Andersen is dead: No more tales?

One enduring legacy that Danish storyteller and poet Hans Christian Andersen left to posterity is a partially clothed young woman, Den Lille Havfrue, commonly known as the Little Mermaid in the English-speaking world. The story was published in the Nordic issue of Diplomacy & Trade.

Perched on rocks, only a few hundred meters south of Copenhagen’s Langelinie Quay, the bronze sculpture of the fairy-tale figure is undoubtedly the most photographed statue all over Scandinavia. Dating from 1913, the statue of the Little Mermaid, attacked and abused time and again, is the symbol and a veritable icon of Copenhagen’s diverse cultural life. The author sheds further light on the role the statue has come to occupy in Denmark’s history.

An admirer of classic art

In 1909, Danish brewer, art collector and philanthropist Carl Jacobsen attended a ballet named The Little Mermaid, which was based on the Andersen tale of the same name. Jacobsen was an ardent admirer of Greek and classical art, and it was his profound interest that led him to set up the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, which was as one of the largest private art collections of his time. Today, the museum houses the largest collection of ancient art in Northern Europe, mainly sculpture, from Egypt, the Near East, Greece and Italy. During the more than one hundred years of its existence,

it has also expanded the collection of French and Danish art from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While Jacobsen is primarily acclaimed for the setting up of the Carlsberg brewery, his efforts to preserve high art and promote the cultural life of his nation is best reflected through his immense art collection and the commissioning of the sculpture of the Little Mermaid.

Son of a poor shoemaker

Andersen, the man behind the mermaid is widely acknowledged for his achievements among the Danes, insomuch that the Hans Christian Andersen Museum, located in the city of Odense and open since 1908, has its primary focus on the life and work of the writer, making it one of the first museums in the world dedicated to a writer. Its exhibitions tell of his life, from his childhood years as the son of a poor shoemaker in Odense through the hard times he spent on his way towards realizing his dreams in Copenhagen. Andersen’s life, career and the fairy-tale universe, for which he has gone down in history, are indispensible for the understanding of Denmark’s varied cultural life, its beliefs and myths.

Voice for legs

In Andersen’s story (immortalized through various adaptations and the ever-popular Walt Disney cartoon, featuring frolicsome Ariel as the sea creature), a mermaid exchanges her voice for human legs in order to win the heart of an earthly prince. However, the tongue-tied sea-girl can only watch wordlessly as he walks out on her to conquer a real princess. In desperation, she throws herself into the sea, turning into foam. Andersen’s quaint choice to set his hybrid creature with the upper torso of a woman and the tail of a sea fish as the story’s heroine is outshone only by the decision of Jacobsen, who placed the statue (sculpted by Edvard Eriksen) of the famous siren among the ice-cold waves of the Baltic Sea.

The figure of the mermaid was modeled after Ellen Price, the prima ballerina whom Jacobsen spotted on stage while watching the ballet adaptation of the Andersen tale. The statue found its home in the quay in 1913, but is only a replica of an original held by Eriksen’s descendants: three other copies exist – two in the US states of California, Iowa, and one in Vancouver, Canada.

Symbol for Denmark

While the sculpture itself is high on the ’must see’ list for all visitors to Copenhagen, one will be taken aback that the skillful angles employed in most promotional photographs make it appear, misleadingly, much larger and more strategically situated than it is in reality. In spite of its miniature size, the importance that the statue has in the eyes of the Danes is similar to what the Statue of Liberty means for the New Yorkers or the Sphinx for the Egyptians.

Sadly enough, over past decades, the sculpture of the Little Mermaid has repeatedly fallen victim to acts of vandalism, as a result of which the original statue has been twice decapitated and her arm was amputated once. Tragedy struck in 1998, when it was reported to have been decollated in the dead of night. The act of sabotage was followed by an outpouring of emotions, as the Little Mermaid has become an essential part of the Danish heritage, similarly to Tivoli, the Queen.

While this was not the first time that the sculpture of the Little Mermaid had been mutilated, it was fortuitous that the original mold exists, and recasting the bronze and welding back the missing body parts remains a viable solution. Although, the Radical Feminist Faction never owned up to being the perpetrator of the act, they distributed flyers to the press to disapprove “the woman-hating, sexually fixated male dreams” supposedly conjured by the statue’s bareness. In line with the more modern modus operandi of the new millennium, the sculpture was blasted off the rock in 2003 with dynamite. It just seems that people have no respect for fairy tales in the 21st century.

Back in its place

In 2010, the Copenhagen City Council made a decision to share the beauty and uniqueness of the Little Mermaid with the rest of the world by sending it to the World Expo in Shanghai. The council was hopeful that her presence at the exhibition, placed in the center of a pool of water taken from her original dwelling, would help create further publicity for the Danish capital and turn it into a major tourist attraction, even among those who live in the remotest part of the globe. While the descendents of the mermaid’s sculptor, Edvard Eriksen, were outraged by the decision that she would be removed from her original location, it was conjectured that the Little Mermaid would not feel homesick (let alone seasick) on her long voyage, because she would be in her natural element, bathed in water transported from the Copenhagen quay. Today, the Little Mermaid – head, tail, and all – is back to being the country’s trademark. The only thing that visitors to the city might have found fishy in the state of Denmark – to loosely paraphrase Shakespeare – was that the most photographed nude woman in Copenhagen had temporarily swum off to make her debut in the Orient. “Andersen is dead; no more tales,” so goes the biting Hungarian proverb, yet his mermaid has been gracious enough to preserve the name of her creator and that of Denmark for future generations on.