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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Children's Books
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
A beautiful gift collection of Hans Christian Andersen's most enchanting fairytales A girl journeys across unknown lands to rescue her friend from the clutches of The Snow Queen, who has imprisoned his heart in ice. A sister struggles to break the spell that has turned her ten princely brothers into swans. A mermaid decides to leave her underwater world behind for love. These renowned fairy tales, brimming with imaginative richness, are some of the most magical and inspiring ever written. The Snow QueenThe Wild SwansThe Little MermaidThe NightingaleThe True-Hearted Tin Soldier
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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CONTENTS
The Snow Queen
First Story
THE MIRROR AND THE PIECES
10
Listen closely! We’re about to begin. And when we reach the end of the tale, let’s hope we know more than we do now, for it concerns an evil goblin, one of the very worst – the Devil himself! One day, the Devil was feeling mighty pleased with himself because he’d made a special mirror. The mirror took anything that was good or lovely and shrank it to almost nothing. But if something was useless or bad, the mirror magnified it and made it look even worse. The most charming landscape looked like boiled spinach in the mirror, while the nicest people turned nasty or stood on their heads with their middles missing, and their faces so twisted that nobody knew who they were. And if you had a freckle, you could be sure that the mirror would stretch it across your entire mouth and nose. “What a hoot!” cried the Devil. If someone had a kind thought, then a sneer would appear in the mirror, which made the old goblin laugh at his own cunning. The goblins who went to goblin school – for you see, the Devil ran a goblin school – all chattered about the miracle. They 12thought that now they could see what humans and the world really looked like. They ran everywhere with the mirror and, in the end, there was not one person or country that it didn’t twist out of shape.
Then the goblins decided to fly up to Heaven, to mock the angels and God himself. The higher they flew with the mirror, the harder it laughed, and they could barely hold onto it. Higher and higher they flew, nearer and nearer to God and the angels – and then the mirror shook so hard with laughter that it slipped from their hands and tumbled down to earth, where it shattered into millions and billions of pieces.
That created more trouble than ever. Some pieces were hardly bigger than a grain of sand, and they flew all around the wide world – and whenever a piece got in someone’s eye, it stuck fast. Then the person could only see what was wrong with everything, because each of these tiny bits had the same power as the whole mirror. Some people also got a sliver of mirror in their hearts – and that was truly terrible, because it turned their hearts into lumps of ice. Sometimes a piece was large enough to use as a windowpane; but it was no good looking at your friends through a window like that. Other pieces ended up in eyeglasses – and then it was awful when people put them on in order to see and do things properly.13
It all tickled the Devil so much that he roared with laughter and his belly nearly split. All the while, more and more tiny shards of glass were flying about in the air.
And now we’ll hear what happened next!14
Second Story
A LITTLE BOY, A LITTLE GIRL
16
In the big city, there are so many houses and people that hardly anyone has room for a small garden. So most people have to make do with flowers in pots. And in this city lived two poor children who felt lucky, because they had a garden that was a bit larger than a flowerpot. They weren’t brother and sister, yet they loved each other just as if they had been. Their parents lived right next to each other, in the garrets – the attic rooms – of two neighbouring buildings. Where the one roof jutted up against the other, a rain gutter ran between them and a small window poked out from each garret. If you stepped over the gutter, you could go out of one window and into the other.
Outside the windows, each family had a large wooden planter. In these boxes they grew herbs that they used for cooking, and a small rosebush that did very well. The parents came up with the idea of placing the two planters across the gutter, stretching nearly all the way from one window to the other and creating two banks of flowers. Pea shoots hung down over the edges of the 18planters, while the rosebushes sent out long stems that twined around the windows and nodded to each other, making a triumphal arch of greenery and blossom. The boxes were high and the children knew not to climb on them, but their parents had made a platform on the roof between the planters, and the children were allowed to go out and sit under the roses on their two little stools. There they would play together marvellously.
But when winter came, that pleasure was past. Often the windows frosted over completely. Then each child would heat a copper penny on the stove and lay the hot coin against the frozen pane to form a wonderful peephole – so round, so perfectly round. Through it peeked two sweet, gentle eyes, one from each window: the little boy and the little girl. His name was Kai and her name was Gerda. In the summer they could get to each other with a single leap, but in the winter they had to first go down many flights of stairs and then back up many more, while the snow flew around outside.
“The white bees are swarming,” Grandmother said.
“Do they have a queen too?” asked Kai, because he knew that the real bees had a queen.
“They do!” said the old woman. “She flies just where they swarm the thickest. She’s the biggest bee of all and she never rests on the ground, she just flies up again in 19a black cloud. Night after night, she flies through the winter streets of the city and peers into people’s windows. And then the windows frost up with strange and curious patterns – just like flowers.”
“Yes, we’ve seen them!” the children both exclaimed. And they knew then that Grandmother was telling the truth.
“Can the Snow Queen come in here?” asked Gerda.
“Just let her try,” Kai said. “I’ll set her on the hot stove, and then she’ll melt.”
But Grandmother said nothing. She just smoothed back the boy’s hair and told other stories.
Back home that evening, when Kai was half undressed, he crawled up on the chair by the window and peered out of the tiny hole. A few snowflakes fell outside, and the largest of them hung on the edge of one flowerbox. The snowflake grew bigger and bigger, till at last it became an entire woman. She was clothed in the finest white gauze, which looked like it had been made from millions of starry flakes. She was exquisite but she was ice – dazzling, flashing ice – even though she was alive. Her eyes shone like two bright stars, but there was no peace or rest in them. She nodded toward the window and motioned with her hand. The boy became frightened and jumped off his chair; it was as if a giant bird had flown past the window outside. 20
The next day there came a clear frost – and then spring arrived. The sun shone, the green peeped out of the trees and bushes, the swallows built nests. Then the windows were lifted from their sills, and the small children sat once more in their tiny garden by the roof gutter, high above all the other floors below.
That summer the roses bloomed like never before. Gerda had learned a hymn and it had something about roses in it; the song made her think of her own roses. She sang it for Kai and he sang with her:
In the valleys, the roses grow
The child of God we’ll come to know
And the children held hands, kissed the roses, and gazed into the blessed bright sunshine, speaking to it as if the child of God was really there. How lovely the summer days were and how pleasant, there among the cheerful roses that seemed as if they would never stop blooming.
One day, Kai and Gerda sat together looking at a picture book with animals and birds. It was then – just as the clock in the great steeple struck five – that Kai cried, “Ow! Something stung me in the heart! And now I’ve got something in my eye!”21
Gerda placed her arms around his neck; he was blinking hard. But no, there was nothing to be seen in his eye.
“I think it’s gone,” he said. But it wasn’t gone. It was one of those splinters of glass from the shattered mirror, the Devil’s mirror. You remember – the terrible mirror that turned anything great and good into something puny and ugly – the glass that made anything plain or evil look bigger, that made every blemish or mistake stick out. And a splinter had gone right into his heart too. Soon it would become just like a lump of ice. The splinter no longer hurt – but it was there all the same.
“What are you crying for?” he asked. “You look revolting when you cry. There’s nothing wrong with me!” he shouted. “Ugh! a worm’s been chewing on that rose! And look, that other one’s crooked! They’re disgusting! They look as ugly as the box they’re in!” He kicked the planter hard and tore both roses from their stems.
“Kai, what are you doing?” cried Gerda. And when he saw how frightened she was, he tore off another rose and left, going in through his window and away from his sweet young friend.
Afterwards, anytime she came by with the picture book, he would say it was for babies, and when Grandmother told stories, he always made some objection. Whenever he could, he’d put on a pair of glasses and walk behind the 22old woman, mimicking the way she spoke. It was uncanny; it made people laugh. Soon he was able to speak and walk just like everyone on their street. He could imitate anything that was odd or unattractive about them, and people said, “What a talent that boy has!” But it was the splinter of glass lodged in his eye – and the splinter lodged in his heart – that made him tease others, even young Gerda, who adored him with all her heart.
His games were quite different now from what they had been before he’d become so clever. One winter day, as snowflakes flew around, he came by with a big magnifying glass and held out a flap of his blue coat, letting the flakes fall onto it.
“Here! Look through the glass, Gerda,” he said. The magnifying glass made each snowflake appear much larger – like a splendid flower or a six-pointed star, lovely to look at.
