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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
In "What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales," Hans Christian Andersen weaves a tapestry of enchanting narratives that reflect his profound understanding of human nature and the whimsical world surrounding it. This collection, first published in 1842, showcases Andersen's signature style, marked by rich imagery, simple yet poignant language, and an exploration of moral themes. Each tale is imbued with an ethereal quality, often transcending traditional folk tales through innovative storytelling that reveals deeper philosophical insights and societal critique, characteristic of the literary context of the early 19th century, when fairy tales began to evolve into a means of social commentary. Born in Odense, Denmark, Andersen's humble beginnings, combined with his experiences as a traveler and observer of society, significantly shaped his storytelling. His upbringing in a world rife with cultural contradictions and socio-economic disparity fueled his imagination and empathy, prompting him to create characters who are often outcasts or dreamers. Andersen's profound engagement with themes of longing and the search for belonging resonates throughout his works, illustrating his belief in the transformative power of imagination and compassion. "What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales" is a must-read for anyone captivated by the magic of storytelling and the complexities of the human experience. It serves as both an introduction to Andersen's rich literary legacy and a timeless exploration of universal themes that continue to resonate today. Readers seeking to rediscover the haunting beauty of tales that illuminate the mundane and the extraordinary will find themselves transported by Andersen's exquisite prose. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales
Table of Contents
Introduction
This single-author collection gathers a broad and representative array of Hans Christian Andersen’s prose tales under the banner What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales. Rather than presenting a complete works or a single genre, it offers a capacious panorama of Andersen’s nineteenth-century storytelling, from intimate sketches to expansive, myth-tinged narratives. The aim is to show his range and coherence at once: how brief vignettes, moral parables, legends, and longer fairy tales converse across themes and tones. Readers encounter Andersen not as a compiler of folk fragments, but as an original artist whose invented tales cultivate wonder, empathy, and reflection.
The volume is anchored in prose fiction: literary fairy tales, fables, and legends alongside character sketches and framed sequences. It includes short, self-contained pieces; extended stories of substantial breadth; and cycles that unfold across multiple parts. While occasional verse surfaces within the tales, the collection is not a book of poems, plays, or essays; it is a gallery of narrative prose. Its variety embraces the comic and the grave, the domestic and the fantastic, the rural and the urban, always with Andersen’s distinctive blend of imagination and everyday observation that shaped modern storytelling for readers young and old.
At its heart stands the cycle titled What the Moon Saw, arranged as a succession of evenings in which the Moon becomes a quiet witness and narrator. Each evening delivers a self-contained glimpse—of streets, rooms, landscapes, or lives—casting ordinary scenes in a silvery, contemplative light. The Moon’s vantage turns outward and inward at once: outward to the world’s bustle and inward to sentiments often unnoticed by daylight. This opening sequence establishes the collection’s central gesture: to regard the familiar from a fresh, elevated angle, dignifying small events and revealing the poetry that threads through daily existence.
Surrounding the lunar cycle is a diverse suite of tales that amplify and vary its concerns. Some arrive as novella-length fairy stories steeped in mythic atmosphere; others are briskly comic fables that pivot on a single conceit. Several appear as linked sets—such as the incremental episodes of Soup on a Sausage-Peg or the revisits in Ole the Tower-Keeper—creating echoes and refrains within the whole. These structural choices allow Andersen to pace surprise and recognition: a brief parable prepares the mind for a longer meditation, while a return visit reframes what seemed settled, sharpening the reader’s sense of pattern and change.
Though varied in plot and scope, the works share abiding themes. Transformation—moral as much as magical—recurs, as do the perils of vanity and the quiet dignity of the overlooked. Acts of kindness ripple outward; neglect and pride carry their own consequences. Andersen’s characters often stand at thresholds: between childhood and adulthood, nature and culture, desire and duty. The collection dwells on choices made in small moments and the long shadows they cast. Without prescriptive lessons, the stories invite readers to consider compassion, humility, and courage, and to sense the moral resonance that hums beneath even the lightest invention.
Stylistically, Andersen writes in a conversational, lucid prose that retains the intimacy of a storyteller speaking to listeners gathered close. He pairs homely detail—the creak of a door, the color of a feather, the feel of frost—with visionary flights of imagination. Personification is one of his signatures: animals, trees, winds, even tools and trinkets acquire voices and motives that mirror human hopes and foibles. Humor and pathos sit side by side, often within a single page. The effect is neither stark realism nor unmoored fantasy, but a supple mode that allows wonder to meet the recognizable textures of life.
A distinctive feature of this collection is its array of narrators and vantage points. The Moon and the Wind speak as worldly observers. Birds, insects, and domestic creatures comment on human affairs with sidelong clarity. Inanimate objects—a pen, an inkstand, a bottle-neck, a weathercock—become eloquent, exposing the absurdities and desires of their owners. These choices are not mere whimsy. By relocating perspective, Andersen disarms readers’ expectations and uncovers truths polite society might overlook. The neglected, the peripheral, and the small gain prominence, reminding us that meaning lies not only in grand events but in modest, overlooked corners.
The tales also reveal a keen eye for social texture. Andersen attends to marketplaces and manor houses, farmyards and city lanes, portraying both comfort and want with impartial sympathy. He frequently turns satire toward pretension and hollow cleverness, yet does so without cruelty. A huckster finds his match in a goblin’s stubborn sense of value; a pair of writing tools quarrel over credit and inspiration. Such scenes are comic on the surface, but they probe status, taste, and the ethics of everyday life. The collection’s laughter carries an afterthought, nudging readers to distinguish what is flashy from what endures.
Nature and time provide a vast backdrop for personal fortunes. Seasons stride through the pages; a year becomes a story; a venerable tree contemplates the lives beneath its canopy. Sea, marsh, and sand-dunes form dramatic settings where human choices meet ancient forces. Birds and butterflies embody chance, constancy, and metamorphosis. Even in the most fantastical episodes, natural detail anchors the marvelous, so that wonder feels rooted rather than abstract. Across the collection, cycles of growth and decay echo the arc of human hopes, suggesting that individual destinies are legible only when read against the patient rhythms of the world.
Spiritual and ethical undercurrents flow through these works without preaching. Images of temptation, mercy, sacrifice, and grace recur, filtered through folklore and domestic realism. Characters wrestle with conscience as much as with circumstance; the consequences they face feel both storied and recognizably human. Andersen’s moral imagination respects mystery: explanations are sparing, and meanings often arrive obliquely, through symbol and atmosphere. This reticence invites readers to participate in interpretation, to sense why humility might be stronger than cleverness, or why fidelity might outlast brilliance. The tales thus sustain rereading, offering fresh emphases as experience and perspective deepen over time.
Taken together, the pieces confirm Andersen’s role in redefining the literary fairy tale for modern audiences. He grafted the immediacy of oral storytelling onto crafted prose, infused folk motifs with psychological insight, and made room for both children’s delight and adult melancholy. The result is a body of work that is accessible and layered, hospitable to casual browsing and serious study alike. This collection displays that achievement in breadth: widely loved pieces sit beside less familiar gems, making visible the consistency of his vision and the versatility of his art. Its enduring appeal rests on sympathy, surprise, and simplicity.
Readers may approach these tales sequentially or at leisure. The lunar cycle offers a natural point of entry, after which one might wander by mood—toward a legend, a comic fable, a coastal romance, or a meditation on art and craft. The English prose bears a nineteenth-century cadence that suits Andersen’s voice, yet the emotions remain immediate. Above all, the volume invites unhurried attention: to a turn of phrase, a sudden image, a quiet insight. Its purpose is not to exhaust Andersen, but to open his world widely, demonstrating how his imagination renders the ordinary luminous and the marvelous close at hand.
Author Biography
Introduction
Hans Christian Andersen (H. C. Andersen) was a Danish author whose fairy tales reshaped world literature. Born in the early 19th century and active through the Victorian era, he wrote across genres—poetry, drama, novels, travelogues—but achieved enduring fame with stories such as The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Princess and the Pea, and Thumbelina. Blending oral tradition, Romantic sensibility, and a modern, conversational voice, he elevated the fairy tale into a literary art form for both children and adults. His work, translated worldwide, continues to influence storytelling, popular culture, and the moral imagination.
Education and Literary Influences
Andersen grew up in modest circumstances in Odense, with limited formal schooling. As a teenager he moved to Copenhagen, initially aspiring to a theatrical career in acting and singing. Support from patrons enabled him to pursue more structured education, including time at demanding grammar schools where he studied languages and literature. Although his schooling could be uneven and emotionally taxing, it strengthened his command of Danish and broadened his reading. He gained access to literary circles in the capital and slowly redirected his ambitions from the stage to writing, channeling a performer’s instinct for voice and timing into prose and verse.
His imagination drew on Danish folk traditions and European Romanticism, valuing nature, feeling, and the inner life. He admired Shakespeare and was attentive to the narrative art of the Brothers Grimm, while maintaining a distinctive, personal tone that placed everyday speech alongside the marvelous. Travel across Europe exposed him to varied cultures and literary salons, deepening his cosmopolitan outlook. Encounters with prominent writers—he notably met Charles Dickens—reinforced his interest in social observation and the lives of outsiders. Danish contemporaries and critics also shaped his development, encouraging clarity of style and a closer attention to form and audience.
Literary Career
Andersen’s earliest publications included poems, plays, and a novelistic breakthrough in the mid-1830s with The Improvisatore, which brought him attention beyond Denmark. Around the same time he began issuing his fairy tales in small installments, later gathered under titles such as Fairy Tales Told for Children. These early tales were modestly received at first but revealed an original method: colloquial narration, psychological nuance, and a blending of humor with melancholy. He wrote swiftly and diversely, pursuing the theater while refining his prose style, and he learned to balance lyric effects with clear, memorable plots suited to both public readings and domestic storytelling.
The hallmark of Andersen’s oeuvre is his fairy-tale cycle, which increasingly aimed at adult as well as child readers. He reimagined the genre with stories like The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Princess and the Pea, and Thumbelina. Themes of transformation, yearning, dignity, and the trials of the outsider recur, often shaded by bittersweet endings. Objects and animals speak with moral insight, while human characters struggle with pride, vanity, or love. His stylistic signature—plainspoken yet lyrical—allowed complex emotional registers to emerge without didacticism, inviting reflection on identity, sacrifice, and hope.
Beyond tales, Andersen wrote novels such as O.T. and Only a Fiddler, exploring youth, social status, and the shaping power of art and circumstance. His travel books, particularly A Poet’s Bazaar, drew on extensive journeys through Europe and beyond. These works display his eye for telling detail, curiosity about customs, and capacity to render place as a stage for human character. He experimented in drama and continued to write poetry, though the theater rarely yielded lasting triumphs. Across genres, he cultivated a recognizably intimate narrative voice, often addressing the reader directly and weaving observation with gentle irony.
Critical reception in Denmark was mixed at first. Some commentators viewed his colloquial style as insufficiently elevated for literature, and early reviewers questioned the artistic standing of children’s stories. Translations and foreign readerships, however, grew rapidly from the 1840s onward. As his international profile rose, perception at home shifted. Public readings and new collections expanded his audience, while younger writers and educators recognized the originality of his fables. By the mid-19th century he was widely regarded as a national figure whose work embodied Danish letters yet spoke across borders and classes, amplified by publishers and translators throughout Europe.
Professionally, Andersen’s milestones included steady cycles of tale collections that evolved in tone and complexity. Later stories embraced grander symbolic architecture—The Snow Queen, for example, interlaces episodic adventure with spiritual and emotional maturation. He refined his narrative economy, allowing small details to carry moral weight. Stage adaptations, illustrations, and musical settings multiplied, confirming his status as a source for collaborative arts. While he continued to write in multiple forms, it was the fairy tale—flexible, intimate, and universally legible—that became the central vehicle of his artistic identity and the foundation for his enduring, global reputation.
Beliefs and Advocacy
Andersen’s writings articulate a humane vision grounded in compassion, imagination, and a sense of spiritual purpose. He often affirmed the intrinsic worth of the humble and overlooked, dramatizing the pains of exclusion alongside the transformative power of perseverance. Although not doctrinaire, his outlook was shaped by Christian ethics and Romantic ideals, favoring conscience, mercy, and wonder over cynicism. Ordinary objects and creatures attain dignity in his tales, suggesting a moral universe where grace emerges in unlikely forms. He resisted rigid moralizing, preferring ambiguity and emotional truth, and he honored tears, laughter, and silence as pathways to understanding.
In public life, Andersen cultivated a literary rather than partisan profile. Travel served as cultural advocacy, introducing readers to distant places with curiosity rather than judgment. He supported education and reading through his example and through works accessible to a wide audience, contributing to a broader culture of literacy. While he did not lead political campaigns, his stories repeatedly contest cruelty, vanity, and social pretension, implicitly advancing ideals of kindness and dignity. He engaged with salons, publishers, and educators, and he read to audiences, helping to normalize the fairy tale as serious literature capable of ethical and aesthetic reflection.
Final Years & Legacy
In his later years Andersen continued to publish tales, sketches, and travel writing, while maintaining a prominent public presence. Extensive travel gradually gave way to quieter routines. After a serious fall in the early 1870s, his health declined. He died in 1875 in the Copenhagen area, honored as a national author. Newspapers across Europe marked his passing, recalling the breadth of his audience and the tenderness of his art. Commemorations followed in Denmark and abroad, and his friends and readers reflected on a career that had transformed childhood reading and enlarged the ambitions of short prose narrative.
Andersen’s legacy is both literary and cultural. His tales have been translated into numerous languages and adapted for stage, ballet, and film, shaping global popular culture; several animated features draw on his narratives. Scholars continue to analyze his style, narrative voice, and psychological depth, while educators rely on his stories to teach empathy and imagination. Monuments, museums, and festivals attest to his standing as a cultural icon. His influence can be traced in modern fantasy, magical realism, and children’s literature worldwide, where the gentle rigor of his storytelling—simple surface, layered meaning—remains a model of artistic universality.
Historical Context
Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875), born in Odense and long resident in Copenhagen, wrote across the Danish Golden Age and into mid-Victorian Europe. His career, from the first Eventyr (1835) to late stories of the 1860s, unfolded alongside Denmark’s transition from absolute monarchy to constitutional state in 1849. Patronage from Jonas Collin brought him into the Royal Danish Theatre in the 1820s, while a cosmopolitan itinerary—Germany, Italy, Greece, and Constantinople in 1841, England in 1847 and 1857—fed his imagination. What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales gathers pieces reflecting decades of artistic evolution, binding Romantic allegory to social observation, and local Danish materials to continental and global horizons.
The Danish Golden Age (c. 1800–1850s) furnished Andersen with an intellectual and artistic milieu defined by Romantic nationalism, Lutheran humanism, and Biedermeier domesticity. He wrote amid the achievements of Adam Oehlenschläger in poetry, J. L. Heiberg in drama, Bertel Thorvaldsen in sculpture, and C. W. Eckersberg in painting. Scientific inquiry by Hans Christian Ørsted (discoverer of electromagnetism in 1820) and philosophical debate—later sharpened by Søren Kierkegaard—shaped the era’s interrogation of faith, selfhood, and art. In the wake of the 1814 loss of Norway and the 1807 British bombardment of Copenhagen, national introspection encouraged the recasting of folktale, history, and landscape as moral and imaginative reservoirs.
Copenhagen’s modernization gives a key backdrop to the collection’s urban sensibility. The city’s first railway opened in 1847 (Copenhagen–Roskilde), gasworks began supplying light in 1857, and the dismantling of fortifications after 1852 permitted new quarters to expand beyond the ramparts. Tivoli Gardens, founded in 1843, popularized spectacle, pantomime, and puppet entertainments. Such developments resonated with tales about night-time observation, bustling streets, shopkeepers and hucksters, mechanized amusements, and the changing skyline watched from towers and attics. The vantage of the Moon—aloof yet intimate—captures a city negotiating between older crafts and emerging technologies, between convivial interiors and the anonymity of the modern thoroughfare.
Religious sentiment and ethical inquiry permeate Andersen’s work, reflecting the Lutheran establishment and revivalist currents associated with N. F. S. Grundtvig. The 1849 Constitution broadened religious freedom, yet questions about providence, doubt, and redemption grew more pointed after crises like the 1853 cholera epidemic in Copenhagen. Cemeteries such as Assistens, where Andersen would be buried, framed a culture of mourning, memory, and consolation. Allegories of the soul, meditations on death and renewal, and personified forces of nature intersected with contemporary sermons, hymnody, and domestic piety. In this atmosphere, the miraculous and the everyday frequently meet in objects, seasons, and rituals that tether grief to hope.
Political upheaval shaped the era’s historical imagination. The European revolutions of 1848 catalyzed Denmark’s move to constitutional monarchy under Frederick VII (1848–1863). The First Schleswig War (1848–1850) and, more decisively, the Second Schleswig War in 1864—ending in territorial loss to Prussia and Austria—haunted national consciousness. Scenes of borderlands, marshes, and bleak coasts, as well as elegiac historical recollections, align with a culture preoccupied by defeat, dignity, and perseverance. The figure of Christian VIII (1839–1848) and the subsequent reign of Christian IX (from 1863) mark a continuum in which monarchy, nationhood, and civic identity were recast, and writers like Andersen probed the costs and consolations of such transitions.
Andersen’s cosmopolitan travels complemented his Danish rootedness. His A Poet’s Bazaar (1842) drew on journeys through Germany and Italy and a notable 1841 route to Greece and Constantinople, bringing Mediterranean and Ottoman scenes into Nordic storytelling. Repeated visits to Paris and London—where he first met Charles Dickens in 1847 and famously overstayed in 1857—exposed him to industrial modernity, the international book trade, and exhibition culture epitomized by the Crystal Palace (1851). Encounters with multilingual audiences and varying moral expectations sharpened his sense of narrative voice, irony, and pathos, qualities evident in tales that range from village hearth to distant seas and imagined antiquity.
Folklore and oral tradition fed Andersen’s reinventions, even as he remained a literary, rather than strictly folkloristic, author. He wrote in an age that saw the Grimm brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812 onward) shape European tastes, while in Denmark Svend Grundtvig collected ballads and tales. Coastal legends of sunken bells, marsh hauntings, and spectral bishops, and rural lore from Jutland’s dunes to Zealand’s manors, supplied motifs he refashioned into psychological parables. Rather than transcribe peasant stories verbatim, Andersen fused anecdote with urban observation and personal memory, letting ordinary objects—bottles, pens, weathercocks—speak in idioms that bridge household intimacy with mythic resonance.
Scientific curiosity and technological change informed Andersen’s anthropomorphic cosmos. Ørsted’s circle popularized natural philosophy and wonder, while the Round Tower’s observatory in Copenhagen encouraged the public imagination of the heavens. Telegraph lines and steamships shortened distances in the 1850s, and entomology, botany, and collecting became middle-class pursuits. Such contexts animate stories where a beetle or butterfly claims attention, winds carry news, and the Moon surveys cities and shores. Speculations about futurity—cast in centuries-long vistas—echo the era’s blend of progressivism and unease. The moral life of tools and instruments, from inkstands to bottle-necks, mirrors a society learning to read its own material culture.
The arts—especially theatre—shaped Andersen’s sensibility. His early, often fraught, engagement with the Royal Danish Theatre under J. L. Heiberg acquainted him with vaudeville’s comic rhythms and the ballet of August Bournonville. Puppetry, pantomime, and street performance thrived at venues like Tivoli after 1843, permeating stories about showmen, stages, and illusion. At the same time, the expanding book market and periodical press raised questions about the commercialization of taste. Grocers, hucksters, critics, and poets become emblematic figures through whom the dignity and compromises of art are measured. The stage, shop, and study sit side by side as Andersen weighs applause against conscience.
Rural Denmark—its farms, barter markets, and weather-beaten coasts—remained central amid urban change. Long after the 1788 abolition of the stavnsbånd (peasant adscription), agrarian life continued to structure social relations, festive calendars, and moral expectations. Jutland’s heath and dunes, threatened by drift sands, drew national attention; later initiatives like Hedeselskabet (1866) sought to reclaim the land. Farmyards with their cocks and pigs, village greens with gossip and barter, and coastal hamlets facing the “iron coast” of the North Sea provide settings in which humor and hardship mingle. The moral economy of exchange and neighborliness animates rural episodes that test prudence, folly, and kindness.
Questions of class and mobility animate Andersen’s autobiographical myth. The poor shoemaker’s son who entered Copenhagen at fourteen sought patronage, education (notably at Slagelse), and a place in letters. Nineteenth-century Denmark increasingly valorized merit, yet birth and manners remained gatekeepers in salons and ministries. The folk high school movement inspired by N. F. S. Grundtvig and practiced by Christen Kold from the 1840s broadened rural educational horizons. Against this backdrop, comic pretenders, quiet strivers, and unappreciated laborers populate narratives where dullness may disguise invention and cleverness is not always wisdom. Success and recognition appear as moral, not merely social, achievements.
Andersen’s women—servants, seamstresses, widows, and orphaned girls—reflect tensions in a society of strong domestic ideals but fragile social safety nets. Copenhagen’s poor relief evolved in the mid-nineteenth century, yet precarious employment, illegitimacy, and illness exposed women to gossip, moral policing, and deprivation. Philanthropic energies—charity schools, church aid, genteel visitors—offered help tinged with surveillance. Tales of erring mothers, steadfast daughters, and undeserved shame mirror debates on propriety and compassion in bourgeois culture. Affection, pride, and penitence are staged not as abstract virtues but as negotiations across kitchen tables, garrets, and parish offices, where reputation can wound as sharply as hunger.
Religious pluralism and Jewish emancipation gave Andersen a framework for exploring belonging and prejudice. Denmark recognized Jewish civil rights progressively after 1814, and the Great Synagogue in Copenhagen opened in 1833. The 1849 Constitution affirmed broader freedoms, yet social suspicion lingered, as across Europe after the 1819 Hep-Hep riots in German lands. Andersen’s sensitivity to outsiders—rooted in his own marginal childhood and in cosmopolitan travels—enabled portraits that contrast legal toleration with emotional exile. Such treatments align with a broader Nordic discourse on citizenship and faith, situating Jewish lives within the same moral topography of dignity, error, and redemption as their Christian neighbors.
Nature’s cycles—winter snows, spring thaws, summer harvests, and autumn storms—pattern both rural and urban existence in the tales. The oak, a national emblem in Denmark, bears witness to centuries; snow and ice sculpt streets and canals; winds off the Kattegat and Skagerrak batter Jutland’s coast. Maritime commerce and disaster mark communities that listen for bell-tones under the sea and watch for lighthouses such as Skagen’s Grey Lighthouse (1858). Animals and weather-signs speak in voices that blend fable and observation. Seasonal change becomes a moral and historical calendar, measuring human vanity and constancy against phenomena no king, poet, or merchant can command.
Antiquarianism and the new historical sciences enriched a culture of memory. The National Museum in Copenhagen emerged from royal collections (1807), and Christian Jürgensen Thomsen’s Three-Age System (Stone, Bronze, Iron) in the 1820s–1830s pioneered archaeological chronology. Such interests, complemented later by photography (introduced in 1839), fostered a taste for relics, ruins, and albums—mute “books” of lives and eras. Old gravestones, bottle-necks from festive tables, and heirlooms become storytellers in Andersen’s fiction. The past is never inert; it presses through objects into conscience. Thus modern temporality—progress, loss, repetition—finds emblematic form in keepsakes that survive their owners and instruct their heirs.
The English-language fortunes of Andersen shaped the reception of this collection. Early translations by Mary Howitt (1846) prepared the way for H. W. Dulcken’s mid-1860s versions for George Routledge & Sons, who packaged Andersen within the Victorian gift-book market. The Dalziel Brothers’ wood engravings and artists such as A. Boyd Houghton and J. E. Millais, R.A., contributed to richly illustrated editions advertised alongside Scripture storybooks and anthology volumes. Such framing emphasized moral edification, picturesque scenery, and seasonal reading, especially at Christmas. Yet Dulcken’s broadly faithful approach allowed Andersen’s irony and tenderness to reach British and American readers without wholly submerging Danish particularities.
By the time of Andersen’s death in 1875 and burial at Assistens, his synthesis of Romantic wonder, social observation, and cosmopolitan reach had redefined the modern tale. What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales presents not isolated curiosities but a web of concerns—nation and exile, art and trade, faith and doubt, nature and time—rooted in Copenhagen streets, Jutland coasts, and the wider nineteenth-century world. The speaking object and the observant wind or moon are instruments of moral scrutiny suited to an age of industry and introspection. Their vantage remains durable, inviting readers to hear history in the ordinary and the ordinary in history.
Synopsis (Selection)
Preface
A brief note outlining the aims of the collection and the spirit in which the tales are offered.
What the Moon Saw (Introduction and Evenings I–XXXII)
A moon addresses a young artist over successive nights, sharing vivid vignettes from around the world that reveal fleeting joys, sorrows, and the hidden poetry of everyday life.
The Story of the Year
The seasons are personified as a year-long journey, tracing nature’s cycles and human moods from spring’s promise to winter’s rest.
She Was Good for Nothing
A poor woman scorned by society quietly proves her kindness, highlighting the gap between reputation and true worth.
There Is a Difference
A concise fable contrasting appearance and reality to show how genuine value often lies beneath humble surfaces.
Everything in Its Right Place
A gentle moral tale about disorder and harmony, suggesting that peace comes when things—and people—find where they truly belong.
The Goblin and the Huckster
A house goblin torn between a grocer’s treats and a poet’s inspiration learns to value the nourishment of the spirit.
In a Thousand Years
A speculative glimpse into the far future imagines how time will transform cities, customs, and memory.
The Bond of Friendship
Two friends’ lives diverge through distance and mischance, yet their lasting loyalty is tested and affirmed.
Jack the Dullard
A guileless simpleton outwits clever rivals and wins a princess by unpretentious wit and bold spontaneity.
An Old Story Told Anew
A familiar mythic pattern is retold in a contemporary key, revealing the timelessness of love, loss, and renewal.
Something
A king’s challenge to bring the most valuable “something” sparks debate over knowledge, power, and love, with an unexpected resolution.
Under the Willow Tree
Childhood companions make vows beneath a willow; time and circumstance reshape their dreams into tender, wistful memory.
The Beetle
A proud beetle, jealous of a horse’s honor, wanders the world and endures comic trials that temper its vanity.
What the Old Man Does Is Always Right
A farmer repeatedly barters down his goods yet returns home content, buoyed by his wife’s unwavering good humor.
The Wind Tells about Waldemar Daa and His Daughters
The wind narrates the fall of an ambitious nobleman consumed by alchemy and the divergent fates of his three daughters.
Ib and Christine
Rural childhood sweethearts face parting, hardship, and selfless choices that redefine love over a lifetime.
Ole the Tower-Keeper (First, Second, and Third Visits)
Conversations with a watchman high above the town reflect on history, art, and the changing world across three visits.
The Bottle-Neck
A champagne bottle’s neck recounts its journey from celebration to castoff, a small saga of fortune’s reversals.
Good Humour
A light parable showing how cheerfulness and patience can turn mischance into reconciliation and luck.
A Leaf from the Sky
A healing leaf’s chance fall saves a child, linking scientific curiosity with a sense of providence.
The Dumb Book
A wordless album of images narrates a love story and separation, proving that pictures can speak beyond words.
The Jewish Girl
A sensitive portrait of a Jewish maiden confronting prejudice and finding dignity through faith and compassion.
The Thorny Road of Honour
A man endures hardship and misunderstanding in pursuit of integrity, walking a difficult path before recognition.
The Old Gravestone
An inscription and a neglected grave reveal a past love and the quiet endurance of remembrance.
The Old Bachelor’s Nightcap
An elderly man’s nightcap becomes a keepsake that unlocks memories of youth, affection, and missed chances.
The Marsh King’s Daughter
A sweeping tale of a child born of a Viking maiden and the Marsh King, marked by a dual nature and a quest toward redemption.
The Last Dream of the Old Oak Tree
An ancient oak reflects on centuries of life and greets its final storm with a consoling vision of renewal.
A Christmas Tale
A seasonal sketch where small acts of kindness and wonder soften hearts and rekindle generosity.
The Bell-Deep
A sunken bell is said to toll from the depths during storms, a legend blending conscience, faith, and folklore.
The Puppet Showman
A puppeteer’s figures mirror human foibles, blurring the line between creator and creation in art and life.
The Pigs
A satirical fable in which pigs judge taste and culture, exposing complacency and self-satisfaction.
Anne Lisbeth
A mother’s worldly ambition leads to a fateful decision about her child, with haunting moral consequences.
Charming
A whimsical vignette on the allure of charm and the contrast between surface sparkle and sincere worth.
In the Duck-Yard
Comic squabbles in a poultry yard lampoon pretension, gossip, and the pecking order of society.
The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf
A vain girl’s small act of pride draws her into a grim descent, confronting humility and the hope of change.
A Story from the Sand-Dunes
An epic set among the Jutland dunes traces the intertwined destinies of fisher folk and a foundling through love and loss.
The Bishop of Börglum and His Warriors
A Danish legend of a powerful bishop and his spectral retinue condemned to restless penance.
The Snow Man
A newly made snowman discovers the world and yearns for the warmth of a stove, a tender parable of transience.
Two Maidens
An allegory contrasting two young women—worldly and modest—to weigh beauty, virtue, and fortune.
The Farmyard Cock and the Weathercock
A barnyard rooster and a rooftop vane argue constancy versus opportunism in a sly social satire.
The Pen and Inkstand
Writing tools boast of their importance until the creative spirit reminds them where inspiration truly begins.
The Child in the Grave
A grieving mother has a consoling vision that helps her release her hold on her departed child.
Soup on a Sausage-Peg (I–V)
A playful frame tale spins fanciful anecdotes around the absurd idea of making soup on a sausage-peg, celebrating imagination.
The Stone of the Wise Men
Seekers pursue a legendary stone and find that wisdom lies less in magic than in compassion and selflessness.
The Butterfly
A fickle butterfly searches for the perfect bride, only to learn a wry lesson about hesitation and choice.
In the Uttermost Parts of the Sea
A journey to the farthest seas reveals strange marvels and the humbling vastness of creation.
The Phoenix Bird
The phoenix’s cycle of death and rebirth is retold as a symbol of endurance, renewal, and human hope.
Publishers’ Advertisements and Catalogues (Dalziels’ Fine Art Gift Books, Birkett Foster, Millais, Our Best English Poets, Richard Doyle and J. R. Planché, Hans C. Andersen, Arthur Bailey Thompson, H. W. Dulcken, Otto Speckter, F. Hey, etc.)
Promotional listings of contemporary illustrated gift books, poetry collections, and children’s titles issued by the publisher.
George Routledge and Sons Listings
Additional catalogue notices for Routledge’s children’s and illustrated series, including scripture stories and picture books.
What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales
PREFACE.
The present book is put forth as a sequel to the volume of Hans C. Andersen's "Stories and Tales," published in a similar form in the course of 1864. It contains tales and sketches various in character; and following, as it does, an earlier volume, care has been taken to intersperse with the children's tales stories which, by their graver character and deeper meaning, are calculated to interest those "children of a larger growth" who can find instruction as well as amusement in the play of fancy and imagination, though the realm be that of fiction, and the instruction be conveyed in a simple form.
The series of sketches of "What the Moon Saw," with which the present volume opens, arose from the experiences of Andersen, when as a youth he went to seek his fortune in the capital of his native land; and the story entitled "Under the Willow Tree" is said likewise to have its foundation in fact; indeed, it seems redolent of the truth of that natural human love and suffering which is so truly said to "make the whole world kin."
On the preparation and embellishment of the book, the same care and attention have been lavished as on the preceding volume. The pencil of Mr. Bayes and the graver of the Brothers Dalziel have again been employed in the work of illustration; and it is hoped that the favour bestowed by the public on the former volume may be extended to this its successor.
H. W. D.
WHAT THE MOON SAW.
INTRODUCTION.
It is a strange thing, that when I feel most fervently and most deeply, my hands and my tongue seem alike tied, so that I cannot rightly describe or accurately portray the thoughts that are rising within me; and yet I am a painter: my eye tells me as much as that, and all my friends who have seen my sketches and fancies say the same.
I am a poor lad, and live in one of the narrowest of lanes; but I do not want for light, as my room is high up in the house, with an extensive prospect over the neighbouring roofs. During the first few days I went to live in the town, I felt low-spirited and solitary enough. Instead of the forest and the green hills of former days, I had here only a forest of chimney-pots to look out upon. And then I had not a single friend; not one familiar face greeted me.
So one evening I sat at the window, in a desponding mood; and presently I opened the casement and looked out. Oh, how my heart leaped up with joy! Here was a well-known face at last—a round, friendly countenance, the face of a good friend I had known at home. In, fact it was the Moon that looked in upon me. He was quite unchanged, the dear old Moon, and had the same face exactly that he used to show when he peered down upon me through the willow trees on the moor. I kissed my hand to him over and over again, as he shone far into my little room;[1q] and he, for his part, promised me that every evening, when he came abroad, he would look in upon me for a few moments. This promise he has faithfully kept. It is a pity that he can only stay such a short time when he comes. Whenever he appears, he tells me of one thing or another that he has seen on the previous night, or on that same evening. "Just paint the scenes I describe to you"—this is what he said to me—"and you will have a very pretty picture-book." I have followed his injunction for many evenings. I could make up a new "Thousand and One Nights," in my own way, out of these pictures, but the number might be too great, after all. The pictures I have here given have not been chosen at random, but follow in their proper order, just as they were described to me. Some great gifted painter, or some poet or musician, may make something more of them if he likes; what I have given here are only hasty sketches, hurriedly put upon the paper, with some of my own thoughts interspersed; for the Moon did not come to me every evening—a cloud sometimes hid his face from me.
First Evening.
"Last night"—I am quoting the Moon's own words—"last night I was gliding through the cloudless Indian sky. My face was mirrored in the waters of the Ganges, and my beams strove to pierce through the thick intertwining boughs of the bananas, arching beneath me like the tortoise's shell. Forth from the thicket tripped a Hindoo maid, light as a gazelle, beautiful as Eve. Airy and ethereal as a vision, and yet sharply defined amid the surrounding shadows, stood this daughter of Hindostan: I could read on her delicate brow the thought that had brought her hither. The thorny creeping plants tore her sandals, but for all that she came rapidly forward. The deer that had come down to the river to quench their thirst, sprang by with a startled bound, for in her hand the maiden bore a lighted lamp. I could see the blood in her delicate finger tips, as she spread them for a screen before the dancing flame. She came down to the stream, and set the lamp upon the water, and let it float away. The flame flickered to and fro, and seemed ready to expire; but still the lamp burned on, and the girl's black sparkling eyes, half veiled behind their long silken lashes, followed it with a gaze of earnest intensity. She knew that if the lamp continued to burn so long as she could keep it in sight, her betrothed was still alive; but if the lamp was suddenly extinguished, he was dead. And the lamp burned bravely on, and she fell on her knees, and prayed. Near her in the grass lay a speckled snake, but she heeded it not—she thought only of Bramah and of her betrothed. 'He lives!' she shouted joyfully, 'he lives!' And from the mountains the echo came back upon her, 'he lives!'"
Second Evening.
"Yesterday," said the Moon to me, "I looked down upon a small courtyard surrounded on all sides by houses. In the courtyard sat a clucking hen with eleven chickens; and a pretty little girl was running and jumping around them. The hen was frightened, and screamed, and spread out her wings over the little brood. Then the girl's father came out and scolded her; and I glided away and thought no more of the matter.
"But this evening, only a few minutes ago, I looked down into the same courtyard. Everything was quiet. But presently the little girl came forth again, crept quietly to the hen-house, pushed back the bolt, and slipped into the apartment of the hen and chickens. They cried out loudly, and came fluttering down from their perches, and ran about in dismay, and the little girl ran after them. I saw it quite plainly, for I looked through a hole in the hen-house wall. I was angry with the wilful child, and felt glad when her father came out and scolded her more violently than yesterday, holding her roughly by the arm: she held down her head, and her blue eyes were full of large tears. 'What are you about here?' he asked. She wept and said, 'I wanted to kiss the hen and beg her pardon for frightening her yesterday; but I was afraid to tell you.'
"And the father kissed the innocent child's forehead, and I kissed her on the mouth and eyes."
Third Evening.
"In the narrow street round the corner yonder—it is so narrow that my beams can only glide for a minute along the walls of the house, but in that minute I see enough to learn what the world is made of—in that narrow street I saw a woman. Sixteen years ago that woman was a child, playing in the garden of the old parsonage, in the country. The hedges of rose-bush were old, and the flowers were faded. They straggled wild over the paths, and the ragged branches grew up among the boughs of the apple trees; here and there were a few roses still in bloom—not so fair as the queen of flowers generally appears, but still they had colour and scent too. The clergyman's little daughter appeared to me a far lovelier rose, as she sat on her stool under the straggling hedge, hugging and caressing her doll with the battered pasteboard cheeks.
"Ten years afterwards I saw her again. I beheld her in a splendid ball-room: she was the beautiful bride of a rich merchant. I rejoiced at her happiness, and sought her on calm quiet evenings—ah, nobody thinks of my clear eye and my silent glance! Alas! my rose ran wild, like the rose bushes in the garden of the parsonage. There are tragedies in every-day life, and to-night I saw the last act of one.
"She was lying in bed in a house in that narrow street: she was sick unto death, and the cruel landlord came up, and tore away the thin coverlet, her only protection against the cold. 'Get up!' said he; 'your face is enough to frighten one. Get up and dress yourself, give me money, or I'll turn you out into the street! Quick—get up!' She answered, 'Alas! death is gnawing at my heart. Let me rest.' But he forced her to get up and bathe her face, and put a wreath of roses in her hair; and he placed her in a chair at the window, with a candle burning beside her, and went away.
"I looked at her, and she was sitting motionless, with her hands in her lap. The wind caught the open window and shut it with a crash, so that a pane came clattering down in fragments; but still she never moved. The curtain caught fire, and the flames played about her face; and I saw that she was dead. There at the open window sat the dead woman, preaching a sermon against sin—my poor faded rose out of the parsonage garden!"
Fourth Evening.
"This evening I saw a German play acted," said the Moon. "It was in a little town. A stable had been turned into a theatre; that is to say, the stable had been left standing, and had been turned into private boxes, and all the timber work had been covered with coloured paper. A little iron chandelier hung beneath the ceiling, and that it might be made to disappear into the ceiling, as it does in great theatres, when the ting-ting of the prompter's bell is heard, a great inverted tub had been placed just above it.
"'Ting-ting!' and the little iron chandelier suddenly rose at least half a yard and disappeared in the tub; and that was the sign that the play was going to begin. A young nobleman and his lady, who happened to be passing through the little town, were present at the performance, and consequently the house was crowded. But under the chandelier was a vacant space like a little crater: not a single soul sat there, for the tallow was dropping, drip, drip! I saw everything, for it was so warm in there that every loophole had been opened. The male and female servants stood outside, peeping through the chinks, although a real policeman was inside, threatening them with a stick. Close by the orchestra could be seen the noble young couple in two old arm-chairs, which were usually occupied by his worship the mayor and his lady; but these latter were to-day obliged to content themselves with wooden forms, just as if they had been ordinary citizens; and the lady observed quietly to herself, 'One sees, now, that there is rank above rank;' and this incident gave an air of extra festivity to the whole proceedings. The chandelier gave little leaps, the crowd got their knuckles rapped, and I, the Moon, was present at the performance from beginning to end."
Fifth Evening.
"Yesterday," began the Moon, "I looked down upon the turmoil of Paris. My eye penetrated into an apartment of the Louvre. An old grandmother, poorly clad—she belonged to the working class—was following one of the under-servants into the great empty throne-room, for this was the apartment she wanted to see—that she was resolved to see; it had cost her many a little sacrifice, and many a coaxing word, to penetrate thus far. She folded her thin hands, and looked round with an air of reverence, as if she had been in a church.
"'Here it was!' she said, 'here!' And she approached the throne, from which hung the rich velvet fringed with gold lace. 'There,' she exclaimed, 'there!' and she knelt and kissed the purple carpet. I think she was actually weeping.
"'But it was not this very velvet!' observed the footman, and a smile played about his mouth. 'True, but it was this very place,' replied the woman, 'and it must have looked just like this.' 'It looked so, and yet it did not,' observed the man: 'the windows were beaten in, and the doors were off their hinges, and there was blood upon the floor.' 'But for all that you can say, my grandson died upon the throne of France. Died!' mournfully repeated the old woman. I do not think another word was spoken, and they soon quitted the hall. The evening twilight faded, and my light shone doubly vivid upon the rich velvet that covered the throne of France.
"Now, who do you think this poor woman was? Listen, I will tell you a story.
"It happened, in the Revolution of July, on the evening of the most brilliantly victorious day, when every house was a fortress, every window a breastwork. The people stormed the Tuileries. Even women and children were to be found among the combatants. They penetrated into the apartments and halls of the palace. A poor half-grown boy in a ragged blouse fought among the older insurgents. Mortally wounded with several bayonet thrusts, he sank down. This happened in the throne-room. They laid the bleeding youth upon the throne of France, wrapped the velvet around his wounds, and his blood streamed forth upon the imperial purple. There was a picture! the splendid hall, the fighting groups! A torn flag lay upon the ground, the tricolor was waving above the bayonets, and on the throne lay the poor lad with the pale glorified countenance, his eyes turned towards the sky, his limbs writhing in the death agony, his breast bare, and his poor tattered clothing half hidden by the rich velvet embroidered with silver lilies. At the boy's cradle a prophecy had been spoken: 'He will die on the throne of France!' The mother's heart dreamt of a second Napoleon.
"My beams have kissed the wreath of immortelles on his grave, and this night they kissed the forehead of the old grandame, while in a dream the picture floated before her which thou mayest draw—the poor boy on the throne of France."
Sixth Evening.
"I've been in Upsala," said the Moon: "I looked down upon the great plain covered with coarse grass, and upon the barren fields. I mirrored my face in the Tyris river, while the steamboat drove the fish into the rushes. Beneath me floated the waves, throwing long shadows on the so-called graves of Odin, Thor, and Friga. In the scanty turf that covers the hill-side names have been cut.[1] There is no monument here, no memorial on which the traveller can have his name carved, no rocky wall on whose surface he can get it painted; so visitors have the turf cut away for that purpose. The naked earth peers through in the form of great letters and names; these form a network over the whole hill. Here is an immortality, which lasts till the fresh turf grows!
[1] Travellers on the Continent have frequent opportunities of seeing how universally this custom prevails among travellers. In some places on the Rhine, pots of paint and brushes are offered by the natives to the traveller desirous of "immortalising" himself.
"Up on the hill stood a man, a poet. He emptied the mead horn with the broad silver rim, and murmured a name. He begged the winds not to betray him, but I heard the name. I knew it. A count's coronet sparkles above it, and therefore he did not speak it out. I smiled, for I knew that a poet's crown adorns his own name. The nobility of Eleanora d'Este is attached to the name of Tasso. And I also know where the Rose of Beauty blooms!"
Thus spake the Moon, and a cloud came between us. May no cloud separate the poet from the rose!
Seventh Evening.
"Along the margin of the shore stretches a forest of firs and beeches, and fresh and fragrant is this wood; hundreds of nightingales visit it every spring. Close beside it is the sea, the ever-changing sea, and between the two is placed the broad high-road. One carriage after another rolls over it; but I did not follow them, for my eye loves best to rest upon one point. A Hun's Grave[2] lies there, and the sloe and blackthorn grow luxuriantly among the stones. Here is true poetry in nature.
[2] Large mounds similar to the "barrows" found in Britain, are thus designated in Germany and the North.
"And how do you think men appreciate this poetry? I will tell you what I heard there last evening and during the night.
"First, two rich landed proprietors came driving by. 'Those are glorious trees!' said the first. 'Certainly; there are ten loads of firewood in each,' observed the other: 'it will be a hard winter, and last year we got fourteen dollars a load'—and they were gone. 'The road here is wretched,' observed another man who drove past. 'That's the fault of those horrible trees,' replied his neighbour; 'there is no free current of air; the wind can only come from the sea'—and they were gone. The stage coach went rattling past. All the passengers were asleep at this beautiful spot. The postillion blew his horn, but he only thought, 'I can play capitally. It sounds well here. I wonder if those in there like it?'—and the stage coach vanished. Then two young fellows came gallopping up on horseback. There's youth and spirit in the blood here! thought I; and, indeed, they looked with a smile at the moss-grown hill and thick forest. 'I should not dislike a walk here with the miller's Christine,' said one—and they flew past.
"The flowers scented the air; every breath of air was hushed: it seemed as if the sea were a part of the sky that stretched above the deep valley. A carriage rolled by. Six people were sitting in it. Four of them were asleep; the fifth was thinking of his new summer coat, which would suit him admirably; the sixth turned to the coachman and asked him if there were anything remarkable connected with yonder heap of stones. 'No,' replied the coachman, 'it's only a heap of stones; but the trees are remarkable.' 'How so?' 'Why, I'll tell you how they are very remarkable. You see, in winter, when the snow lies very deep, and has hidden the whole road so that nothing is to be seen, those trees serve me for a landmark. I steer by them, so as not to drive into the sea; and you see that is why the trees are remarkable.'
"Now came a painter. He spoke not a word, but his eyes sparkled. He began to whistle. At this the nightingales sang louder than ever. 'Hold your tongues!' he cried testily; and he made accurate notes of all the colours and transitions—blue, and lilac, and dark brown. 'That will make a beautiful picture,' he said. He took it in just as a mirror takes in a view; and as he worked he whistled a march of Rossini. And last of all came a poor girl. She laid aside the burden she carried, and sat down to rest upon the Hun's Grave. Her pale handsome face was bent in a listening attitude towards the forest. Her eyes brightened, she gazed earnestly at the sea and the sky, her hands were folded, and I think she prayed, 'Our Father.' She herself could not understand the feeling that swept through her, but I know that this minute, and the beautiful natural scene, will live within her memory for years, far more vividly and more truly than the painter could portray it with his colours on paper. My rays followed her till the morning dawn kissed her brow."
Eighth Evening.
Heavy clouds obscured the sky, and the Moon did not make his appearance at all. I stood in my little room, more lonely than ever, and looked up at the sky where he ought to have shown himself. My thoughts flew far away, up to my great friend, who every evening told me such pretty tales, and showed me pictures. Yes, he has had an experience indeed. He glided over the waters of the Deluge, and smiled on Noah's ark just as he lately glanced down upon me, and brought comfort and promise of a new world that was to spring forth from the old. When the Children of Israel sat weeping by the waters of Babylon, he glanced mournfully upon the willows where hung the silent harps. When Romeo climbed the balcony, and the promise of true love fluttered like a cherub toward heaven, the round Moon hung, half hidden among the dark cypresses, in the lucid air. He saw the captive giant at St. Helena, looking from the lonely rock across the wide ocean, while great thoughts swept through his soul. Ah! what tales the Moon can tell. Human life is like a story to him. To-night I shall not see thee again, old friend. To-night I can draw no picture of the memories of thy visit. And, as I looked dreamily towards the clouds, the sky became bright. There was a glancing light, and a beam from the Moon fell upon me. It vanished again, and dark clouds flew past; but still it was a greeting, a friendly good-night offered to me by the Moon.
Ninth Evening.
The air was clear again. Several evenings had passed, and the Moon was in the first quarter. Again he gave me an outline for a sketch. Listen to what he told me.
"I have followed the polar bird and the swimming whale to the eastern coast of Greenland. Gaunt ice-covered rocks and dark clouds hung over a valley, where dwarf willows and barberry bushes stood clothed in green. The blooming lychnis exhaled sweet odours. My light was faint, my face pale as the water lily that, torn from its stem, has been drifting for weeks with the tide. The crown-shaped Northern Light burned fiercely in the sky. Its ring was broad, and from its circumference the rays shot like whirling shafts of fire across the whole sky, flashing in changing radiance from green to red. The inhabitants of that icy region were assembling for dance and festivity; but, accustomed to this glorious spectacle, they scarcely deigned to glance at it. 'Let us leave the souls of the dead to their ball-play with the heads of the walruses,' they thought in their superstition, and they turned their whole attention to the song and dance. In the midst of the circle, and divested of his furry cloak, stood a Greenlander, with a small pipe, and he played and sang a song about catching the seal, and the chorus around chimed in with, 'Eia, Eia, Ah.' And in their white furs they danced about in the circle, till you might fancy it was a polar bear's ball.
"And now a Court of Judgment was opened. Those Greenlanders who had quarrelled stepped forward, and the offended person chanted forth the faults of his adversary in an extempore song, turning them sharply into ridicule, to the sound of the pipe and the measure of the dance. The defendant replied with satire as keen, while the audience laughed, and gave their verdict. The rocks heaved, the glaciers melted, and great masses of ice and snow came crashing down, shivering to fragments as they fell: it was a glorious Greenland summer night. A hundred paces away, under the open tent of hides, lay a sick man. Life still flowed through his warm blood, but still he was to die—he himself felt it, and all who stood round him knew it also; therefore his wife was already sowing round him the shroud of furs, that she might not afterwards be obliged to touch the dead body. And she asked, 'Wilt thou be buried on the rock, in the firm snow? I will deck the spot with thy kayak, and thy arrows, and the angekokk shall dance over it. Or wouldst thou rather be buried in the sea?' 'In the sea,' he whispered, and nodded with a mournful smile. 'Yes, it is a pleasant summer tent, the sea,' observed the wife. 'Thousands of seals sport there, the walrus shall lie at thy feet, and the hunt will be safe and merry!' And the yelling children tore the outspread hide from the window-hole, that the dead man might be carried to the ocean, the billowy ocean, that had given him food in life, and that now, in death, was to afford him a place of rest. For his monument, he had the floating, ever-changing icebergs, whereon the seal sleeps, while the storm bird flies round their gleaming summits!"
