"The Swineherd" ("Svindrengen") and "The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep" ("Hyrdinden og Skorsteensfeiren") are among Andersen's best-known fairy tales, and when we reread them, they seem so natural. They simply could not be different! Is it just habit, or is it because they are so well narrated, with such power and energy?

What does this mean? After all, they are sad stories; you'd have to look long and hard to find such embarrassing love stories. And yet, they are so funny! How can this be? If you were to ask why Andersen wrote them, there are so many possible answers. For example, you could try to find out whether the poor man had recently been in love and whether, in that case, he had fared as badly as the men in the fairy tales. You will, of course, find that the poet had been unhappy in love, but this doesn't really tell us very much. The interesting thing, after all, is not that the poet fell in love and was unsuccessful in his love, but that he wrote the fairy tales. What actually happens in them? What is it that the poet does with his sad experiences in love when he uses them as a basis for his writing?

The fairy tales just mentioned were written five years apart, but when we hear them one after the other, we are struck by how closely they resemble each other. In a way we are being told the same story. This is true for a great number of tales written by Andersen during the same period, that is, within ten years' time: "The Steadfast Tin Soldier" ("Den standhaftige Tinsoldat") is from 1838, "The Swineherd" is from 1839, and "The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep" is from 1844. Between the latter two comes the long fairy tale "The Nightingale" ("Nattergalen"), which to a large degree is also "the same story" and which therefore also belongs to the group of stories we are trying to understand here.

After "The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep" we have "The Bell" ("Klokken") from 1845, "The Shadow" ("Skyggen") from 1846, and "The Collars" ("Flipperne") from 1848. Within the same ten-year period Andersen also wrote many other things, but there is a close connection between the fairy tales I have just mentioned. In their own way, they all work with the same story—the same problem of love, of woman, of sexuality, and of the importance of money in the game of love. We cannot deal with all of them here, but I will try to show some of their common features. I will also try to show that there is a gradual change in the situation. For although it is the same story that continues to be repeated, something happens to it—little by little, something changes.

If we try to determine what it is that changes and how it changes, then we are on our way toward learning why Andersen wrote these fairy tales. His negative experiences continue to play freely in his mind; they continue to torment and torture him until he gets them worked out and put into a meaningful context. The fairy tales are a direct expression of this dogged and ardent endeavor. When Andersen writes his fairy tales, he is laboring with his mind, working on and changing his consciousness. Naturally, this process also leads him to pass quite a few judgments on his surroundings, for his experiences do, after all, stem from his confrontations with these surroundings. Thus it is not so strange that the fairy tales are full of derision and biting satire toward the bourgeois world, to which he himself belonged but in which he never felt quite at home. He was a son of the proletariat as well as a refined man of the bourgeoisie; he knew poverty, but when he died, he was a millionaire with decorations and titles. Despite this, he never felt really accepted. He was grateful for his successes but always furious that, in spite of them, somehow he was not wholly recognized as the genius he was.

"The Swineherd" is full of scorching satirical remarks on life at the emperor's court—that is, among society's highest strata. And yet, this is not the main point. The core of the action is a story of revenge. Let's examine it more closely.

The court in "The Swineherd" is characterized by superficial mannerisms, power struggles, double standards, and class-determined tyranny. When the ladies-in-waiting speak French, each one worse than the other, when the princess's musical knowledge encompasses one melody and her performance at the piano is on the one-finger level, then these are signs of that same superficial mannerism that causes the court to prefer pot and rattle to rose and nightingale.

The emperor is tyrannized by the capricious princess; he will tolerate quite a lot before he gets so angry that she will feel the slipper. A power struggle, in other words. When the princess orders her ladies-in-waiting to kiss the swineherd, they resist, but the princess reminds them that she is their employer, after all. As swineherd, the prince must be content with a wretched little room by the pigsty. In other words, class difference and class tyranny.

When the lady-in-waiting will not repeat the naughty swineherd's price for the rattle, the princess says she may whisper it. The princess doesn't really mind paying the swineherd's exorbitant prices as long as no one finds out. "I am the emperor's daughter!" she actually says (p. 196).¹ In other words, a double standard. To be sure, the framework around all this is the code that Andersen got from the child's fairy tale, but he is only pretending—we must listen beyond the seemingly childish features and understand, among other things, that one hundred kisses from the princess is, within such a fairy tale, quite the same thing as going to bed with her outside the fairy tale, in adult reality.

This is the milieu, but what, then, is the plot? It is presented in the form of opposites: the princess's rejection of the prince opposite her acceptance of his opposite, the swineherd; her rejection of his offer of true love, the rose and the nightingale, opposite her acceptance of sexuality as something to be bought and sold; the rejected prince opposite the revenging prince; the arrogant princess opposite the humiliated princess; the henpecked emperor opposite the disciplining father. The central point of all these opposites in the action is where the prince disguises himself as a swineherd. This has its own opposite in the scene at the very end, when he sheds his lowly disguise and again appears as the handsome prince that he is.

The whole world here is two-faced and divided. The two gifts that the prince sends to the princess when he proposes are the rose and the nightingale. The rose's opposite is the pot; the nightingale's opposite is the rattle. What does this mean? The remarkable thing about the prince and the princess is that his father is dead and her mother is dead. Perhaps this could be taken to mean that they should unite and together form a new father-mother pair. The prince got the rose from his father's grave—it stands for true love—and this is why it blooms so rarely, only once every five years. It can, however, perform miracles: its fragrance can make anyone who smells it forget all his sorrows and troubles. We don't learn very much about the nightingale, but it knows all the lovely melodies ever composed, as opposed to the princess, who knows only a single one. The rose and the nightingale are real and genuine, but the princess lives in a world of pretension and fads. To her, something is good when it is "interesting" and "artificial." This is why she plays children's games with the ladies-in-waiting, who of course don't really have anything to do, as opposed to the swineherd, who didn't let a day go by without accomplishing something. They play house; you leave the room and get all dressed up and come back and make yourself interesting by pretending to be someone you're not. What makes the game interesting is the piquancy and dishonesty, the thrill of merely acting out parts. When the prince's honest love is turned away, he seeks his revenge by acting the way the court does. He plays a part; he dresses as the opposite of what he is. He appears as his own shadow, so to speak.

These patterns are paralleled by the work given him by the emperor: tending the pigs. The pigs are symbols of drives in their base and misshapen forms. The emperor, poor man, says of the pigs: "We have such an awful lot of them" (p. 194). The emperor himself is not depraved, even though he is cowed by the infantile and demonic princess. When he hears the nightingale the prince has sent, he relives his feelings for his deceased wife, the dead queen, and he cries honest tears, or, in the language of fairy tales, he "cried like a baby" (p. 194). Since he is doing the crying, he cannot at the same time be used to inform the reader of why he is crying—he is too moved for that—but we do have very handy another old gentleman, "an old courtier," and he says that the nightingale reminds him of the late empress's music box. This is precisely where we can see how complex the fairy tales really are. On the one hand, the courtier is employed to express the emperor's feelings. On the other hand, satire creeps in here, too, for the fact that the courtier thinks that the living nightingale sounds like the artificial music box is, of course, a reflection of the stupidity of the court. The difference between them will be elaborated on later in the fairy tale "The Nightingale."

What is ingenious and difficult in the fairy tale code is, generally, that it allows the presence of many different viewpoints all at once, even in one and the same sentence, in one and the same remark. Seen from the outside, the court is merely ridiculous, but for those inside and dependent upon it, it is not so amusing; to them, the stupid appears demonic, like a diabolical degradation of life's values. In short, it is like a piggish world, and if you care to get along in it, you must make yourself into a pig, or into a demon, like the shadow in the fairy tale that most directly deals with the demonic. In "The Swineherd" it is still one and the same person, the prince, who assumes both the positive and the negative figure; he is and remains a prince, a positive, "a prince whom everyone thought was a swineherd," the narrator assures us (p. 196).

In "The Shadow" they are, however, separated into the scholar, who perishes, and the shadow, who is successful—like Andersen himself, one might say. While the princess in "The Swineherd" is and remains a little pig, there are two aristocratic women in "The Shadow"—namely the positive, which is poetry, and the negative, a demonic princess who can so easily marry the shadow. They share the ability to see through the roles in the world around them and see all the bad and evil behind them, even in children. This is, however, all they can see. It is interesting that the scholar, whom they kill, is not presented as merely an innocent victim, for he is not entirely in the right. He knows a lot, but he understands far too little. Thus there is a giant leap from "The Swineherd" to "The Shadow." The former story is in total sympathy with the prince and puts the entire blame on the princess, who must in the end suffer the entire punishment: to be excluded from both the emperor's realm and from that of the prince. In the latter story no one is right, and there is nothing but disharmonious opposites. Between "The Swineherd" and "The Shadow" there are also almost ten years of literary activity.

One step along the way is "The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep," and another and higher plateau is reached in "The Nightingale." The nightingale is the positive counterpart to the shadow. In "The Nightingale," a remarkable thing happens: the positive forces—which in the previous fairy tales are associated with woman and which are so terribly difficult to release because woman is in turn bound by many other negative forces: above all, sexuality, economy, and the class difference—are separated from the feminine and presented in an entirely abstract form, namely as the nightingale itself….

In "The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep," this separation has not yet occurred, but the attitude toward it is already completely different from that of "The Swineherd." There are, as stated earlier, five years between them. In "The Swineherd," the narrator simply sides with the prince throughout; everything is seen from the prince's perspective, at least where matters of judgment are concerned. In "The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep," the narrator stands on the outside. He can do so because this fairy tale is staged in a world of things, not people. With incredible artistic economy, the things are equipped with exactly the qualities they must have in order to express some very definite human qualities, no more and no less.

In "The Swineherd," we saw that the stupid world is a demonic world to those who are forced to live on its terms. The same is true for the world in "The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep." Here there are tyrants and authority figures, but their status is remarkably ambiguous. The main characters are the two young procelain people, who aren't real people yet but rather artificial. When they undertake the most daring expedition of their lives, out into reality, and the shepherdess is overwhelmed by it, she cries "so hard that the gold in her waistband began to chip" (p. 300). The artificial, the porcelain role, is beginning to fall off her. The chimney sweep, on the other hand, fares better from the beginning; this is evident from his profession as chimney sweep. He has the ladder, and he has the necessary courage for the dark, narrow road out into the real world.

But where do they really come from? What is it that they must escape from? Two forces are against them: the old Chinese mandarin and "Mr. Goat-legged Commanding-General-Private-War-Sergeant." Who are they? To begin with, they are typically characters who cannot move. The Chinese mandarin is rounded at the bottom, and the goat is carved in the wood of the old cabinet. Like the whole room, the cabinet is "an heirloom that had been in the family for four generations" (p. 297). This is the inherited world, the given society with all its roles and rules.

Within this world it is the Chinese mandarin who rules. He is quite cynical. The shepherdess doesn't want to marry the goat; she has heard that he has eleven porcelain wives in the cabinet already! The Chinese mandarin's justification for the marriage is purely economical: "You will have a husband who I am almost certain is made of mahogany" (p. 298). Mahogany was the preferred wood for fine furniture at that time, a sign of affluence, in other words. However, a mahogany man was—in the slang of those days—a dandy, a fop, a bon vivant, so it is probably correct that he has girls by the dozen. Here again, we see Andersen's artistic economy; in the world of human beings, the explanation for a total of twelve porcelain girls is, of course, found in the fact that you could buy such table decorations and knickknacks by the dozen, just like the silverware in the cabinet. Again, several worlds are layered on top of each other, so to speak. Another example of economy is that the Chinese mandarin and the goat cannot go anywhere; they are completely bound to this world of convention in which young girls are married off for money and in which it is considered comme il faut that the rich man should keep a harem, hidden in the cabinet. When the shepherdess and the chimney sweep are on the run, they jump into the drawer by the window. At the window, we are told, there was a seat where you could sit with your sewing and have enough light for your work and look out on the street at the same time, and the empty space below had thriftily been filled with a drawer for the childrens' toys. Now we are in the world of toys, and plays are being performed. The audience is a deck of cards, and the knaves show that they have heads at both ends—again there is economy in the symbolism. It isn't so good to have a head in both ends, to turn love into economy rather than passion. The play being performed in the drawer is, of course, about love having to become tragedy in this world. The shepherdess cannot bear it, so they continue their flight.

It occurs to the chimney sweep that they might find refuge in the potpourri jar. It is full of salted, dried rose leaves, so they could lie on a bed of roses and throw salt in the eyes of the others. What does this mean? Perhaps it means that you will remain within the real world but relate to it ironically (i.e., the salt) and otherwise enjoy as best you can your lusts and passions—the rose leaves. However, the shepherdess knows there is a connection between the potpourri jar and the Chinese mandarin; they were once engaged, she says. The only solution is to make a complete break with this world, which they try to do but with no success. To be sure, the shepherdess manages the dangerous journey through the black stove and the chimney, but faced with the real, wide world, she cannot bear it any longer: "The world is much too big," she says, as if it isn't she who is too little (p. 300). The chimney sweep cannot help but feel a bit peeved, but her mind is made up and she even lies a little: "I followed you out into the wide world, now you must take me home, if you care for me at all" (p. 300). That isn't right; she was the one who first wanted to see the big wide world, and the chimney sweep had not felt too confident that she could handle it. He was right.

The love between them is also a bit questionable. Actually, their passion does not seem to be too fiery. The reason is said to be that "they had been standing close together, for that was the way they had always been placed; and so they thought it was natural that they be engaged" (p. 298). This is then followed by some bourgeois reasoning: they were both young and made from the same clay—that is, of the same class—but the narrator immediately manages to inject another point of view as well: they were "both breakable" (p. 298).

The Chinese mandarin really has no other power over the shepherdess than what she herself will grant him. He has insisted that he is her grandfather, "although he couldn't really prove that he was related to her at all" (p. 298). She proves it to him when she, frightened by reality, finds her way back to the little table beneath the mirror, to that narrow world in which the mirror reflects only one's own role, one's outer costume. She proves it the moment she sees the Chinese mandarin lying on the floor. One should expect her to be happy to see the tyrant toppled, but her first thought is to have him riveted, and the next one is how much it might cost. She has a housewife's tone of voice already, and the lovers have their first row: "Don't carry on so," he says (p. 300). Coincidences keep them together now: the Chinese mandarin gets a rivet in his neck and can no longer nod to Mr. Goatlegged. So they stay together. But unlike the good old fairy tales in which the lovers live happily ever after, this one says that "they loved each other until they broke" (p. 301)—which is to say that they never became real people.

The Chinese mandarin represents society's norms, but what does the goat with the difficult name represent? The fairy tale does not say in so many words, for that is not possible in this language. However, it can still be conveyed in code language. The narrator shows disdain over the fact that Mr. Goat-legged is there. He describes him: he has horns on his forehead and the legs of a goat, and we learn that he keeps a harem "and is the most amazing figure in the central panel" (p. 297). Mr. Goat-legged is sexuality incarnate, that which remains when love becomes merchandise. Additional evidence of this interpretation is found in Andersen's draft, in which the "War-Sergeant" was initially called "the satyre."

Thus there are at least two things that will prevent true love from being realized. One is sexuality as naked, urgent drive, a War-Sergeant who will not be ignored—the drive is there, and somehow it must be included in the world, for one cannot be rid of it. The other hindrance is society's narrow rules and conventions, and these appear above all as money matters, as economy. In practice, these things are interwoven, for the realization of love in an acceptable manner would be synonymous with marriage. A precondition for marriage was, however, an acceptable economy and a steady income, and in order to provide himself with this, Andersen had to make himself a successful author first. Therefore the entire matter is woven into an almost Gordian knot; the precondition for success as an author was inspiration, and it, in turn, demanded an emotional life and thus a relationship to women. These are the interrelationships that the texts seek to untangle….

Notes

¹ Page citations, unless otherwise indicated, are to Hans Christian Andersen, The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, translated by Erik Christian Haugaard (New York: Doubleday, 1974).—TRANS.