The Snow Queen

8-10 min read
16 pages

The snow queen by Hans Christian Andersen, to read aloud. A splinter of mirror gets into Kai's eye, and Gerda walks a very long way for him.

A mirror was made once that showed everything good as small and mean, and everything bad as large and clear. It broke, and the pieces blew about the world, and some of them were no bigger than a grain of sand.

In a town there were two children, Kai and Gerda, who lived in attics opposite each other with a window box of roses between them, and were as close as brother and sister without being either.

One winter evening a splinter of that mirror went into Kai's eye, and another into his chest, and from that moment the roses looked ugly to him and Gerda looked silly and he could not say why.

He went out to sledge in the square. A great white sleigh came round twice and the third time he hooked his little sledge onto the back of it, and it went out of the town gate and did not stop.

The woman driving it was tall and white and made of the cold. She wrapped him in her fur and kissed his forehead, and after that he did not remember Gerda, or the attic, or anyone's name but his own.

In the spring they said in the town that Kai was drowned. Gerda did not believe it. She put on her new red shoes and went down to the river and asked it whether it had taken him, and offered it the shoes to give him back.

The river took the shoes and gave her a boat instead, and the boat carried her away downstream.

She came to an old woman's garden where it was always summer, and the old woman combed her hair with a golden comb, and combing it made her forget what she had come for, and she stayed there among the flowers for a long time.

What woke her was a rose. There were no roses in that garden — the old woman had made them sink into the ground — but one came up, and Gerda saw it and remembered everything at once, and went out through the gate barefoot.

A crow told her of a prince and princess in the next country, and she went there and woke them in the night, and they gave her boots and a muff and a gold carriage, and sent her on north.

Robbers took the carriage in the forest. The robber girl, who was small and fierce and did exactly as she liked, decided not to let her mother kill Gerda, and put her on a reindeer instead and told her the way.

The reindeer carried her to the edge of the country where the snow does not stop. A Lapp woman, and then a Finn woman, gave her food and told her where the palace was, and would give her nothing else. «She has more strength than we could lend her,» said the Finn woman. «Don't you see how people and animals serve her? She is barefoot.»

So she walked the last of it alone, through the snowflakes that are alive and go in front of you, and she came to the palace, which had walls of drifted snow and windows of cutting wind and a hall a hundred miles long.

Kai was sitting in the middle of the frozen lake with flat pieces of ice, arranging them into words. He was trying to make the word ETERNITY and he had been trying for a long time, and he was almost black with cold and did not know it.

Gerda ran to him and put her arms round him, and he sat still. So she cried, and her tears fell on his chest and went through to his heart and melted the splinter there, and he looked up and saw her, and then he cried too, and the splinter came out of his eye with the tears.

The pieces of ice got up and danced by themselves, and when they stopped they were lying in the word he had never managed. The two of them walked out of the palace and south, hand in hand, and the further they went the greener it got, and when they came at last to the attic and the window box, the roses were in flower and they were both grown up.

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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.

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The Snow Queen

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