The Little Mermaid
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Wikipedia-Article "The Little Mermaid"
- For the 1989 Disney animated movie, see The Little Mermaid (film).
The Little Mermaid (Den lille havfrue) is a fairy tale about a young mermaid and her love for a human prince. The story was written by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, and was first published in 1836.
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Story overview
The Little Mermaid lives at the sea bottom with her father the Sea King, her grandmother, and her 5 older sisters, born one year apart. When a mermaid turns 15, she may swim to the surface to watch the world above, and as the sisters become old enough one of them visits the surface every year. As each of them returns the Little Mermaid listens longingly to their descriptions of the surface and human beings.
When the Little Mermaid turns 15 she ventures to the surface. She sees a ship with a beautiful prince, and falls in love with him. There comes a great storm, and the prince almost drowns, but the Little Mermaid saves him and she delivers him to the shore near a temple. But the prince never sees her because he is unconscious.
The Little Mermaid spends her days longing for the prince, and longing to have a soul and eternal afterlife like humans do, instead of turning to foam when she dies. At last she goes to the Sea Witch, who sells her a potion that gives her legs, in exchange for her tongue, because the Little Mermaid has the prettiest voice in the world. But drinking the potion will feel like a sword being passed through her, and walking on her feet will feel like walking on knives. And she will only get a soul if the prince loves her and marries her; otherwise, the day the prince marries another woman, the Little Mermaid will die broken-hearted and turn to foam.
She drinks the potion and meets the prince, who is attracted to her beauty and grace. She is mute so she cannot talk to him, but he loves her like one loves a little child.
One day the prince sails to a neighboring king to find a bride. It turns out that the neighboring king's daughter is the woman from the temple who found the prince after the Little Mermaid delivered the prince to the shore. The prince remembers and loves her, and soon they announce the wedding.
The Little Mermaid's heart breaks, and she despairs as the wedding night comes. But her sisters come to her, and give her a knife which they got from the Sea Witch in exchange for their hair. If the Little Mermaid slays the prince with the knife she will become a mermaid again and be able to live with them for the rest of her life.
But the Little Mermaid cannot bring herself to kill the sleeping prince lying with his bride, and instead throws herself into the sea and dissolves into foam. But she doesn't die; she becomes a daughter of the air, a being invisible to humans. By striving for 300 years to do good deeds she will earn a soul and float into the Kingdom of Heaven. But for every good child a daughter of the air finds she subtracts a year, and for every naughty or wicked child she weeps, and adds a day for every tear.
Adaptations of The Little Mermaid
One of the earliest animated films, based on the fairytale, was the Soviet one, entitled Rusalochka (The Little Mermaid), which was released in 1968. In 1976 a live action film, entitled Rusalochka, a joint production by the USSR and Bulgaria, was released.
In 1989 the fairytale was made into an animated movie by the Walt Disney Company; see The Little Mermaid (movie).
The 1984 Ron Howard film Splash starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah was loosely based on the same premise.
In 2003-2004, Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch aired in TVTokyo. It was inspired by The Little Mermaid.
In fact, the story of The Little Mermaid has long been a favorite in Japan and has been adapted into anime more than most other Western fairy tales. The first Japanese anime adaptation of the story was the 1970 TV series "Maho no Mako-chan" (Magical Mako-chan). This series, produced by Toei Animation and directed by Yugo Serikawa, kept the basics of the tale but moved the setting to modern-day Japan. The mermaid, Mako, attends high school while she waits for another meeting with her beloved Akira, and also helps those in need with her magical pendant, the "Mermaid's Tear." "Maho no Mako-chan" is also considered an early example of "maho shojo" or "magical girl" anime. It achieved some popularity in Europe as well as Japan but was never released in English.
The second anime adaptation of The Little Mermaid was also produced by Toei. In 1975, the studio released the feature-length production "Anderusen Dowa Ningyo Hime" (Andersen's Story: The Mermaid Princess), directed by Tomoharu Katsumata. The mermaid was drawn as a blonde in this version and given the name Marina. This film was dubbed into English and given a home video release in the United States in 1979. Purists often hold it in higher regard than the Disney version, since it hemmed closer to the original tale than did Disney's version and didn't attempt to sugarcoat the tragic ending (although, like Disney, Toei did add a comic-relief sidekick, in this case the dolphin Fritz).
In the wake of the success of Disney's version, a third anime take on the story surfaced in 1991, with the 26-episode TV series "Ningyo Hime Marina no Boken" (The Adventures of Mermaid Princess Marina). This series, a Japanese/South Korean coproduction directed by Takehiro Miyano and Yun Suk Hwa, also depicted the mermaid as a blonde and named her Marina. The series aired originally in Japan on Fuji TV from February to July of 1991 and was brought to the U.S. that fall under the title "Saban's Adventures of the Little Mermaid." This series added a new ingredient to the mix: a magical whistle, given to Marina by the Sea Witch, which enabled her to shift back and forth between human and mermaid form when she blew it. It didn't come anywhere near to the popularity of Disney's version and disappeared after a brief run in Saturday-morning syndication.
The Royal Danish Ballet commissioned Russian American composer Lera Auerbach to create a modern rendition of this fairy tale. It was choreographed by John Neumeier and premiered on April 15, 2005.
The Little Mermaid statue
A statue of the Little Mermaid sits on a rock in the Copenhagen harbour (at 55°41′34.39″N, 12°35′56.59″E). This small and unimposing statue is a symbol of Copenhagen, and a major tourist attraction.
The statue was commissioned in 1909 by Carl Jacobsen, son of the founder of Carlsberg, after he had been fascinated by a ballet about the fairytale. The sculptor Edward Eriksen created the statue, which was unveiled on 23 August 1913. He used his wife Eline Eriksen as model.
This statue has been vandalised several times, but has each time been restored. On 24 April 1964, the statue's head was sawn off and stolen by politically oriented artists of the situationist movement, amongst them Jørgen Nash. The head was never recovered and a new head was produced and placed on the statue. On 22 July 1984, her right arm was sawn off. The arm was returned 2 days later by two embarrassed young vandals. In 1990 another attempt was made to cut her head off, which resulted in an 18 cm deep cut in the neck. On 6 January 1998, she lost her head for the second time, the head was returned anonymously to a nearby TV station, and on 4 February the head was back on. Red painted has been thrown on it several times, including one humorous episode in 1961 where somebody painted it's hair red and painted a bra on her, and on 11 September 2003, the statue was blasted off her rock, possibly with dynamite. It was also draped in a burka as a statement about Turkey being the European Union.
How small she is... is a typical reaction from tourists visiting for the first time. The Little Mermaid statue is only 1.25 meter high and weighs about 175 kg.
There are similarities between the Little Mermaid statue and the Pania of the Reef statue on the beachfront at Napier in New Zealand, and some similarities in the Little Mermaid and Pania tales.
An undamaged copy of the statue is located in Solvang, California.
External links
- The Little Mermaid at the Internet Movie Database
- The Little Mermaid. Photo gallery from Denmark. Hans Christian Andersen Information
- The Little Mermaid Full text of H. P. Paull's translation (1836)
- The Annotated Little Mermaid by Heidi Anne Heiner, Paull's translation, with scholarly annotations, scans from six illustrated editions, bibliography.
- Little Mermaid Statue thumbnail photo gallery, from Mermaids on the Web