Thumbelina

8-10 min read
16 pages

Thumbelina by Hans Christian Andersen, to read aloud. She is no taller than a thumb, and everyone who finds her decides who she should marry.

A woman who wanted a child was given a barleycorn by a witch and told to plant it in a flowerpot. It came up as a tulip, and when the petals opened there was a girl sitting in the middle of it, no taller than a thumb.

She slept in a walnut shell with a rose petal over her, and in the daytime she sailed a tulip leaf across a plate of water, rowing with two white horsehairs.

One night a toad came in at the window and looked at her asleep. «She'll do for my son,» said the toad, and carried the walnut shell out and put it on a lily pad in the middle of the stream, where she could not possibly get off.

The fish in the stream had heard the toads talking and did not care for the plan. They bit through the stalk of the lily pad, and it floated away downstream with Thumbelina standing on it, and she went past towns and out into the country.

A cockchafer picked her off the leaf and carried her up into a tree, and thought her lovely — until his friends came and said she had only two legs and no feelers and was thin at the waist. So he put her down on a daisy and flew off, and she sat there and cried.

She lived all summer in the wood on her own. She drank dew off the leaves in the morning and ate honey out of the flowers, and she was warm, and she managed.

Then came autumn, and then the snow. Every flower she had lived in was dead and brown. She wrapped herself in a dry leaf and it did not help.

At the edge of a cornfield she found a door in the ground, and a field mouse looked out and took her in — a warm kitchen, corn in the store room, and a place by the fire.

«There is a neighbour,» said the field mouse a few weeks later. «A mole. Very rich. Very well kept rooms. He is blind, so don't mention colours. You could do a great deal worse.»

In the mole's long dark passage Thumbelina found a swallow lying with his wings against his sides, quite still and cold. The mole kicked him as they went by and said something about birds being useless.

She went back that night with a blanket of hay and put it over him, and laid her head on his chest, and heard his heart going — very slowly, but going. She kept him warm all winter and told nobody.

In the spring he sat up. «Come with me,» said the swallow. «I'm going south.» But she thought of the field mouse, who had fed her all winter, and she said no, and he flew out of the hole alone.

So the wedding was arranged, and the corn was ground for the wedding bread, and Thumbelina was allowed out one last time to look at the sun before going underground for good.

She stood in the stubble with her arms up and said goodbye to the sky. And out of it came the swallow.

«Sit on my back,» he said. «Hold on to the feathers.» And she did, and they went south over the mountains, over the snow, to a country of white marble and blue water, where he put her down on the broadest petal of the broadest flower.

In the flower there was a small man with wings, about her own height, and he had a crown and he was the flower's spirit, and he was as surprised as she was. Nobody there told her what she had too few of or too many. She was given wings of her own, and a name in that country — Maia — and the swallow sang about it on the roof of the house all summer.

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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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Thumbelina

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