s messenger.

“Oh no,” said Sorrow. “He went away on his own; he was not called. His spiritual power here was not strong enough to gain the treasures that he was destined for. I will do him a favor.”

And she took the galoshes from his feet. The sleep of death ended, and the resurrected arose. Sorrow disappeared, but also the galoshes. She must have considered them her property.

NOTES

1 A professor at the University of Copenhagen, H. C. Orsted (1777-1851) wrote an essay entitled “Gamle og nye Tider” (“Old and New Times”). Andersen admired Orsted, who discovered electromagnetism.

2 King Hans was born in 1455 and ruled Denmark and Norway from 1481 to 1513.

3 Zealand is the largest island of Denmark, separated from Funen by the Great Belt and from Scania in Sweden by the Oresund. Copenhagen is partly located on the eastern shore of Zealand and partly on Amager.

4 The medieval dialect of Copenhagen was similar to that of the present day island of Bornholm, in the Baltic Sea, and could be somewhat comical to those who live in Copenhagen.

5 After Thomasine Gyllembourg, a popular author of the time, published En Hverdagshistorie (A Story of Everyday Life) in 1828, the term hverdagshistorie came into use as a genre definition for stories of contemporaneous Copenhagen. Andersen was not an admirer of the genre.

6 In his Danmarks Riges Historie, Holberg tells how one day King Hans was joking with the famous Otto Rud, of whom he was very fond. The King had been reading about King Arthur and said, “Yvain and Gawain, whom I read about in this book, were remarkable knights. You don’t find knights like that anymore.” To which Otto Rud replied, “If there were Kings like King Arthur, you would find knights like Yvain and Gawain.” [Andersen’s note] Andersen cites Holberg’s “The History of the Kingdom of Denmark.” Ludwig Holberg (1684-1754) was the most important writer in eighteenth-century Denmark/Norway. [translator’s note]

7 Writer and critic Johan Ludvig Heiberg (1791-1860); he published writings of his mother, Thomasine Gyllembourg, among others.

8 Godfred von Gehmen was the first publisher in Copenhagen; in 1493 he published Latin grammars for the new university.

9 Cholera was a serious problem in most of Europe from 1830 to 1837, but except for Holstein, Denmark was not much affected.

10 A statute of 1496 prescribed that prostitutes wear caps that were half red and half black, to distinguish them from other women.

11 Johann Heinrich von Madler was a German astronomer who (with Wilhelm Beer) issued Mappa Selenographica (1834-1836) in four volumes; it presented the most complete map of the moon at that time.

12 The agave is a tropical plant that in Denmark flowers only in greenhouses after a period of forty to sixty years; in 1836 a sixty-year-old plant that bloomed in Copenhagen was nearly 20 feet tall.

13 Cactus. [Andersen’s note]

14 Snarleyyow. [Andersen’s note] The citation, given in the original English, is from Snarleyyow; or, The Dog Fiend (1837), a historical novel by Captain Frederick Marryat, a naval officer and writer of adventure novels. [translator’s note]

15 Statesman and poet (c.630-560 B.C.), known as one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece.

THE GARDEN OF EDEN

ONCE THERE WAS A prince, and no one had so many or such beautiful books as he had. He could read about and see splendid pictures of everything that had happened in the world. He could find out about all nationalities and every country, but there was not a word about where the Garden of Eden was, and that was what he thought most about.

When he was still quite little, just beginning his education, his grandmother had told him that every flower in the Garden of Eden was the sweetest cake, and each stamen the finest wine. History was on one flower, geography or math tables on another. All you had to do was eat the cakes to know your lessons. The more you ate, the more history, geography, and math you would take in.

He believed that as a boy, but as he grew older, learned more, and became wiser, he understood, of course,