What the Wind Tells: Stories 1858–59
1
Andersen knew the stories written in the two years following his return from England marked an innovative departure from his previous work, demanding refinements in technique and style to meet the challenge of their audacious subjects. He would always believe that the best among them equalled (to say the least) his most celebrated earlier productions, and was irritated by the conservatism of critics and some readers, who would insist on the superiority of the earlier Andersen – the one they knew – without always remembering correctly what was written when!1 Four stories in particular from 1858 and 1859 are particularly rewarding, and they have enough differences from their predecessors and enough in common with each other to be placed in the same chapter. All are overtly Denmark-orientated (indeed three out of the four take us firmly to Jutland) but it is a Denmark which occupies a visible, not to say prominent, place on the historical-cultural European map (stretching back into the first millennium, and further if one thinks in terms of natural life). The tales we are concerned with here then are ‘Dynd-Kongens Datter’ (‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’, to call it for the time being by its usual English name, published in Nye Eventyr og Historier. Anden Samling, New Fairy-Tales and Stories. Second Collection, 15 May 1858); ‘Vinden fortæller om Valdemar Daae og hans Døttre’ (‘The Wind tells of Valdemar Daae and his Daughters’) and ‘Anne Lisbeth’ (both in Nye Eventyr og Historier, Tredje Samling, New Fairy-Tales and Stories. Third Collection published 24 March 1859) and – the fruit of his tour of Jutland, especially its northern parts, 20 June–12 September 1859) – ‘En Historie fra Klitterne’ (‘A Story from the Dunes’, in Nye Eventyr og Historier. Fjerde Samling, New Fairy-Tales and Stories. Fourth Collection, 9 December 1859).
Andersen – for whom the composition of his surely most ambitious story to date, ‘The Snow Queen’, had flowed along with miraculous-seeming ease – found the writing of these tales difficult; unprecedentedly so. ‘The basic story – as has been the case with all my fairy tales –,’ he confessed of ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’, ‘occurred to me in a single moment, in the same way as a well-known melody or song can sometimes come into one's mind.’2 He did as he usually did, wrote it down, then worked on it, ‘but even after the third version lay before me,’ he could not feel satisfaction. In this instance, not with the others, he wanted to do more reading round and research to see the story in the depth it needed and deserved, and all that inevitably gave rise to new questions, new answers: ‘this story was rewritten six or seven times, until finally I was convinced that I could not improve upon it’.
The writing went no more easily for a story Andersen rated particularly highly: ‘The Wind tells about Valdemar Daae…’: ‘It is one of the stories that I have revised most for the sake of style, so that the language would have the tone of the blistering, whistling wind, who tells the story.’3
This last admission gives us a key to what Andersen was embarking on in these new works: the nature of the narratology itself. Who should present the incidents and people of the story to us to do them the justice the author felt was their due? Through whose eyes – if indeed anybody's – should they be seen? (For eyes will always be part-clouded by their owner's personality and concomitant prejudices.) Our principal guides to the complex events of ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’, which involve emanations of primordial evil and virtue, and conflicts for domination between rival cosmogonies, are a pair of storks on their nest. Their chatter has an amusingly domestic quality (the father-bird a touch vain and over-inquisitive, the mother-bird rather too practical and pragmatic in her approach to life) yet what they have to relate takes us away from the certainties of familial duties into conflicts that literally have rent continents asunder. The storks do not comprehend all that they witness – in this sense, they anticipate the modern concept of the unreliable narrator – and to complicate matters they actually intrude into, and play a part in, central events. Indeed the most crucial occurrence of all – Helga's adoption by the Viking woman – is effected by the father-stork. And the narrative device is further complicated at the close of the tale when we are left uncertain as to which age the storks have been talking to us from.
In ‘The Wind Tells …’ it is the wind who, with onomatopoeic effects and not a little pride in its own being, gives us the tragic history of a Sjælland nobleman and his three daughters. Yet here too it is a case not merely of impartial, non-human witness (and even the impartiality isn't total, since the wind has value-based preferences among the daughters), but of a narrative voice which is also an agent in the history concerned. Of Ide it says: ‘Tidt tog jeg fat i hendes lange, brune Haar, naar hun ved Æbletræet i Haven stod tankefuld…’4 ‘Often I took hold of her long, brown hair when she stood by the apple-tree in the garden full of thought.’ And of her sister Johanne, its favourite who has run away to sea in disguise, it boasts: ‘Den Raskeste af Søstrene tog jeg mig af!… blæste jeg hende overbord. …”5 ‘The liveliest of the sisters I took care of!… I blew her overboard’, thus saving her from scandal.
What I consider the masterwork in this 1858–59 quartet, ‘A Story from the Dunes’ reads like a history, told with both factual objectivity and feeling and sober acceptance of its tragic outcome, such as the old saga-writers or professional keepers of stories might have had in their repertoire. Yet at the close we learn that this too has been airborne, has come to the author via the ever-present winds of north Jutland:
Ingen forstyrrer den Dødes Hvile, Ingen vidste eller veed det, før nu, – Stormen sang det for mig mellem Klitterne.6
Nobody disturbs the peace of the dead man, nobody knew or knew about this before now – the gale sang it to me among the dunes.
‘Anne Lisbeth’ makes use of no such experimental narrative devices, yet it too relinquishes conventional presentation of characters in time and space. Although it proceeds chronologically, it defies linear procedure by deliberately leaping over a decade and a half of its central character's life, and leaving a not inconsiderable number of years a blank. There are any number of questions about Anne Lisbeth we could not answer: Why did she move to the town? Who did she marry, and what happened to her husband? Why did they have no children? Was it her marriage that made her well-off, or were there subsequent relationships? But – paradoxically, and this is one of the story's remarkable triumphs – by such restricted concentration on but one aspect of his heroine's life, on an episode of her youth which she herself chose to regard as unimportant and which, against her will, comes back to haunt her, Andersen gives us an entirely satisfying picture of the person she is, of the ways she will have spent the years of which we are factually ignorant. What Andersen accomplishes here is a demonstration of how the human mind moves, at the profoundest level, independently of clock time. Yet it is housed within a system – the body – wholly subject to this, to the successive stages of growth, maturity, ageing, decline. Therefore pressures from deep within, when they rise to the surface, can erupt into the temporal, spatial sphere, and even affect and change it. Anne Lisbeth is, we can work out, entering middle age proper when her crisis occurs – she must be thirty-five.
Anne Lisbeth gik og tænkte ikke paa nogen Ting, som man siger, hun var borte fra sine Tanker, men Tankerne vare ikke borte fra hende, de ere aldrig borte fra os, de ligge bare i en Døs, baade de levendegjorte Tanker, der have lagt sig, og de, som endnu ikke have rørt sig. Men Tankerne komme nok frem, de kunne røre sig i Hjertet, røre sig i vort Hoved eller falde ned over os.7
Anne Lisbeth went on and thought about nothing at all, as they say, she went away from her thoughts, but her thoughts didn't go away from her, they are never away from us, they exist even in a snooze, both the vitalised thoughts which have settled, and those which as yet have not stirred. But the thoughts still come forward, they can move into the heart, move into our heads or fall down over us.
It's impossible not to see this as an account of the Freudian unconscious and its workings avant la lettre. Except, as we will see, conscience, in the Christian sense, operates through it; deeds and feelings, long suppressed for reasons of ‘worldly’ expediency, eventually surface for moral acknowledgement. Andersen said in his Notes: ‘In “Anne Lisbeth” I wanted to show that all virtues lie in every human breast;’8 He likened these to seeds, from which nutritious plants grow.
How to define identity while recognising the extent, the complexity and the inconsistency of consciousness is central to the stories of this quartet. In ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’ – far the nearest of them, in both overall effect and component parts, to fairytale – the eponymous main figure is, for the greater part of the narrative, under a curse, like the princess in ‘The Travelling Companion’. She alternates between vicious (hyperactive) aggression and a pained, bewildered, beseeching gentleness. For most of the tale the division is immutable, though one presumes that the anguish of the second state owes much to awareness of conduct in the first. The eponymous nobleman in ‘The Wind Tells. …’ is shown as descending through obsession into a madness that sets comfort, health, hygiene, food, clothing, and obligations to other human beings, at naught. Finally he will die in a seizure consequent on a delusional triumph. The alchemist is convinced he has made gold. ‘Anne Lisbeth’ and ‘A Story from the Dunes’ show their protagonists becoming (for want of a better word) ‘simple-minded’. In Anne Lisbeth's case, as summarised above, it is the final stage of an obsession-dominated guilt-driven psychosis whose roots lie in uncaring youthful action, which she has done her best to expunge from her mind. The tale demonstrates that trying to bully the memory in this way is doomed to failure. In ‘A Story from the Dunes’ the pitiful mental state is brought about by a trauma consequent on a physical calamity, though behind that trauma itself lies Jørgen's whole scarred history (including that of his birth). Attempting the rescue during a disaster at sea in which he and Clara, the young woman he loves, are involved, he is defeated by the force of the waves and arrives back on the shore bearing the body of his dead sweetheart:
Fjollet kaldte man Jørgen, men det var ikke det rette Udtryk; han var, som et Instrument, hvorpaa Strængene ere løsnede og ikke længer kunne klinge, – kun i et enkelt Øieblik, faa Minuter, fik de en Spændkraft, og de klang, – gamle Melodier klang, enkelte Takter; Billeder rullede op og hentaagede, – han sad igjen stirrende tankeløs …9
People called Jørgen daft, but that was not the right term; he was like an instrument of which the strings have got loosened, and can no longer sound, – only for one single moment, no more than minutes, would they get elasticity, and give out sound – old tunes rang out, single measures; pictures rolled up and vanished; he sat again staring mindless …’
‘A Story from the Dunes’ comes from the same year as The Origin of Species, which would both gather up and stimulate debates about what the English Darwinian Herbert Spencer was famously to call ‘the survival of the fittest’.10 An interesting passage in ‘A Story from the Dunes’, adjacent to the one just quoted, attempts to contextualise – in biological terms – the hero's terrible fate unjustifiable by any narrowly moralistic or behavioural view of existence. Here we have a boy, conceived, back in Spain, as the welcome heir to privilege, position and wealth, who survived the accident that killed his parents and grew up in Denmark talented, strong and handsome enough to expect a long and fulfilled life and seemingly overcome hazards in the path of this. And then at thirty he loses all ability to manage for himself, even to entertain coherent thoughts. Andersen proceeds to remind us of an earlier cameo in the tale showing a box of bulbs that had drifted onshore from a stranded ship. Shouldn't all of them have grown into beautiful flowers, that being what they were created to do? But the majority rotted on the sand, and some were eaten by fishermen (who mistook them for onions, one assumes). Is that how we should see Jørgen's life – as a wasted flower-bulb? Andersen, as soon as he has imposed the interrogative simile on us, passionately rejects it. No, no! Every human being is made in the image of God. (And possibly every living being, according to a divine concept?) But the image remains, however blighted. Likewise Anne Lisbeth was egregiously attractive. Yet she doesn't stay her course as a well-heeled, well-respected middle-aged woman but degenerates – not a slow process – into a possessed halfwit scrabbling in the hard earth until her fingers bleed from the nails in her efforts to dig a grave. … Nevertheless somehow we respect her and feel for her more in this dreadful last development than ever we did earlier on. Her final apotheosis inside the church before the altar seems therefore entirely right.
Andersen's art opposes in every fibre of its being that rejection of imperfect or impaired lives which major belief-systems in the post-Darwin age developed with such infectious thoroughness: laissez-faire capitalism, Social Darwinism, the eugenics-favouring utopian socialism of Wells, the Webbs, the Myrdals, Marxist-Leninism mutating into Stalinism, as well as Fascism, Nazism, the various avatars of the Free Market with its doctrinaire refusal to find room for those who cannot bring in good money. We shall return to this major strand (arguably the major strand) of Andersen's literary achievement in the final chapter when we attempt a summarising overview. But it is undoubtedly this group of stories that first and uncompromisingly embodies Andersen's detestation of a utilitarian attitude to human beings (and to their non-human kin: there is a beautiful plea for a donkey's soul towards the beginning of ‘A Story from the Dunes’). The corollary of this is dignified representation of the jumbled thoughts, the unarticulated emotions of those for whom utilitarianism put into practice could find no room.
Their technical adventurousness, their new philosophical emphasis do not mean, however, that these tales eschew Andersen's grammar of images which was inextricable from his language as a writer. Storks, swans, storms, the transitional country between water (sea, fjord) and the land, marshy terrain home to secret amphibious life, all recur. Even more important, all these tales give us children, orphaned or abandoned and having to survive in a world without the support of kinfolk, that motif with its origins in Andersen's earlier moments of self-awareness, and often with heart-touching parallels in the creature world.
Helga, the Marsh-King's daughter is the result of her monstrous father's rape of her Egyptian princess mother who came to the bog-country of north Jutland as a swan in order to find a healing plant for her sick father. Deposited like Thumbelina as a miniature humanoid in the bud of a flower, she was found by the father-stork, who took her to be brought up by surrogate parents, a Viking chief and his wife. The chieftain, away on raids for much of his foster-daughter's young life, is proud of her beauty, her tomboy's strength and daring and knows nothing of her other side – her nightly existence as a wounded, mournful frog. Her foster-mother, on the other hand, is repelled by Helga's wilful, often cruel audacity, and responds to her sad tenderness when she appears in her hideous amphibian form.
Valdemar Daae's daughters are certainly his – by his proud, well-born beauty of a wife, compared (by the wind) to a tulip, magnificent, showy and without scent. But they might as well not be, since after her death he has little thought, let alone affection, for them. The acquisition of gold is his consuming interest, and when it doesn't come his way after his extravagant building of a ship, then he turns to alchemy, to the transmutation of other material into gold, and this fills his days and nights. Meanwhile his daughters lead neglected, unfulfilled lives, and face dereliction after his death. The rose, the lily and the hyacinth they were called when young. But the rose, Ide, ends up married to a peasant, living in penury and harsh servitude, the lily Johanne runs away to sea disguised as a boy (like Naomi in Only a Fiddler) and falls to her death from the ship's deck (blown by the wind, as we have seen), while Anna Dorthea, the most sensitive of the three – the only one to grieve for the birds made homeless by trees felled to build her father's grandiose ship – ekes out her days in a hovel all by herself, watched over only by storks, whose relatives she had once protected.
In ‘Anne Lisbeth’ the abandoned (or to be more precise, the given-away) child is all-pervasive. In the note already cited Andersen proclaimed: ‘This is the story of mother love and how it is given life and strength by experiencing fear and terror.’11 This mother love was originally – and indeed for many, many years – repudiated, denied. Or was it? It may well have undergone a transposition into a never-recognised substitute or correlative.
Of pretty, popular Anne Lisbeth when young we hear: ‘Foden var let i Dandsen og Sindet endnu mere let!’12 ‘[Her] foot was light in the dance, and [her] mind was even more light!’ Almost inevitably Anne Lisbeth becomes pregnant, we never know who by; that is unimportant to the tale. What is important, one assumes, considering the insistence on it, is the child's ugliness. Anne Lisbeth feels no inclination to keep him – would she have done had he been a bonny little baby who would have drawn forth compliments? – but hands him over to the local ditch-digger's wife for a modest regular payment. She never visits her son, nor is tempted to do so, especially after she has moved away to the town. It is an indigent, uncaring, loveless home in which she has deposited him. The lad has a big appetite for food, and so is early put out to work to get money for his keep – minding Mad Jansen's red cow, for instance – but his physical growth is stunted, and his appearance is repulsive enough for all the farm-hands and servants where he is employed to cuff and insult him. His is truly a case of ‘aldrig elsket’,13 ‘never loved’, and what happens, asks Andersen, to those for whom ‘aldrig elsket’ is the order of the day?
They do not love themselves, for a start. And they leave the home country where they have been unhappy, for miserable jobs they would have been better off not taking. Anne Lisbeth's boy joins a barely seaworthy boat, sitting by its helm while its skipper drinks himself legless. Of course when a storm comes the boat gets into severe difficulties, and for all the boy's shouts, the skipper cannot cope. It sinks, and Anne Lisbeth's son is drowned. The only survivor of the wretched vessel is one bottle, the broken base of which rests on a piece of blue-painted wood; this is borne on the current towards the shore.
How different has his young mother's life been. While her son is only a baby she becomes nursemaid to a count's child, and is quartered in a castle in greatest comfort. She dotes on her nice-looking, well-born charge, and, long after she has left her post, has married and gone to live, in good material circumstances, in the town, her mind and conversation often turn to him. We readers see that the boy has become the receptacle for the strong maternal instincts Anne Lisbeth stifled, but without doubt, Anne Lisbeth herself does not. It is less a case of self-deception than of a mechanism in the mind having been effectively set up that only some shock can put out of action. And such a shock she receives, though it follows a course of action her conscious self has decided on (however, we may well reject this last interpretation of her decision).
So often has she thought and talked about her first charge that she finally takes it on to herself to go to the Count's castle and see again ‘sin søde Dreng’,14 ‘her sweet boy’, who must now be fourteen. She is granted an interview with him, after he has had dinner. But – the whole economically presented scene resembles some bitter, ironic moment in de Maupassant – he looks at her, doesn't speak to her, and clearly fails to recognise her. (It would of course have been strange if he had done so; she has preserved him in the chambers of her mind, but he cannot be expected to have done the same with her.) Desperate, for her whole carefully nurtured identity has been struck at, she seizes his hand and presses it to her, lips, whereupon he says ‘Naa, det er godt!’ 15 (a convincing translation of which would be a graceless ‘All right, all right!’ or ‘Steady on!’)and promptly leaves the room.
Devastated, humiliated by this snub, Anne Lisbeth makes her way towards the ditcher's cottage, guided by some compulsion, only emphasised by the croaking raven that flies down to land on the road in front of her. The ditcher's wife, commenting how well off in her plumpness Anne Lisbeth looks, gives her the news she didn't know: that her real son was drowned at sea. She need send no more money for his upkeep. So now Anne Lisbeth has lost two sons – the real and unprepossessing one, whom she chose to cast out of her life, and the surrogate one who had lived for years a fantasy life in her head. Her psyche cannot stand such upturning of the premises on which a whole life has been built, and it takes swift revenge on her entire being – first through an overwhelming dream of an emissary from Heaven trying to take her there for her son's sake but unable to do so, and next, and repeatedly, through hallucinatory demands that her unburied son should receive Christian burial. During the course of the strange phantasmagorical wandering it insists she takes, she will stumble across – indeed, cut her hand on – the bottle with the blue wooden base, sole survivor of the rotten hulk which saw the last of her unfortunate bastard son.
The motif of the foundling, the adopted child, is elaborated still further in ‘A Story of the Dunes’, set in the late eighteenth century, and as in ‘Anne Lisbeth’ bad weather at sea is a major agent. The protagonist's actual birth, attributable to this, is also reminiscent of that of Elisabeth in The Two Baronesses. There is a further echo of that novel, in that he has Southern European parentage, like (the admittedly only half-Italian) Baron Herman. Born to his mother after a shipwreck on the Jutland west coast that kills her as it already has his father, Jørgen is brought up by a fisherman and his wife whose own child had died at just five years of age. Theirs is a hard life, in a poor community used to adversity. ‘Granatkjærnen fra Spaniens Jordsmon blev Marehalmens Plante paa Jyllands Vestkyst.’16 ‘The pomegranate seed from the soil of Spain became a lyme-grass plant on Jutland's west coast.’
Such reversals of fortune, such transpositions of living beings, happen all the time, Andersen reminds us. Nature versus Nurture is obviously a dominant theme of the tale, as in so much of Andersen, from ‘The Ugly Duckling’ (emphatically Nature) to ‘To Be or Not To Be’, where civilising, Christianising Nurture certainly scores some impressive points (as, it could be argued, if with a little ingenuity, it also does in ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’). But something else comes into play in ‘A Story from the Dunes’, apparent in Andersen from The Improvisatore onwards: that the circumstances and experiences of the first years shape the individual immeasurably. The kinship to Wordsworth and Dickens (and to Andersen's own first novel) is seen in his authorial assertion about his hero: ‘til dette Hjem klamrede han sig med sin Livs aarlange Rødder,’17 ‘to this home he [Jørgen] clung with the years-long roots of his life’.
Destiny, whether seen as the logical outcome of innate inner qualities when pitted against the obstinate realities of external life or as the (no less logical) consequential development of choices – or of actions demanding choice – is a major feature of the 1858–59 stories. The storyteller's task is seen in these tales in the workings of Destiny manifested in individual lives through epiphanies, dreams, meaningful encounters, recurrent objects or phenomena of psychic significance to the persons concerned but not necessarily yielding to conscious interpretation on their part. In October 1858 Andersen gave an intentionally inspiriting lecture to the Mechanics' Association in Copenhagen: ‘far more people than there were places for in the great hall: the crowd outside pressed close up to the windows and clamoured to have them opened’.18 The words he offered his enthusiastic listeners are very germane to the stories he was engaged on at this time:
‘Among the instructive readings which are given at the Mechanics’ Association there is one that it has been thought should not be omitted, and that is one from the poetic, the art that opens our eyes and our hearts to the beautiful, the true and the good.
‘In England, in the Royal Navy, through all the rigging, small and great ropes, there runs a red thread, signifying that it belongs to the crown; through all men's lives there runs also a thread, invisible indeed, that shows we belong to God.
‘To find this thread in small and great, in our own life and in all about us, the poet's art helps us, and it comes in many shapes. Holberg let it come in his comedies, showing us the men of his time with their weaknesses, and their amusing qualities, and we can read much of these.
‘“In the earliest times the poet's art dealt mostly with what are called Wonder Stories; the Bible itself has enclosed truth and wisdom in what we call parables and allegories. Now we know all of us that the allegory is not to be taken literally by the words, but according to the signification that lies in them, by the invisible thread that runs through them.
‘We know that when we hear the echo from the wall, from the rock, or the heights, it is not the wall, the rock, and the heights that speak, but a resounding from ourselves; and we also should find [in the parable, the allegory] ourselves – find the meaning, the wisdom, and the happiness we can get out of them.
‘So the poet's art places itself by the side of Science, and opens our eyes for the beautiful, the true and the good; and so we will read here a few Wonder Stories.’ 19
And indeed in each of the stories here we do follow the thread by which the characters, self-ignorant though they may be, and terrible the route they have to take and terrible too the destination, attain some state of Grace. Crazed Anne Lisbeth, missing from home but this time not to be found on the seashore, is discovered by herself in a church where she will shortly die. Jørgen too, possessed by pictures of splendid reconciliation with people from the past, ends up in a church, which is itself buried by huge drifts of sands from the dunes. That is his resting-place to this day. These Wonder Stories, which emphatically are not mere parables or allegories, but which serve the Kantian ‘the beautiful, the true and the good’ are nevertheless contributions to Christian culture.
Andersen in My Fairy-Tale Life could not resist relating what followed after that last-quoted pronouncement: ‘And I read and was followed with close attention; a single heartfelt burst of applause was heard. I was glad and satisfied to have read. Afterwards I gave still a few more readings…’20 A few paragraphs on, he names ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’ among his Wonder Tales. Like ‘A Story from the Dunes’ it requires further attention.
2
Andersen observes that there are two stories in the storks' repertoire which are outstanding for antiquity and length. One of them is universally known, that of Moses, found in the bulrushes by Pharaoh's daughter and growing up to be a great man; the other – to be substantially given us by the storks themselves, even while its events are unfolding – is not, as yet. Thus this second unknown story is offered as a companion-piece, if not as a complement, to a mythic history that became a cornerstone of Western civilisation itself. ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’ is also concerned with the movement and home-seeking of peoples, with the faiths that sustain them for these purposes, and the necessary and inevitable yielding of older creeds, born of earlier circumstances, to innovative, forward-looking ones. In both stories the transitional stage – between departure and arrival, between obscurity and fulfilment – is a major area of interest. We should therefore briefly remind ourselves of what Exodus tells us of Moses's start in life.21
The descendants of the Hebrew Joseph and his brothers multiplied and prospered in Egypt to such an extent that the host nation resented them, imposing restrictions and harsh working conditions and treating them largely as a servant class. All to no avail. Consequently the King of Egypt determined on elimination. First he tried the unworkable policy of getting midwives to kill any male Hebrew children, then he ordered the drowning of all male babies in the river (Nile). But a husband and wife of the tribe of Levi – ironically, one of Jacob's two sons denied his father's good wishes – produce a child so ‘goodly’ that his mother refuses to kill him and instead hides him for three months. When this is no longer practicable, she places him in a little ark made of bulrushes and ‘daubed’ with ‘slime’, which she puts among the reeds at the river's brink, to be found. It is Pharaoh's daughter herself who, to her joy, discovers it, recognises the baby inside as Hebrew, and asks a girl nearby – in fact, the baby's sister – to fetch a nurse for him; she does this, and brings their own mother, who then cares for the child until Pharaoh's daughter is ready for him, ‘and he became her son’, and she called him Moses because he was ‘drawn out of water’. But years later, despite growing up a member of the royal household, Moses takes his own Hebrew kinsman's side in a quarrel with an Egyptian and kills the aggressor. Consequently – for Pharaoh learns of the incident – he is forced to leave Egypt for the land of Midian. So begins Moses's heroic history, culminating, after acute sufferings for both nations, in his leading his own people out of Egypt in the direction of Canaan and giving them a code of law, so simple in its moral directives, so free of the clutter of tradition, and so generally benevolent in its tendencies as to supersede all predecessors.
It is easy to see how Moses's infancy with its confusions of provenance, its translations of familial membership and domicile, and its subsequent unstoppable movement towards his acceptance as moral spokesman for a whole people would have appealed to Andersen, with his own segmented life, his divisions in loyalty, never more tested than in the 1850s, and, despite all the misery experienced, his now widely established fame. Moses was superficially an awkward human being, ‘slow of speech, and of a slow tongue’, a stammerer, and Andersen too had been ill-spoken, gauche, comical and stork-like in society, and yet had – by some inner power – become a success. To this ‘swamp-plant’ the scriptural context of Moses's start in life, river, river-brink and reeds as appropriate cradle for a genius of national and international significance, must have had potent psychic resonance. Also he would have been quick to see the Pentateuch story in suprapersonal terms as evidencing the emergence of a country (his own) from obscurity (the 1813 impositions, and subsequent bankruptcy) into a confident nation state that could defeat its enemy. Certainly the biblical images recur in this ‘second’ storks' tale, reinforced by emphatic circumstantial details: the watery country is actually named for us: Vildmosen (Wild Marsh) in Vendsyssel in the county of Hjørring near Skagen in northern Jutland.22
At this point comment on the title chosen by Andersen for his story is necessary, the more so as its usual English rendering, ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’ – though employed for readers' convenience throughout this book – is neither accurate nor adequate, failing to do justice to the author's – later explicitly conveyed – purpose. The story's first sentence does indeed speak of ‘Sumpen og Mosen’,23 ‘swamp’ and ‘marsh’, the second Danish noun recalling the northern English word ‘moss’ (as in Holme Moss, Derbyshire/Yorkshire and Moss Side, Manchester) and connoting moorland with its many, treacherous patches of ‘bog’, another term by which ‘Mose’ is often translated. But ‘Dynd’, which occurs in the subsequent text, means ‘mud’, ‘slime’, even ‘ooze’, referring to the basic and (to warm-blooded animal life) the most dangerous element of which marsh/swamp/bog is compounded. As we have seen in The Improvisatore, marshland has in its duality of earth and water much to teach us, challenging the limitations of singleness, and thus (as for Antonio, and indeed for Moses himself) offering new life, rebirth. In Andersen's own language there is wordplay here, which there cannot be in ours, but, by inference, so there was in the ancient original (‘his name Moses… Because I drew him out of the water’); Moses is ‘of [the] marsh’). But in Andersen's story ‘Dynd’, if an inextricable ingredient of all marshes, is certainly not coterminous with them. It is what renders them perilous, capable of sucking us in to our deaths and reminding us of that primordial slime from which every living being had to emerge if it was to know existence at all.
In an intellectual climate obsessed with the beginnings of life, Andersen clearly saw ‘Dynd’ as at once indispensable and destructive. You can see it too as an analogue for chaos, for the formlessness which precedes forms and into which they are forced to return. The King of Slime is a terrifying, malignant, indescribable being, yet creation somehow needs him: after all, he begets Helga, the story's central figure. The intention of ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’ is nothing less than the essentially biblical one of showing how chaos can be held off, first through self-protecting energies which include concern for others (embodied here by the stork parents, with their concern for the young and their enormous, valiant, migratory flights at specific seasons), and next through religion, which addresses itself to the whole question of beginning and ending. But religion, like life itself, undergoes continuous evolution. Whatever faith the Hebrew descendants of Jacob practised in Egypt, it underwent a tremendous transmutation when Moses received the Commandments on Sinai.
Standing back from this long fairy tale, we will not find it difficult to discern its bottom line, of growth and concomitant moral progress. But above that line weave intricacies of subject, abetted by an unusually elaborate manner of presentation, which demand concentration. As was made clear at the beginning of this chapter, nowhere is Andersen's new artistic desire for experimentation more testingly demonstrated than in his narratological methods. The married storks most certainly do not recount occurrences from any factual certainty of knowledge. Furthermore, the stork father is the bemused, dismayed witness of the first gravely seminal event and – some while later – becomes an actual instrument of the second. But regularly we hear the voice of the author as well, summarising the storks' conversation or commenting himself on the birds and on the sequence of events in which they have interested themselves.
This sequence in itself involves an intricate union – or conflation – of various archetypal situations and deeds from past legend. Andersen who, as we have seen, read so widely for, and worked so immensely hard on, this story must have decided – or arrived at – this apparent concertinaing of motifs for an overall purpose. We have perhaps to call to mind here the many usages the Moses story has been subjected to – religious, nationalistic, historical. So, is Andersen, by thus bringing together so much diverse folk material, not reminding us that, if the subject of the development of physical life forms has attracted many differing schools of mythological, theological and scientific thought (some susceptible to reconciliation, others mutually antagonistic), so too has the development of our souls, our psyches, been addressed in numerous myths and lore? And while they often exhibit interesting cultural distinctions, they have an underlying kinship, not to say unity, illuminating in itself and helpful to us in the present age of ontological uncertainty.
Certainly as we review the story itself, we shall constantly hear echoes or see shadows of widely regarded and culturally influential others.
An Egyptian lord is gravely ill, and his daughter, believing that that he could be restored by a marsh-flower that grows in a northern country, journeys there with two other princesses who know the area; all wear swanskins enabling flight. Once she has arrived in the wateriest part of the marsh in question – Vildmosen in Vendsyssel – she alights on an alder log, casts off her swanskin, asking her companions to take care of it for her, and dives down to pluck the desired flower. But when she comes up again, the other two princesses – for no reason that is stated – tear her feather-skin into shreds, telling her that now she will never see Egypt again. They then fly back there themselves. In her distressed state the princess weeps until she animates the alder log, which, it transpires, is nothing less than the body of Dynd-Kongen, the Slime King. He rolls himself over, taking the girl down into the dark depths with him. As our stork-narrator at this point doesn't know what has happened to the Egyptian princess after her disappearance into the mud, his account here is vividly redolent of atavistic fear:
Hun sank strax i, og Elletrunten gik ned med, det var ham [Dynd-Kongen] der halede; der kom store, sorte Bobler og saa var der ikke Spor mere. Nu er hun begravet i Vildmosen, aldrig kommer hun med Blomst til Ægyptens Land.24
She sank immediately, and the alder log went down with her, it was him [Slime-King] who tugged; there came large black bubbles and then there was no more trace. She is now buried in Vildmose, she will never come with the flower to the land of Egypt.
The image here is at once excremental and crudely priapic, all that we strive upwards away from. … The stork, despite his solemn words, doesn't altogether give up hope, and regularly inspects the wild marsh for signs of the princess's survival. One day he sees on the marsh-lake's bed a green shoot. This grows into a bud, and the bud opens into a flower in the very middle of which he can see lying a tiny beautiful infant girl. Remembering that the woman in the house high atop the roof of which he has built his own nest has long been wanting a child, Stork Father carries this diminutive human in his beak over to her house (thus fulfilling his species's folkloric role of child-bringer, which Andersen made us aware of in Only a Fiddler). The woman's happiness at his gift is alloyed, however, when it turns out that at night-time the child undergoes a change of form, from lovely girl into hideous frog. Nor is this the only troubling feature of her being, as it develops under the foster-mother's care, for she has, as we have seen, a double nature: as a human outwardly fair, but spiteful, uncontrollable, and as a frog gentle, kindly, but sorrowful. It is the author, and not the uncomprehending Stork Father, who has to give the explanation here: ‘her var to Naturer, der skiftede om, baade udad og indad’; ‘here were two natures which changed round, both outwardly and inwardly’ – her father's destructive temperament inside her mother's externally pleasing body, her mother's kindly temperament inside just such an ugly shape as her father's.
In the above procession of situations major themes of universal fairytale are immediately detectable, closely interwoven: the arcane plant that can heal and the difficult journey to find it; the metamorphosis (or part-metamorphosis) of human into bird; the inexplicable malignity of two siblings (so often sisters) to a third, the foundling of unknown or mysterious provenance, and its kinship to the wild; the gift of a child to the long-childless – and finally, and most importantly, the double self-presentations, or separate diurnal/nocturnal manifestations, of a single individual. This last – the marsh-king's daughter who is at her best at night as a frog – is a variant, whose idiosyncrasy has intellectual, ideological causes, on that large group of tales that Bruno Bettelheim (in The Uses of Enchantment, 1977) calls ‘The Animal Groom’, with a subsection ‘The Frog King’25 in which (for the gender is most commonly male) the handsome prince, desirable socially and sexually, is at night a misshapen, repellent creature, so often a frog, who has somehow to be (re-)humanised. ‘There are,’ says Bettelheim, ‘direct associations between sex and the frog which remain unconscious. Preconsciously the child connects the tacky, clammy sensations which frogs (or toads) evoke in him with similar feelings he attaches to the sex organs. … Repulsive as the frog may be, as vividly described in “The Frog King” [the Brothers Grimm],26 the story assures us that even an animal so clammily disgusting turns into something very beautiful, provided it all happens in the right way at the right time.’ True enough of ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’, with one extremely important proviso: that it is the clammily disgusting (female) frog who is both virtuous and appealing, the outwardly perfect human being (female also) who repels and terrifies. Andersen's extraordinary mind always demanded reworking of given conventions.
Not only can many familiar folk tales be discerned in the narrative so far but much-read Andersen Eventyr also: ‘The Wild Swans’, ‘The Snow Queen’ (the girl as quest-maker); ‘Thumbelina’ (the miniature human girl found in the flower); ‘The Travelling Companion’ (the female bewitched into an evil self); ‘The Little Mermaid’ (the fraught passage between two elements). Such an omnium-gatherum of his own images suggests, when placed beside that from folklore, and remembering the unusual length of time spent working on the story, that the intention was to create a compound metaphor for nothing less than the growth of civilisation itself.
From the précis so far, one key fact has been omitted. The storks have built their nest on top of a Bjælkehuus27 – a log house, three-storeyed, with a tower and a stone-lined cellar, erected and lived in by Vikings. For the adoptive mother of the marsh-king's daughter is a Viking woman; at the time of the child's arrival her husband and the other menfolk are away on one of their raids. In the middle of her hall burns a fire, and tapestries depicting Norse gods, Odin, Thor and Freia hang on the walls. ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’ – the finished version of which was the fruit of the author's deep immersion in history, lore and the Norse sagas themselves – is Andersen's most sustained imaginative engagement with Viking culture, interest in (indeed admiration for) which had been for so long virtually de rigueur for Danish intellectuals, following the examples set by Grundtvig and Oehlenschläger. Snorri Sturleson (1179–1241)28 the authority in whom Andersen immersed himself, and a widely consulted source of reference for those pursuing Norse studies, viewed his subject matter from a Christian perspective, whatever imaginative and emotional ambiguities he retained. That Andersen himself had doubts about Grundtvig-style ‘Edda Christianity’ we have seen in ‘To Be or Not To Be’. For this reason possibly Andersen has chosen to set his Viking presentation at the time when the Vikings's conversion to Christianity is, with bloody travails, well under way,29 and to highlight in his narrative the Apostle of the North, (Saint) Ansgar, (801–865), whose mission was the Christianising of the North. Ansgar made at least two recorded expeditions on behalf of the faith to Jutland, and later became Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen, the see specifically established for northern proselytising. The dualism of marsh-king and Egyptian princess, of heartless girl and feeling frog, of northern summers and southern winters, climaxes in the oppositions of Norse and Christian (there can be no dialectic here) but there is an interesting, highly significant foreshadowing of this, to which we should address ourselves.
Not long after he has brought the Viking woman the marsh-king's daughter, our principal informant of events, Stork Father, his wife and fledglings take part in their great late summer migration, programmed by Nature, southwards from Jutland and winter. The Egypt they journey to is not, obviously, the biblical land of Moses's persecuting pharaoh, but an Islamic society, part of the sophisticated Abbasid caliphate ruled from Baghdad, a society, religious and virtuous, with which dialogue is possible and desirable.30
As I read this story and ponder its emphases (the more striking because made within the boundaries of a severe and sui generis structure), I cannot but be reminded of a passage in a much later masterpiece: Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (1946–57, in English 1958). The speaker is Zhivago's metaphysician uncle, Nikolay Nikolayevitch:
‘[It] is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels. Now what is history? Its beginning is that of the centuries of systematic work devoted to the solution of the enigma of death, so that death itself may eventually be overcome. This is why people write symphonies and why they discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves. Now, you can't advance in this direction without a certain upsurge of spirit. You can't make such discoveries without spiritual equipment, and for this, everything necessary has been given us in the Gospels. What is it? Firstly, the love of one's neighbour – the supreme form of living energy. Once it fills the heart of man it has to overflow and spend itself. And secondly, the two concepts which are the main part of modern man – without them he is inconceivable – the ideas of free personality and of life regarded as sacrifice – Mind you, all this is still quite new. There was no history in this sense in the classical world. There you had blood and beastliness and cruelty and pock-marked Caligulas untouched by the suspicion that any man who enslaves others is inevitably second-rate. There you had the boastful dead eternity of bronze monuments and marble columns. It was not until after the coming of Christ that time and man could breathe freely. It was not until after Him that men began to live in their posterity and ceased to die in ditches like dogs – instead, they died at home, in history, at the height of the work they devoted to the conquest of death, being themselves dedicated to this aim.’31
This approach to Christianity's role in the history of civilisation informs the story's account of the coming of the new religion to Vildmosen, the accord it finds in the heart of the Viking woman already drawn to loving-kindness and gentleness as cardinal virtues. And she responds to the very idea of the ‘Hvide Christ’, ‘White [pure] Christ’ even before she finds herself invoking his miraculous name.
Its thematic and artistic ambitions and their hard-won union in its course certainly justify Andersen's pride in ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’ and the high reputation it has subsequently enjoyed. Yet, for all its abundant merits, I find the story less than wholly satisfactory. One way of accounting for this is an admission that, returning to Andersen's statement about the basic story coming to him in a moment of inspiration, I have difficulty in knowing just what that first germinating idea would be. Though the strange, beautiful, melancholy ending bringing home to us the immensely distant past to which Helga belongs resembles a symphonic coda, gathering up and rounding off the thematic material of the whole, ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’ fails to cohere as an organic whole. This failure is due less to the palimpsest-like complications of both construction and the narration than to the virtuosic brilliance of the individual sections, which vie for supremacy in the receiving mind, and even more so in the critical-adjudicatory memory. The evocation of the three Egyptian princesses' flight to Jutland, say, competes with the later story of the Christian priest and his death, and they refuse altogether to gel. But there are two further and graver obstacles to giving the story the admiration the others in this chapter truly deserve.
A heroine like Helga who for most of its course alternates between two complete and contrasting states (active viciousness and passive virtue) cannot satisfactorily exist in a work of this length (virtually a novella). In the tightly controlled world of folktale, and its derivatives like ‘The Travelling Companion’, she can be a plausible enough representative of opposing spiritual forces; in the far more detailed and at the same time far larger fictional world of ‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’, spanning continents and centuries, she defeats belief, and ironically the richly written passages of her evolution into a kindly, full human being only increase one's inability to credit her with reality, inner as well as exterior. The vitiating imbalance between features proper to the fairy tale and those more appropriate for a work of ampler dimensions is even more apparent in its use of instruments of redemption – Christ's name, the Christian Cross, the golden censer of the Mass. The virtuous efficacy of these is only acceptable if one assumes the moral superiority of the religion to which they belong, even in its outward forms. This could scarcely be done with any adequacy in a fairy tale where they perforce coexist with mud-bound monsters, evil flying princesses and beneficent plants in the Jutland marshland. Perhaps the problem inherent in this is what caused Andersen such immense trouble and so many rewritings.
3
‘The Marsh-King's Daughter’ pays rich tribute to Jutland's landscape and its long past. How much Jutland meant to Andersen as both traveller and writer will already be clear to readers: he had after all spent his first literary earnings in 1830 on a trip to Jutland, partly because of his enthusiasm for the writings of poet and short-story writer, Steen Blicher (1782–1848). The impression made on him by the region was tremendous, and fuller knowledge only strengthened his feelings – with the ‘German Ocean’ (North Sea) on one side and the Baltic on the other and, at its very tip, marking the Skagerrak from the Kattegat, Skagen of the dunes and quicksands. Otto in O.T. was heir to a Jutland estate, where he grew up after his traumatic beginning in Odense Tugthus; his friend Vilhelm loved to hear him tell tales of the rough, venturesome lives of ordinary people on Jutland's west coast, not dissimilar to those accounts of Cornish wreckers that have exercised a pull on the British mind. Niels in ‘To Be or Not To Be’ became absorbed in Jutland country life after he moved to his foster-father's parish as an eleven-year-old boy, taking to its pursuits and fascinated by its more primitively cultured inhabitants. One presumes that he will spend the rest of his life there. Certainly what one carries away from the novel most strongly is the evocation of Jutland's free, untrammelled land- and seascapes, and Niels's ardent, if sometimes perplexed response to them. But no work of Andersen's is more imbued with Jutland, is a more fulsome homage to its long history and to its present robust culture, to its indigenous people and to its amazing natural features than ‘A Story from the Dunes’, the writing of which followed a major exploration of the region by the author.
Andersen, that summer of 1859, crossed by barge the Limfjord, which bisects the peninsula making northern Jutland a de facto island. He visited administrators (including the commissioner for the prevention of sand drifts), clergymen (one of them Kierkegaard's elder brother), musicians and painters, thus deepening his knowledge of the province's mores and constituency. He went to see the famous Kloster (Cloisters) at Børglum (the setting for an 1861 tale of his evoking late medieval times and struggles for power within the Church),32 the sand dunes at Rubjerg, and – the culmination of his visit, as it is of Jutland, of the nation state of Denmark and of mainland Europe itself – Skagen.
The hero of ‘A Story from the Dunes’ is born on Jutland's west coast, near the shore on to which his mother was tossed from her wrecked ship by the waves. So metaphorically the sea, which plays such a determining part in Jørgen's life, was also his womb. He grows up strong, intelligent, good at committing songs and stories to memory, skilled at making pictures of ships out of shells, carving sticks into diverse shapes, and singing a melody as soon as he hears it. You could liken him to a fine instrument whose range would be known the world over had it not been confined to a remote corner of Jutland – and, as we have already noted, it is to such an artefact Andersen compares him when his mind has gone: one with loosened strings. All these abilities and demonstrations of a refined taste probably derive from his Spanish antecedents about whom he knows nothing (and whose palacio he unwittingly sees when a sailor-boy going on shore into a Spanish port). On the other hand he is also very much a vigorous young male of Jutland's west coast; hardship and setbacks he takes in his stride. Yet his identity is put to severe tests.
He goes to sea, against his protective affectionate foster-mother's wishes, and suffers not just storms and bad weather but bullying masters whose cruelty he fiercely resents. When he returns he finds that his foster-mother has died. For the next couple of years his working life alternates between strenuous fishing and, together with his pal Morten, signing on as crew-member for ships bound for Norway and Holland. The period also includes his foster-father's death after a fever, and rivalry with Morten over a girl, Else: she prefers Morten, and, after an act of real generosity to them both, one carefully thought out but maybe screening darker feelings (for does he truly wish them well?), Jørgen decides he must leave the neighbourhood. He makes for the house of his foster-mother's uncle, a favourite of his from boyhood when he relished his jokes and anecdotes; this man is an eel merchant in Bovbjerg.
But before he reaches the narrow channel that connects Nissum Fjord with the sea (as always, Andersen is punctilious over geography, of which he had a keen sense), he is arrested for Morten's murder: his friend and rival has been found with a knife in his neck, and Jørgen is the obvious suspect. He is taken to Ringkøbing and imprisoned in a cold, damp jail, where, though he can't understand why such an unjust and terrible thing has happened to him, he comes to feel the grace of God on him and certainty of an existence beyond this earthly one. Maybe this is in part an acknowledgement of the hostile, quasi-murderous emotions he had entertained for his one-time best friend. For Jørgen is not of a cool disposition, he is lively, adventurous, passionate, proud. But we are led to understand that, even in the further tribulations to come, this new knowledge, this comparative serenity will not leave him.
He remains in prison in Ringkøbing for a year before the real killer of Morten is apprehended. Then Jørgen is set free. Even inside the cell he is able to hear the sea and he thinks that just as a man can be carried over its most furious surface and yet survive, so can he endure appalling, unanticipated disasters and remain essentially intact. The story proves this reading of the natural world and our relation to it to be literally untrue – the hero's girlfriend Clara does not survive disaster, and Jørgen himself will also be, to outward perception, an irreparable casualty of the elements. But spiritually – looked at sub specie aeternitatis – one can come through, to attain states of reunion and bliss that to us in our humdrum condition defy imagining.
To show that the world is not all injustice and suffering, a man Jørgen has always liked and admired, Kjøbmand Brønne (Merchant Brønne), takes him into his business and his home – in Skagen.33 He suggests they burn the calendar of the previous year; Jørgen must build a new life for himself in a spot others think of as regrettably remote but which, for all its underdeveloped, primitive aspects, is a place to love and respect. And Jørgen is indeed happy with the merchant and his wife, who grow truly fond of him. Nor do they resent the tenderness that grows up between the young man and their daughter, Clara. One Sunday in particular when the family goes to church and takes Holy Communion makes an indelible impact on him; never will he forget Clara and himself sitting beside each other at the altar to receive the bread and wine. This togetherness confirms his love for her: and somehow strengthens his resolve to follow her to Norway. And indeed the pair do meet up in Christiansand; it is on the way back from there to Skagen that the ship runs aground (as had, so many years earlier, that carrying Jørgen's parents). Clara dies – and with her Jørgen too; that is, he dies to the world as a rational human being able completely to fend for himself.
For his rich, well-born Spanish parents, Andersen tells us, ‘Som en Fest glede Dagene hen, for dem’,34 ‘Like a banquet the days glided past for them.’ That's how in privileged circumstances, life can seem. But it is an illusion. It was an illusion for them; they died as a result of Nature's ineluctable power, long before their planned arrival in St Petersburg. Maybe the uncertainties that beset the fisher communities of Jutland are better guides to what to expect of life, and the dunes of Skagen and the roar and beat of the breakers on its shores better analogues for existence than charming pomegranate gardens in Spain.
The thread we have followed through Jørgen's life history has taken us finally (but Andersen would surely dispute the adverb) to a realm of unmerited suffering. Yet deep within Jørgen's unfathomable mind, images keep themselves alive through the years, ones we have received into our hearts ourselves – above all of himself kneeling beside Clara in the church, of the tears of devotion and love running down her face. So that on the day the catastrophic storm rages and he takes shelter in the church, little knowing that sand will bury it, with himself inside, his mind is a veritable treasure-house of beauties, of moments in earthly life informed by divine spirit – or ‘Sjælens Lys der aldrig vil udslukkes’,35 ‘light of the soul which will never be extinguished’.
In a piece he wrote for the Copenhagen paper Illustreret Tidende, Illustrated News, Andersen recommended distant-seeming Skagen as a place to visit: ‘If you are a painter, follow us here, because you will find a profusion of subjects to paint. Here are scenes to inspire poetry. Here in the Danish environment you will find images of Africa's deserts, of Pompeii's ashes.’36
He wrote prophetically, since Skagen was to attract and give its name to a group of remarkable Danish plein-air artists, who by the late 1870s had cohered into a ‘school’ with shared ideals and artistic practices: Holger Drachmann (1846–1908), Michael Ancher (1849–1927), Anna Brøndum Ancher (1859–1935) and the painter who most famously celebrated them as a fellowship (with erotic currents between them), P.S. Krøyer (1851–1909).37 If we can find much that is harsh and sombre in their canvases, there is also much that is breathtakingly beautiful, recalling the scene-painting of the dunes and the windswept little town in Andersen's story, and often saltily human also. After all, Morten in the story who came to so ugly an end, was also a jolly, libidinous youth of whom one of the older men observed: ‘Morten maatte nok gaae med et Andenæb syet i Buxerne’,38 ‘Morten must go around with a duck's bill stitched to his trousers.’
The solemn events of life in a fishing community, involving struggle against great odds, which the Skagen painters recorded, earning repute for themselves, could all be found in ‘A Story from the Dunes’, so that taken together they form a wonderful coincidence of Danish genius animated by the intensity of folk life. Look at Michael Ancher's great paintings Will He Round the Point? (1879) and Taking the Lifeboat through the Dunes (1883),39 or read his fellow painter, Holger Drachmann's account40 of the Skagen lifeboat man, Lars Kruse who organised the rescue of the foundered Swedish brig Daphne, in winter 1862 (published 1879), and one is back in the cruel but inspiring world of Jørgen and the Brønne family who loved him.
And in his concentration here on a locality within a region intensely interested in its own history and lore, Andersen showed himself very much the European Witness of our title. The modern European nation, as it shaped itself, at once appealed to, and put strain on, those areas with long-standing identities of their own. As Patricia G. Berman writes in In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century (2007): ‘By mid-century, and particularly following the German annexation of Schleswig and Holstein in 1864, a rising sense of nationalism impelled some intellectuals to seek what they considered to be people and places so untouched by foreign influence that they might be identified as symbols of an essential Denmark. Skagen's fishermen provided romantic nationalists with such figures. By the 1870s a core group of these painters had attracted others to Skagen each summer and by the 1880s an art colony had coalesced.’41
All that lies well in the future. In the summer and autumn of 1860 Andersen travelled to Germany and Switzerland, and was distressed when in the former to hear strongly anti-Danish sentiments expressed. In the spring and summer of 1861 he travelled with Edvard Collin's son Jonas, increasingly an important figure in his life, to Italy and Switzerland. The creative links with Germany and its culture (including Swiss-German writing) continue in his works, however. The subject of our next chapter could well be seen – as indeed ‘The Story from the Dunes’ itself can be – as an example of that German genre c.1840–80, of which Gottfried Keller and Theodor Storm were masters, Poetische Realismus:42 fiction, usually in the form of the novella, that makes its impact through a deft weaving of poetic episodes and images, is interested in the life of the imagination, in dreams, uncanny occurrences, etc. and yet does not forswear surface fidelity to life or the sociologically convincing portraiture of a believable community.