The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid is Hans Christian Andersen's story of crossing between sea and land, exchanging capacities and seeking both human love and an immortal soul. This article follows the English text in Project Gutenberg's Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, eBook 27200, whose title page does not identify a translator.

Story summary

The youngest sea princess rescues a prince from a shipwreck, but he does not know who saved him. She longs for him and for the immortal soul that her grandmother says humans possess. A sea witch offers a transformation into human form in exchange for her voice, warning that walking will cause pain and that the prince's marriage to another will bring her death. On land the prince grows fond of her but marries someone else. Her sisters obtain a knife that could restore her sea life if she kills him. She refuses, enters the sea and becomes foam. The story continues: she joins the daughters of the air and can earn an immortal soul through a long period of good deeds.

The ending and its religious frame

Stopping the summary at disappointed romance omits a major part of Andersen's conclusion. The distinction between a mermaid's lifespan and a human soul motivates the journey. The daughters of the air offer another route to what she desires, after marriage fails to provide it. The closing passage also connects the duration of their trial with children's behaviour.

These are features of the tale's imagined religious world. They can be discussed without treating them as factual claims about souls or as a universal account of sacrifice.

Images, capacities and movement

The following observations compare what each change enables and costs.

The mermaid: gaining one capacity and losing another

Change	What it makes possible	What remains difficult
Rising to the surface	Seeing the human world	Watching it does not confer membership.
Rescuing the prince	Saving a person she loves	He does not recognise her part in his survival.
Gaining legs	Living and moving on land	Every step is painful, and the former ease of swimming is lost.
Losing her voice	Payment for the transformation	She cannot tell the prince her history in speech.
Entering the palace	Proximity to the prince	Nearness does not secure marriage or mutual understanding.
Refusing the knife	Preserving the prince’s life	Returning to her earlier form is no longer obtained on the offered terms.

The distinction between proximity and relationship is especially important. Arriving beside the desired person does not ensure the desired recognition. Compare Distance and Proximity: Closeness, Separation and Reach.

The narrator describes the mermaid's experience of walking beside the prince:

she felt as if treading upon the points of needles or sharp knives;

Excerpt from the narrator, Andersen's “The Little Mermaid”, first encounter on land after the transformation.

The sentence continues by describing movements that look light and graceful to observers. External appearance and bodily experience diverge: successful movement across the new setting conceals its continuing cost. The passage supplies a concrete basis for that comparison without diagnosing a real person from their gait.

Language and allusion

The tale can support a comparison with having a voice or losing one's voice, but that does not establish it as the origin of those expressions. In the plot, speech and song are physically removed. A figurative discussion may instead concern influence, expression or being heard; it must specify that further mapping.

Original example: She reached the room where decisions were made, but the price of admission was never speaking. This is an invented comparison involving access and silence, not a quotation from Andersen or evidence about any particular person.

Narrative roles and cultural influence

The sea witch provides an effective means of transformation with explicit costs. Reading her only as an obstacle would overlook the service she supplies; reading the bargain as uncomplicated help would overlook what it removes. The heroine's rescue of the prince and later refusal to kill him also complicate an account in which she merely waits to be rescued.

Disney's animated The Little Mermaid (1989) changes the conclusion: Ariel becomes permanently human and marries Eric. The American Film Institute documents that difference. A comparison can therefore ask how a marriage ending changes the relation between desire, sacrifice and reward, while retaining Andersen's spiritual continuation in the account of his text.

Reading question: Which costs are visible to the prince, and which are visible only to the reader? How does that difference affect the relationship as it is represented?

Related pages

• Beaches & Shorelines
• Feet and Ankles
• Echoes, Silence and Unheard Voices
• Distance and Proximity: Closeness, Separation and Reach
• Sacrifice, Surrender and Transformation
• Rumpelstiltskin

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