H.C. Andersen’s Winter Tale (7): What Happened at the Snow Queen Castle and Elsewhere

We’re almost there and so is Gerda, so we sneak into the Snow Queen’s castle to see how things look from the inside.
And they don’t look very good, one might say.

There was never any real joy here, not so much as a little dance for the polar bears, for which the wind could have supplied the music as the fears walked on their hind legs to display their good breeding. Not even a little card game with paw-slapping and back-smacking, or just a cozy little coffee klatch where the white fox vixens could gossip.

Concept art for the ice castle in Disney’s Frozen

The rooms are beautiful but vast and empty, everything looks the same and, as we have left Kai sleeping at the Queen’s feet, we see that they don’t have any more fun than that. When the Queen is at home, she sits at the centre of a vast frozen lake that has cracked into a thousand pieces, a lake that she calls The Mirror of Reason, and all those pieces look exactly the same. The wonder and magic Kai felt for the snowflakes is completely gone and has left the place to apathy and depression.

Turned so blue by cold that he’s almost black, and so dull by the Queen’s kisses that he’s almost dead, Kai is playing with those fragments, trying to arrange them into a design he has clear in his mind, but apparently unable to perform. The Queen has in fact dared him to spell out a particular word and, should he succeed, he will give him back his freedom and the whole world. And a pair of skates, for good measure. The word is Eternity.

While the Queen is off to warm countries, to take a peek at the Black Cauldrons of Etna and Vesuvius because who doesn’t like a trip to Italy, little Gerda arrives at the castle and finds Kai cold and distant.

Illustration by Vladyslav Yerko

For the second time in the story, she’s able to work her charm through her tears: she kisses Kai’s cheeks bringing back warmth to it and the icicles start dancing around them until they collapse and spontaneously form the work Kai has been trying to spell out for so long.

They stroll out of the castle, hand in hand, and the sun is warm: spring comes back to the world and they retrace Gerda’s steps back until they’re home.

There they sat, and they were grown-ups and children at the same time, children at heart.
And it was summer – warm, wonderful summer.

Illustration by Kai Nielsen