The Little Mermaid

8-10 min read
16 pages

The little mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, to read aloud. She trades her voice for legs, and Andersen never gives her a name.

Far out at sea, where the water is as blue as cornflowers and deeper than any anchor rope, the sea king lived with his six daughters. The youngest was the quietest of them, and she had no name that anyone in the story ever says.

Each daughter was allowed up to the surface on her fifteenth birthday. Her sisters came back with stories about church bells and ships and towns, and she waited five years to see it herself.

On her birthday she rose in the evening and came up beside a great ship with lamps along its rails, and through a window she saw a young prince with dark eyes, on the day he turned sixteen.

Then the wind changed. The ship broke up before midnight, and she held the prince's head above water all night, and at dawn she left him on the sand where the people from a convent would find him. He never knew she was there.

After that the sea was not enough. She asked her grandmother whether people live forever, and was told that they die sooner than mermaids, but that each of them has a soul that goes on, and mermaids have three hundred years and then become foam.

So she went to the sea witch, who lived past the whirlpools where the polyps grow.

«I know what you want,» said the witch. «Legs. It can be done. You will walk as though on knives, every step, for the rest of your life. And I will take your voice for the doing of it — the tongue out of your mouth.»

«And if he marries somebody else,» said the witch, «on the first morning after, your heart will break and you will be foam on the water. Do you still want it?» She said yes.

She drank it at the foot of the palace stairs and it went through her like a sword, and she woke on the sand in the sun with two legs and no voice at all.

The prince found her there. He took her to the castle and she was given silk to wear, and she danced for them all although each step was as the witch had promised, and she smiled through it, because there was nothing else she could do with her face.

He liked her enormously. He called her his little foundling and let her sleep on a cushion outside his door. He told her about the girl who had saved his life on the beach, whom he would love as long as he lived and could never find.

Then the ships were dressed for a wedding. The neighbouring king's daughter had been found, and she was the girl from the convent, and the prince was certain of it, and he was radiantly happy, and he told his little foundling first.

That night the mermaid stood at the rail of the wedding ship. Her sisters came up out of the black water with their hair cut short.

«We sold it to the witch,» they said. «Here.» It was a knife. «Before sunrise. His blood on your feet, and they grow together again, and you come home.»

She took it and went in and looked at him asleep with his wife's head on his arm. Then she came back out and threw the knife into the sea, where it made a small white splash, and she watched the east go grey.

When the sun came up she leaned over the rail and let herself fall — and she did not become foam. She felt herself lifted instead, into the warm air, among transparent shapes she could not quite see. «The daughters of the air,» said one. «Three hundred years of doing good, and we earn a soul the same as they do.» She had no voice to answer with, but she had never needed one to decide anything.

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Text source: Plot by Hans Christian Andersen, public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

The Little Mermaid characters

The little mermaid: The youngest of six sisters, and she has no name. Andersen never gives her one; the names people remember come from film, not from the story.
The sea king: Her father, a widower with six daughters and a household run by his mother.
The grandmother: Explains what a human soul is and why mermaids, who live three hundred years, do not have one. Everything the mermaid does afterwards follows from that conversation.
The sea witch: Takes the mermaid's tongue as payment and warns her exactly what the bargain costs. She keeps her word; nobody is tricked.
The prince: Never learns who saved him from the sea, and marries the girl he believes did. He is not cruel — he is simply mistaken, and nobody tells him.
The sisters: Cut off their hair to buy a knife from the witch, so the mermaid can save herself by killing him. She throws it into the sea instead.

Where «The Little Mermaid» comes from and who wrote it down

What is a fairy tale? Features and structure

The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid characters

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