By Dr Oliver Tearle

'The Little Mermaid' (1837) is i of the most layered and fascinating fairy tales written past Hans Christian Andersen. At once the quintessential fairy tale and a curious subversion of the fairy-tale class, 'The Lilliputian Mermaid' requires some careful assay to unpick its various strands and meanings. Before we offer an assay of the story, though, it might exist worth recounting its plot.

The Trivial Mermaid: summary

Beginning, a brief plot summary of 'The Lilliputian Mermaid'. Deep down at the lesser of the bounding main alive the mermen and mermaids. Vi sisters alive there, all of them princesses, the youngest of whom is quieter and more thoughtful than her older siblings. Each of the mermaids has their ain niggling garden under the sea, but whereas the others decorate theirs with all sorts of things they have salvaged from shipwrecks that have drifted to the bottom of the ocean, the trivial mermaid has just some roses and the statue of a beautiful boy. They are all intrigued by the globe beyond the sea, but this youngest sister – the little mermaid of the story's championship – is more than interested in the world to a higher place the sea than her other sisters.

The sisters are looked later on by their grandmother, who tells them that when a mermaid reaches the age of fifteen, she can rise to the surface of the h2o and explore the world above the surface. In turn, each of the sisters reaches that age and goes upward to the surface, returning below the ocean to tell her sisters what she has seen. When it'due south finally the turn of the little mermaid, she notices a send, which contains royalty. The people on board are jubilant the birthday of a handsome prince. The trivial mermaid is instantly attracted to him.

There is a storm, and the ship sinks. The little mermaid is initially delighted when she sees the prince sinking beneath the water – as it ways he can join her – only then she remembers that humans cannot survive underwater, and then she rescues him and takes him to shore at a temple, where some novice girls appear and i of them restores the prince to consciousness. The mermaid sinks back under the water, with the prince entirely unaware of her existence, or that she has saved his life.

The little mermaid asks her grandmother nigh humans. She learns that humans don't live every bit long equally mermen (who can live for up to iii hundred years), only that they practise have immortal souls which float up to heaven when they dice, different the mermen who don't have souls. The trivial mermaid says she would trade three hundred years of life as a mermaid for one day as a homo, if it meant she would have a soul and alive forever. The grandmother tells her non to think nigh such things, considering the only mode a mermaid could gain a soul is if a human loved her so much that his soul would merge with her and she would gain one.

But the little mermaid realises that she then loves the handsome prince that she could give annihilation to be with him and gain an immortal soul. And so she goes to visit the one adult female who might aid her: the body of water witch. The sea witch says she volition make the little mermaid a potion which the mermaid must take onto land with her and potable. It will plough her fish'south tail into two human being legs, and she will not be able to transform back into a mermaid once again. Information technology will also injure her every time she walks. If the handsome prince will non marry her, she will not gain an immortal soul; and she will dice and become foam upon the water (equally is the fate of soulless mermen) the day the prince marries another.

The petty mermaid is so desperate to marry the prince and gain a soul that she readily agrees, despite this chance; she as well agrees to the sea witch's demand for a payment, which is to possess the mermaid's beautiful singing voice. This means the piffling mermaid volition be able to become a woman, but a mute ane, unable to sing, or speak.

She floats up to the surface and drinks the potion, and falls unconscious. When she wakes, the handsome prince is standing over her, asking her where she came from, but because the sea witch has taken her tongue she cannot respond. He takes her into the palace and finds her the finest dress to wearable, and her beauty is much admired by anybody at court. She grows closer to the prince, but at night she oft sees her sisters, who float upwards to the surface and tell her how she saddened them when she left them backside.

The footling mermaid learns that the prince is fond of her, only has fallen in honey with the pretty girl at the temple who brought him dorsum to consciousness on the night of the shipwreck. Unaware that the picayune mermaid was the one who'd dragged him to shore, he thinks that the novice girl at the temple saved his life. Being mute, the mermaid cannot tell him that she was the one who saved him.

The prince is told to undertake a voyage to a neighbouring kingdom, because his parents wish him to marry the princess in that kingdom (to forge an alliance). The little mermaid undertakes the journey with him, and when the princess appears, it turns out to be the very daughter who had 'establish' the unconscious prince on the temple steps, the dark the footling mermaid had saved his life. Believing the princess to exist the i who had saved him, the prince declares his dear for her and they travel dwelling to his kingdom, to be married. The little mermaid realises that, having failed to gain a human'southward love, she will die the next morn, without having gained a soul.

Heartbroken, the little mermaid is travelling back on the prince'due south ship when her sisters announced above the water, their hair cut off. They know their sister'due south fate, and tell her that they have sacrificed their pilus to the sea witch in commutation for a magical dagger, which they hand to their sister. The piffling mermaid must plunge it into the center of the prince, so that his blood will touch the trivial mermaid's anxiety and merge them together to grade a fish's tail. And then, she can dive back under the water and be with her sisters and her grandmother, who is at her wit's end.

Merely when the mermaid sees the prince and his bride sleeping together in his tent on the ship, she cannot go through with it, and hurls the dagger into the sea earlier diving overboard and dispersing into foam on the surface of the water. Her spirit floats up into the air and she is informed past other mermaid spirits or 'daughters of the air' that, whilst they cannot gain a soul, they have a chance to do then if they provide a useful service to the earth by bringing cooling breezes to the hot winds in warmer parts of the globe.

At the end of their 3 centuries of service, they can create their own everlasting soul – and they can shorten the period of fourth dimension information technology takes to earn ane. Each house they travel into on the breeze, if they find a good child who is a credit to its parents, ane year is taken off their 3 hundred. Merely if they travel into a house where a bad child is bringing shame to its parents, a year is added onto their time in this 'limbo'. And that is how the story of the little mermaid ends.

The Little Mermaid: analysis

'The Little Mermaid' is that rare and paradoxical affair: a tragic tale with a happy ending. Although the mermaid fails in her quest to gain the prince'due south hand in marriage and thus a human being soul, she does larn when she dies that there is 'life' after beingness a mermaid, and that her kind actions in her life (saving the prince's life, and and so letting him live even though information technology volition mean her own death) carry some (long-term) reward.

This is one of the aspects of 'The Fiddling Mermaid' which make it such a rewarding tale (see the pic higher up for the popular statue in Copenhagen depicting the title grapheme). Andersen avoids the (mayhap expected) happy ending whereby the prince and the little mermaid are married and live happily always afterward, with her gaining a soul and truly joining the earth of humans. Instead, the rather more than bittersweet ending is more than mature and realistic: we cannot make people honey u.s. if they do not, and nosotros have to live with that fact. The best we tin do is to act well towards them, and to the world at large.

Although mod readers in particular may blanch at the final sentences of the story (which, i wonders, may accept been on J. M. Barrie'southward listen when he came upwards with the idea of a fairy dropping downwards dead every time a child lies), and they seem an odd fit for the rest of the tale's moral thrust (why should the 'daughters of the air' be blamed for other people'due south children beingness naughty?), the decision to the story does manage to be both satisfying and unexpected.

On this notation, it'due south worth reflecting that Andersen initially concluded the story with the mermaid'south dissolution on the surface of the waves; he revised it to give it a more hopeful conclusion. And indeed, the little mermaid's tears of happiness when she learns she has become a girl of the air ostend what we have suspected all along: that what she actually wants is a soul, and she sees the prince as her gamble to proceeds one.

It's truthful that she loves him earlier this, and she saves his life before she knows he can be of applied value to her; just in one case she learns that he may be her royal road (as information technology were) to souldom (to coin a word … or perhaps 'soulhood'?), her focus seems to exist on this, rather than on any happiness she volition necessarily enjoy with the prince while she is nonetheless alive once she has joined the human globe.

And so, taking all this into business relationship, what does the story of the trivial mermaid actually hateful? Should we analyse 'The Fiddling Mermaid' as a tale almost love, or about immortality, or about selflessness, or about faith (the little mermaid wants to 'alive' forever through some spiritual or supernatural means)?

Or should we offer a feminist interpretation of the tale, which sees the price that young women pay for marriage and motherhood (the intense hurting to her lower body which the trivial mermaid must undergo if she is to bring together the prince) being muteness, physical pain, the loss of an outlet for her talents (giving up her singing voice), and a curtailing of her freedom? That she must leave behind the world of her family unit to marry into his?

I of the reasons why 'The Little Mermaid' is such a rich tale is that information technology invites these and other interpretations. Information technology might be reductive to view the little mermaid'southward actions as solely motivated past love, especially since she appears to long for 'something more', something beyond, and that this is reflected from the beginning of the story when we larn that she was more quiet and thoughtful than her v sisters, and that she has a statue of a beautiful boy as the sole ornament in her personal garden. This can be interpreted equally a sign that she yearns for love – but it also reflects her interest in humans, and in the human earth above the surface of the ocean.

In the concluding analysis, and then, we should avert reductive interpretations of the story because 'The Little Mermaid' is that rare and truthful thing: a text which contains many dissimilar meanings below its symbols and plot details. It is more than a love story, not just a tragedy, more than a fantasy, more even than 'but' a fairy tale.

The writer of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English language at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others,The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers' Journey Through Curiosities of History  andThe Great State of war, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.