Origins and setting
“The Red Shoes” (De røde Skoe) is a nineteenth-century Danish wonder tale by Hans Christian Andersen that travelled swiftly into English nursery rooms. It is a moral romance about vanity and grace: a poor girl named Karen, a rich old lady who adopts her, a pair of bright red shoes that are first innocent, then forbidden, and finally enchanted; an old soldier at a church door whose words lay the spell; an executioner who brings cruel mercy; and the long road of repentance that ends in release.
The tale
I. Poor Karen and the first red shoes
Karen was a poor girl whose mother was dead. In rags she helped the village cobbler make herself a pair of red shoes out of scraps—clumsy things, but to her they were beauty itself. When her mother was buried, Karen wore them; people whispered, and a rich old lady, pious and strict, noticed both the girl and the scandal.
“Child, you shall come with me,” said the lady. She burned the shabby red shoes and dressed Karen in clean linen and soft leather. Karen learned her letters, sat straight, and minded her step. Yet the old liking for red shoes smouldered like an ember under ash.
II. “They must be red”
When the time came for Karen’s confirmation, the old lady ordered black shoes suitable for church. In the shop, with the lady’s eyesight failing, Karen chose a red pair so glossy that the leather shone like cherries.
“Are they black?” asked the old lady, peering.
“Black, indeed,” said the shoemaker, grinning—and wrapped the red.
On Confirmation Sunday the church blazed with candles and hymns, but eyes fell to Karen’s feet. She flushed and lifted her chin. Afterward, at the church door, an old soldier in a scarlet cloak leaned on his crutch. He bent and tapped the shoes with his hand.
“What pretty dancing shoes!
Stick fast when you dance; stick fast!”
Karen started, half laughing, half afraid. The old lady scolded her gently for vanity and forbade the shoes for church again.
III. The dancing begins
Soon after, there was a ball. Karen slipped on the red shoes because they made her feel tall and seen. The music started; she stepped—and the shoes took the step for her. They turned and curtseyed, circled and capered; the more she willed to stop, the more they whirled.
“Mercy—stop!” she whispered, breathless. But the shoes danced her out of the hall, down the steps, through streets and fields, over stones and thorns, day and night, while the moon looked on like a cold eye.
She danced past the church where the old lady sat; she could not go in. She danced to the parson’s house; he raised his hands in pity. Still the shoes leapt.
IV. “Chop off my feet”
At last, wasted and wild-eyed, Karen came to the town’s executioner—a big man with a kindly, weary face—and beat upon his door.
“I cannot stop! Chop off my feet!
Take these red shoes away from me!”
The executioner’s eyes filled. “I am set to strike wicked heads, not feet; but your pleading is bitter.” He led her to the block. He hewed off her feet, and the red shoes with the little feet still in them danced away through the dusk, over the field to the church door, and danced there as if in triumph.
The executioner made Karen wooden feet and gave her crutches. “Learn a good hymn, child,” he said. “It comforts more than dancing.”
V. Wooden feet, a closed door, and a broom
Shamed and shaken, Karen tried to go back to church—but the red shoes were there ahead of her, whirling in the porch; terror seized her and she fled. She went to the parsonage and begged:
“Let me serve for bread and a corner of the floor.
Only hide me from the red shoes.”
The parson’s wife took her in. Karen swept and scoured; she read hymns to the old lady she had once disobeyed (for the rich guardian had fallen sick), and when the organ sounded on Sundays, she sat by the window, longing but peace-learning.
Still, sometimes at dusk she saw, at a turning in the road or under a hedge, two red shoes dancing without a dancer, and she trembled and prayed.
VI. Surrender
One Sunday, when the organ sounded sweet as rain, Karen said, “I will go to church if I must crawl; if the shoes meet me, I will pass them.” She went, step by wooden step. At the porch the shoes leapt again; her heart broke—but not with fear now.
“O God, have mercy on me—a vain, foolish child that I was!” she prayed, wholly yielded.
The wind fell still. The shoes lay quiet as empty cups. In the hush Karen felt a great lightness, as if the hymn were being sung inside her instead of far away. Her head sank; her face was calm.
Those who found her said she looked as if she had fallen asleep smiling. They carried her—so small now—to the church, and the organ seemed to play of itself. Some say an angel lifted her heart into the music; some that she simply rested. But no one ever saw the red shoes dancing at the porch again.
Iconic lines remembered in the telling
- “Child, you shall come with me.”
- “They must be red.”
- “What pretty dancing shoes! Stick fast when you dance; stick fast!”
- “Mercy—stop!”
- “I cannot stop! Chop off my feet!”
- “Learn a good hymn, child.”
- “O God, have mercy on me.”
Closing note
“The Red Shoes” is not a tale about colour but captivity—how a small vanity can grow teeth, how pleasure can become compulsion, and how release costs more than we ever meant to pay. Yet it is also about grace: the executioner’s pity, the parsonage’s shelter, the hymn that teaches the heart to move rightly when the feet cannot. In the end Karen is unbound—not by strength but by surrender—and the church door stands quiet, with only the music going in and out.
Outside Andersen’s original, lots of retellings soften or replace the amputation. In the 1845 tale Karen does ask the executioner to cut off her feet; later editors, children’s anthologies, and stage/film versions often change that beat. Typical alternatives you’ll see:
- Repentance breaks the spell: After sincere contrition, the shoes simply fall away at the church door, or an angel loosens them. Karen lives on in humble service (sometimes with wooden shoes as a penance, but without losing her feet).
- Old soldier’s “counter-charm”: The soldier who first “enchanted” the shoes meets her again and reverses his tap/curse, freeing her to walk normally.
- Parsonage rescue: She reaches the parson’s house; the wife (or a kindly cobbler) cuts the shoes off, ending the compulsion. The tale closes with Karen quietly reformed.
- Death without amputation (stage/film): In ballet and screen versions (e.g., the famous mid-century film and many dance adaptations), the shoes drive the heroine to a fatal fall/accident; there’s no chopping, but the moral sting remains.
- Didactic abridgements: Victorian and modern nursery editions sometimes leap straight from the cursed dancing to angelic pardon or a peaceful death; the red shoes vanish or go still, and the body horror is omitted.
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