The Little Mermaid real story

The Little Mermaid is one of the most known fairy tales around the world. However, most people is familiar with the edulcorized Disney version and not with the original Hans Christian Andersen story, that is somewhat darker:

Statue of Hans Christian Andersen, author of The Little Mermaid, at Copenhagen’s City Hall Square

The Little Mermaid lives in the underwater Kingdom. She turns fifteen and, as for tradition, she is allowed to swim to the surface to have a glimpse of the world above. She then sees a birthday celebration being held on a ship in honor of a handsome prince. After a storm, the ship sinks and the mermaid saves the unconscious prince, bringing him to a shore near a temple. She watches him from afar, as she sees a woman from the temple find him. To her dismay, the prince thinks the temple woman saved him, as he was unconscious when the mermaid took him to the shore.

Sad, the mermaid talks to her grandmother and asks her about humans. She tells her that, although humans live a much shorter life than mermaids’ 300 years, they get to live through their eternal souls in heaven, while mermaids turn into sea foam and cease to exist. This makes the mermaid long even more for the prince and an eternal soul, so she visits the Sea Witch in search of a solution to her melancholy. The witch helps her by selling her a potion that gives her legs in exchange for her tongue and beautiful voice, warning them that she will never be able to return to the sea. The mermaid drinks the potion and gains her legs, that allows her to dance like no human has danced before, but make her feel like she was walking on sharp knives. The witch tells her that she will obtain an eternal soul only if she wins the love of the prince and marries him. However, at dawn on the first day after he marries someone else, she will die and dissolve into sea foam upon the waves.

The mermaid goes on to meet the prince, who is mesmerized by her beauty and grace and enjoys to watch her dance. However, the King and Queen arrange a marriage with the neighbouring kingdom’s princess. The prince says he won’t marry her because he doesn’t love her, as he is in love with the temple woman that saved him. Later on, he finds out that the princess is actually the temple woman, sent there by her parents, so he declares his love for her and the royal wedding is announced.

The mermaid, brokenhearted, runs to the sea thinking of the pain she has endured for nothing. Her sisters arise to the surface and offer her a knife they have bought from the Sea Witch in exchange for their beautiful hair. The knife will turn her into a mermaid again once she kills the prince with it and let his blood drip over her feet.

The Little Mermaid watches the prince sleep, but she cannot bring herself to kill him, so she throws the knife and herself off the ship when the dawn breaks. Her body dissolves into foam but, instead of ceasing to exist, she becomes an ethereal earthbound spirit, a odoughter of the air. Other spirits tell her that, because of her selflessness, she is given the chance to earn her own soul by doing good deeds to mankind for 300 years, after which she will rise up into the Kingdom of God.

The point of the tale is to frighten children into being good, as it usually ends by saying that for every bad child, the mermaid gets one more year on earth, while for every good child she is one year closer to ascend to heaven.

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