Origins and setting
Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (1837) is a Danish wonder tale that swims between romance and theology. Beneath the sea in a crystal palace lives a Sea-King, his wise mother, and six mer-princesses; above is a mortal world with the promise (and peril) of an immortal soul. The tale’s stations are precise: a youngest daughter’s longing; a storm and a rescue; a bargain with the Sea Witch; a mute life on land of beauty and pain; a wedding that breaks her heart; and a last, startling mercy—the Daughters of the Air.
The tale
I. The sea below and the longing above
Far under the green water stood the Sea-King’s palace with windows of amber and a roof of mother-of-pearl. The youngest princess tended her little garden—a round bed of red flowers like a rising sun—and kept a marble statue of a handsome boy that had fallen from a ship. While her sisters rose to the surface in their fifteenth years to tell of cities and forests and church bells, she waited her turn, listening wide-eyed to every tale.
“Do people die and vanish like sea-foam?” she asked her grandmother, who wore twelve oysters on her tail for rank.
“Humans die, child—but they have immortal souls. We live longer, yet become foam and are no more.”
The youngest mermaid’s heart fixed on the world above—its skies, its souls, and (more than she knew) a face she had not yet seen.
At last she turned fifteen and rose through the clear water to a ship hung with lanterns, where a prince celebrated his birthday. She watched, thrilled, until the sky blackened and a storm shattered the masts. When the prince was thrown into the sea, she bore him up, cradled his head against the breakers, and laid him at dawn on warm sand by a sea-side temple, where girls came singing. The prince opened his eyes to the sun and the temple maiden; he never saw the mermaid slip back into the deep.
She returned to the palace quiet and changed. She loved the human world now with a love that hurt. “If only I might live among them—if only I might win a soul.”
II. The Sea Witch’s bargain
At last she went to the place where the Sea Witch lived, where polypi writhed like grasping hands and the forest of bone-white trees grew from wrecks. The Witch, thick and smooth as an old eel, smiled.
“I know what you want. You would rid yourself of a tail and have two legs, and win the prince—and an immortal soul if he loves you more than all and makes you his bride.”
“Yes,” said the mermaid, her voice trembling like a harp-string.
The Witch brewed a draught that smoked green. “Drink this on shore. Your tail will split; you will have legs—lovely as any human maiden’s. But every step will feel as if you tread on sharp knives. And you shall never return to the sea.”
The mermaid shivered, yet whispered, “I will.”
“Price, then: your voice. You have the sweetest of all; I must have it.” And with a swift stroke she took the girl’s voice, so that not even a sigh remained.
“If he marries another,” the Witch added, almost lazily, “on the morning after the wedding your heart will break and you will become foam upon the wave.”
The mermaid took the vial and rose.
III. Pain and wonder on the shore
She drank at sunrise. It was as if a sword passed through her; she fell faint upon the sand. When she woke, the prince stood over her, marvelling at the maiden with eyes like the sea. He wrapped her in purple; she smiled—for she could not speak—and tried to stand. Knives seemed hidden in the stones, yet she moved so lightly that he cried, half laughing, “You dance better than any I have seen.”
She became his little foundling, the companion at his side. Nights she danced for him, the pain burning like fire; days she walked beside him and learned the human way of smiling with the eyes. He said, kindly and thoughtlessly, “I love you as one loves a child—yet the maiden of the temple saved me. She must be my dearer one if I ever find her again.”
Her heart sank like an anchor, but she laid her head where his hand could rest.
IV. The wrong wedding
One day the prince sailed to a neighbouring kingdom. The princess who greeted him at the marble steps was—by chance of tale and tide—the very maiden of the temple. His face lit like morning.
“You! You were the one. Now I know what my heart has sought.”
He begged for her hand; the wedding was set at sea. That night, while songs rose and lanterns made a private sky, the little mermaid smiled and moved and felt the world grow thin under her feet.
Near midnight her sisters rose from the water, hair cut short.
“We went to the Witch and gave her our hair for a way to save you,” they cried. “Take this knife—if you stab the prince before dawn and let his warm blood fall on your feet, your tail will grow again; you will be a mermaid and live your full years. Hurry! When the sun rises, you will be foam.”
She took the knife and went where the prince slept with his bride. Moonlight lay across his face; he murmured her name in his sleep—and another name also, not hers. She lifted the blade; it shook like a silver leaf.
“I cannot.”
She kissed his brow, went out, and cast the knife into the sea. It flashed once and sank. She climbed the rail and fell like a drop of pale water into the dawn.
V. The Daughters of the Air
The first light touched her; she felt herself dissolving, a cool and tender undoing—sea-foam, bright and nothing. Then the wind rose round her like wings.
“Do not be afraid, child,” whispered voices high and kind. “We are the Daughters of the Air. Because you chose love and would not kill, you need not be lost. We win souls by doing good unseen: lifting the hot wind from the desert, bringing the scent of apples to sick rooms, cooling fevered brows. After three hundred years we gain what we never had.”
She felt herself light as light, watching the ship where the prince and princess awoke to another new day. She loved them still—and she loved the world—and she rose into the blue, beginning a long, invisible kindness.
Iconic lines remembered in the telling
- “Humans die—but they have immortal souls.”
- “I know what you want. … Every step will be as if you tread on knives.”
- “Price: your voice.”
- “If he marries another, you will become foam.”
- “I love you as one loves a child… yet my heart belongs to her.”
- “Take the knife—before dawn, or you are lost.”
- “I cannot.”
- “We are the Daughters of the Air… you shall not be lost.”
Closing note
Andersen’s mermaid does not win by conquest but by cost. She trades voice for legs, joy for pain, and at last life for love—only to discover a third way: a slow salvation through unseen goodness. Between sea and sky, she learns the hardest dance of all: to suffer without bitterness and to love without possessing.
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