‘Iisjomfruen’, ‘The Ice Maiden’, 1861
1
‘Lad os besøge Schweiz’,1 ‘Let us visit Switzerland’, opens ‘Iisjomfruen’, ‘The Ice Maiden’, and Andersen himself was visiting (or rather revisiting) Switzerland when he started work on this arguably most ambitious and searching of all his tales. He had arrived in the country from Italy, with Jonas Collin junior as his rather wearing companion, via the Simplon Pass and St Maurice in the Canton Valais to the town of Bex in Canton Vaud. Here on 18 June 18612 he recorded beginning ‘Alpejægeren’, ‘The Alpine Hunter’. The working title is interesting to us as we reflect on the finished work, since it shows that Andersen's mind was from the first exercised by the plight of its protagonist, Rudy, which, he felt, had something strong and interesting to tell about Switzerland itself. The Simplon and the Rhône valley in which both St Maurice and Bex stand will appear in the final story, and Bex itself will play a determining role. From 18 to 22 June Andersen and Jonas Collin stayed in Montreux on Lake Geneva, ever afterwards associated in the writer's mind with the early stages of composition.
Yet the Swiss features he first directs us to in the tale are the two glaciers between Schreckhorn and Wetterhorn near Grindelwald. His friend Thomas Fearnley3 – Johan Christian Dahl's pupil and a companion of Andersen's in his first stay in Rome, he who had tried to make his life a little more sexually adventurous – had painted splendid oil canvases celebrating these. Schreckhorn, 13,379 feet, 4,078 metres high, would anyway have resonated with many of Andersen's readers since fascination with it virtually initiated the mid-nineteenth-century craze of Alpinism, though a complete ascent was not made until the summer of 1861 itself.
If ‘The Ice Maiden’ is to have a metaphoric application to the development of Switzerland as a nation state, then specificity about place will be vital to it, and indeed the story does repay being read with a map to hand. Dates are no less important. The climax of ‘The Ice Maiden’, Rudy's death, occurs, Andersen informs us, in 1856. And the paragraphs bringing the reader towards the present – a present in which Rudy has no part – paint a country in which tourism is exponentially increasing, with railway lines extended through areas once remote, even secretive.
Rudy's childhood, we learn, belonged to a period ‘for nogle og tyve Aar’,4 ‘twenty-some years before’ the writing of this story. Therefore it's possible to work out that he would have been born – in Canton Valais/Wallis5 – in 1833, actually the year of Andersen's own first, long-treasured visit to Switzerland. So with this in mind, we can begin a close examination of the novella by going through Rudy's biography, attending to its changes in place and time.
When just one year old, Rudy loses his father, a mail-coach driver whose job connects different – often culturally self-contained – regions of this mountainous country. He himself came from the Rhône valley, where his brother still lives. But after his death his widow decides to take their son back to her native Bernese Oberland.6 Her father is a successful wood carver from Meiringen whose home now is close to Grindelwald. Chamois-hunters from the Valais accompany mother and child on their journey, which proceeds over the high mountains rather than along the valley roads. But high on the Gemmi Pass a disaster occurs. Newly fallen snow has covered up a chasm, and the mother slips and falls deep down into it with her child. After strenuous rescue work – ropes and poles are brought from the nearest human habitation – both bodies are retrieved from the crevasse; the mother is dead, but Rudy is revived.
He emerges from the traumatic experience unlike his former self. Before, little Rudy had been noted for his perpetual smile. Not any longer. He grows solemn, mirthless: only when beside a rushing waterfall does he ever smile.
den Forandring var nok skeet med ham i Gletscher-Spalten, i den kolde, underlige Iisverden, hvor Sjælene af de Fordømte ere lukkede ind til Dommens Dag, som Schweizerbonden troer.7
this change took place in him inside the crevasse, in the cold, strange ice-world where the souls of the condemned are locked in till Judgment Day, as the Swiss peasant believes.
These words must be kept firmly in mind when considering those critical interpretations of the story which seek to relate Rudy to personal/psychological issues of Andersen's own and speak of ‘innate’ or ‘congenital’ qualities. A popular belief such as that adumbrated above, if brought to bear on a terrible occurrence hard in itself to assimilate, would undoubtedly affect a child's entire being – and, of course, its development, for it will know that others have not gone through the same ordeal. And so it is with Rudy; he feels cut off from other children, even when associating with them, and in him natural competitiveness takes the form of excelling at essentially solitary pursuits.
His maternal grandfather lives higher up on the mountainside than the village proper. The traditional art he practises recalls the carpentering abilities of Andersen's paternal grandfather (for all his mental impairment), and also those of Thorvaldsen's wood-carver father and grandfather. Yet Rudy is never deeply won over to his art. Yes, he is singled out by visitors (tourists) when, together with other children, he offers for sale the beautiful wooden objects of the locality, but that's because of his ‘alvorligt Ansigt’,8 ‘serious face’. In truth, when inside his grandfather's house, his eye is always on the rifle up among the rafters and not on the many examples of his kinsman's craft: nutcrackers, carved boxes decorated with images of leaves and even of leaping chamois. He is not his paternal uncle's nephew for nothing. But maybe there's some inner compulsion he himself doesn't understand which makes him prefer instruments of death to those of domestic harmony.
Rudy always wants to be alone. Even when herding the goats, he likes exceeding his charges' nimbleness and climbing up to high, inaccessible places, encouraged in doing so by his grandfather's cat, his chief instructor and friend. (He can converse with him, as he can with the dog, Ajola, Andersen claiming this an attribute of almost all small children, one later denied, forgotten or repudiated: the relationship, more, the intimate connection between humans and other animals, is absolutely integral to the story.) With the cat Rudy sits on the ridgepole, in the treetops, on rocky precipices up to the very edge, and ventures too up slopes beyond the treeline. The keen air of the higher altitudes, fragrant with mountain herbs, is his favourite drink; the very swallows recognise him as being like themselves.
When he is eight years old, his father's brother asks that he return to the Rhône valley. For the second time Rudy makes the escorted journey over the mountains instead of through the valleys; his route is precisely given, and therefore easily traceable, and essential to the story's paradigmatic nature. The formidable ascent involved of the massif's north side – ‘Opad, altid opad gik det …’9 ‘Upward, always upward it went …’ – does not exhaust the little boy as much as he feared, though for a moment he looks up at the great glacier, remembering that fateful journey of his infancy and the loss of his mother to a crevasse. Even so he maintains his balance ‘fast som en Gemse’,10 ‘steady as a chamois’. This is the first time Rudy has been likened to the chamois he will become so adept at hunting with his gun, our first intimation that when he's stalking them it's a case of a predator pursuing his own kind, his own kin, to their deaths.
In front of Rudy stand those three great peaks so emblematic of Switzerland's national image and with which he has been familiar all his childhood though has never before seen close to: the Jungfrau, the Eiger, the Mönch.11 The first and highest of these Andersen calls by the Danish rendering of its German name: Jomfruen, the Young Girl or Young Virgin (for there is a strong current of abjuration of warm human sexuality throughout the story), the major residence of the Ice Maiden/Virgin herself. Interestingly – and we know how Andersen loved to gather information about places he wrote about – the party who first reached the Jungfrau's summit on 3 August 1811 consisted of two brothers from Aarau (the Meyers) plus two chamois hunters from the Valais.
As in ‘The Snow Queen’, spiritual forces, taken into and then dominating our psyche, specific places traditionally identified with them, and the immutable laws of physical geography are indivisible, interpenetrative. The Eiger and two peaks beyond it as seen from this route, the Wetterhorn and the Schreckhorn, cradle a formidable instance of Nature's destructive capacity, the Föhn12 wind which will resound through the novella. The men accompanying Rudy hear this in its early stage in their stopping-place high on the pass, and tell him not to fall asleep but be ready to move off. When the Föhn descends, its ferocity intensifies; down in the valley it can break trees like reeds and shift houses from one side of the river to the other like chess pieces, so Andersen tells us, faithful to facts.
Rudy's journey to his uncle (his father's family) takes him out of German-speaking (Protestant) Switzerland down into a strongly francophone and Catholic region. ‘Alt var Nyt for Rudy, Paaklaedning, Skik og Brug, Sproget selv. …’13 ‘Everything was new for Rudy, clothes, common practice, speech itself. …’. ‘“Her er ikke saa slemt i Canton Wallis,”’ sagde Farbro'er.14 ‘“It's not so bad here in Canton Valais [Wallis]”,’ said his uncle (his father's brother). (Andersen uses throughout the tale the German form of Swiss names, despite the key importance to the tale of the fact that in Valais/Wallis most people speak French.) His uncle vaunts pro-French views, has married a French wife, and in conversation commends the French (under Napoleon) for many enterprises: ‘saa sang Farbro'er en fransk Vise og raabte Hurra for Napoleon Bonaparte’,15 ‘then Uncle sang a French song and yelled out Hurrah for Napoleon Bonaparte’ – just as Andersen's own father might have done.
Uncle and nephew get on well, and become good mates. His uncle soon realises Rudy's aptitude with a gun, and takes him chamois hunting. Under his expert guidance the boy becomes, within a comparatively short time, an accomplished hunter of these animals with their acrobatic ability to leap, land on precarious ledges and then leap away again. Rudy's own movements emulate theirs, but if the chamois are clever, he has to be cleverer still. His uncle teaches him a useful trick: by hanging coat and hat on an alpenstock a hunter can fool chamois into bounding away in the direction that suits his purpose. This method of decoy is of great significance to the novella; many years later it crops up in the dream Rudy's troubled fiancée, Babette has on the eve of her marriage to him, seemingly questioning his very identity. But the attentive reader will have had doubts about this even in the early chapters.
It is when the two of them are out chamois hunting that Rudy's uncle meets his death. They have climbed to a high altitude, the older man is crawling upwards on his stomach towards their quarry, scattering loose stones into black depths below, Rudy is a hundred paces behind him, the rock still firm underfoot. The uncle has eyes only for the chamois, who has her kid with her. Rudy, on the other hand, can see a vulture swooping down towards the man, clearly intending to dislodge him and turn him into carrion. Rudi aims for the bird while his uncle aims for the chamois, which he kills, though her kid runs away, free. Rudy, however, fails to hit the vulture; terrified, it speeds off. Older and younger man begin a cheery enough descent, feeling a good day's hunting has been had, when a dreadful noise makes them turn round: an avalanche is coming towards them. It kills the uncle, smashing his head in, but Rudy preserves his own life by pressing himself down to the ground. This is the first time he experiences real fear. From this episode we can surely infer two truths contributory to the work's overall meaning but not apparent to Rudy himself.
In bringing about the separation through death of a young being from his mother, his uncle has perpetrated a tragedy identical to Rudy's as an infant (also in the company of chamois-hunters). Misfortune when it befalls the non-human animal causes no less distress and sorrow than when it befalls the human. The second truth is that, for all his undoubted, indeed remarkable skills, Rudy can never attain superiority over indomitable Nature itself. Thematically it has to be his shot at the vulture (fired higher into the air than his uncle's) that dislodges the snow ridges and thus sets the deadly avalanche in motion.
As his French aunt-by-marriage/foster-mother tells him on hearing of her husband's death, Rudy is now the breadwinner of the household, at an early age (but by no means unprecedentedly or improbably). This important fact alone – and it is one never forgotten, but regularly, if lightly, insisted on – brings ‘The Ice Maiden’ (on one level anyway) far nearer mainstream nineteenth-century fiction than any other major fairy tale of Andersen's. The marriage of a credible external world to an equally credible inner or fantasy one is a characteristic of the German Novelle to which category, in length, construction and style, this can legitimately be thought to belong. We gather that Rudy acquits himself in his new role reliably, conscientiously and with a certain aplomb, which earns him a reputation in his community. Nevertheless there is a discrepancy between his social and his naked selves that will widen and occupy our attention. The desire, the psychic need for overreach so characteristic of his earliest years do not significantly abate, his predicament relating him, however loosely, to a long line of nineteenth-century novel protagonists from Stendhal to Mark Twain. (Both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn would surely have understood Rudy perfectly):
‘Hvem er den bedste Skytte i Canton Wallis?’ Ja, det vidste Gemserne: ‘Tag Dig iagt for Rudy!’ kunde de sige. ‘Hvem er den kjønneste Skytte?’ ‘Ja, det er Rudy!’ sagde Pigerne, men de sagde ikke, ‘tag Dig iagt for Rudy!’ det sagde ikke engang de alvorlige Mødre; thi han nikkede ligesaa venligt til dem som til unge Piger, han var saa kjæk og glad, hans Kinder vare brune, hans Tænder friske hvide, og Øinene skinnede kulsorte, en kjøn Karl var han og kun tyve Aar.16
‘Who is the best shot in the Canton Valais?’ Yes, the chamois knew it: ‘Be on your guard against Rudy!’ they would say. ‘Who is the most handsome shot?’ ‘Yes, that's Rudy!’ said the girls, but they didn't say, ‘Be on your guard against Rudy!’ not even the serious-minded mothers said it; for he nodded just as friendlily to them as to the young girls, he was so good-spirited and cheerful, his cheeks were tan, his teeth a clean white, and his eyes shone coal-black, a handsome fellow and only twenty years old.
Yet even in this apparent encomium, built up from local chit-chat, we can detect the seeds of Rudy's ultimate inability to accommodate his whole self to his society, of his instinctual choice of the wilderness over civilisation, of – for it surely amounts to this – Thanatos over Eros. Why this decorum with girls where one might have expected more dash, more adventurousness (though we are to learn that, clandestinely, he has in fact kissed the schoolmaster's daughter, Anette, and other girls too after village dances)? What we learn of other aspects of his life shows him to have these qualities pre-eminently. His uncle was a cooper and has taught him the trade, but he has no interest in it. By common consent he is the best mountain guide in the area, the beneficiary of lessons from the cat in his Oberland childhood and, of course, from the chamois – and from his late uncle who also worked as a guide. But it is hunting to which he devotes his attentions and which brings in income.
His lack of real interest in the girls of his neighbourhood is offset by his sudden aspiration – paralleling his persistence as a mountain hunter – to win a girl outside his village, the daughter of a rich miller in the town of Bex. Just as chamois alight on ledges far beyond normal human range, so Babette stands outside Rudy's own economic and social milieu. Babette has been well educated, and brought up in a house reflecting her father's social position: large, three-storeyed, turreted, close to a rushing stream and surrounded by walnut trees. Nevertheless, though they have never had a proper conversation, a current of attraction has passed between the youth and the girl. He has business in Bex, and decides to pay the miller's house a visit.
We can work out from later details in this same chapter – IV, ‘Babette’ – that Rudy lives in or near Leuk, in the upper stretch of the Valais section of the Rhône valley. His west-bound route to Bex is once again made guidebook-clear to us: no work of fiction better justifies the explorations of Franco Moretti's admirable Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (1998)17 than ‘The Ice Maiden’. There being no railway then, Rudy takes an ever-narrower road from Sion following the valley with its bend like, he thinks, an elbow (the map will show how right this observation is) – and so up to St Maurice and the border with the next canton, Vaud;18 this frontier is marked with an old tower on the one side and on the other, at the end of the river-spanning stone bridge, with a tollhouse. Whereas Valais does have, in its eastern valleys, a sizeable number of German-speakers, Vaud, with its capital Lausanne, is far more predominantly French-speaking, and some of its most famous towns – which we will visit in the latter part of the story – Vevey and Montreux, both on Lake Geneva (Lac Léman) are flourishing representatives of long-established French-Swiss culture. Even today Valais is Catholic; Vaud – partly by influence from Calvin's city of Geneva – strongly Protestant.
Bex itself, the place, as we have seen, where Andersen actually began writing ‘The Ice Maiden’, is virtually a character in this novella. The francophone town is deftly evoked, culturally a cut above any community Rudy has hitherto known, and no house in it more so than Babette's home. He is daunted by his self-imposed social challenge as he has never been by his many harsh physical ones. The mill-house would appear to lie on the far side of Bex from the Rhône bridge. To reach it Rudy takes the road out of the town, passing beneath the snow-capped peaks of Les Diablerets, in fact, at 10,531 feet, 3,210 metres the highest point in Canton Vaud.
Rudy learns that the miller and his daughter are away in Interlaken, for a shooting contest that will draw sportsmen and their followers from all over Switzerland's German cantons. He decides to go there. Interlaken is a long way off by road, but as a chamois-hunter he knows a far shorter if extremely precipitous route there, across the mountains, essentially that taken in his infancy to Grindelwald and then retraced when he was eight years old. He has no doubt he will win the shooting contest (he does!) and the admiration of Babette (he wins this too), so to Interlaken he makes his hunter's way: over the Gemmi Pass (as Andersen specifically informs us), above Kandersteg, with prospects of the Schreckhorn – the highest peak wholly in the Bernese Oberland, the northernmost in the Alpine block, capped by ice and the hardest to climb: ‘det løftede sin hvidpuddrede Steenfinger høit i den blaae Luft’,19 ‘it lifted its white-powdered stone finger high in the blue air’. He then follows the course of the two fast-flowing glacier-fed Lütschine rivers, Schwarze and Weisse, to their union at Zweilütschinen, where he has the satisfaction of seeing his destination, the famous resort between the lakes of Thun and Brienz before him, full of hotels and tourists, German-speaking, praised by Goethe and frequented by Andersen's friend, the late Felix Mendelssohn.
At the marksmanship contest Rudy makes a great impression on everybody, spectators and performers alike. He acquits himself spectacularly as a shot; people want to know who he is: ‘“Han taler det franske Sprog, som det tales i Canton Wallis! Han gør sig ogsaa ganske godt tydeligt i vort Tydsk!”20 ‘“He speaks French as it's spoken in Canton Valais! He also expresses himself clearly enough in our German!’ This is a telling detail; to an important degree Rudy straddles both major components of Swiss culture, the French and the German, a great advantage to him initially, but also perhaps – as we shall see – an instrument in his eventual failure. The miller himself identifies Rudy as coming from the Valais, which, here in the Oberland, he chooses to regard as brother-canton to his own Vaud, and therefore takes a local patriot's pride in Rudy's performance. His enthusiastic reception facilitates Rudy's acquaintance with Babette, who enchants him close to as much as from a distance; she chatters away to him freely, and the two stroll pleasantly through the avenues of the resort. Before long he is admitting to her that he really came to Interlaken on her account.
Andersen gives us a convincing enough précis of Babette's talk which Rudy finds so irresistible: its subjects the many absurdities in dress and gait of the visiting foreign ladies, her elegant English godmother, the brooch that lady gave her, which is now on her own bodice. The marksman has entered a very different sphere from that of pursuing chamois or even snatching kisses from the girls in Leuk, and it is hard to believe that, the physical charms of the speaker apart, it is at all congenial to him. Wouldn't it be right to remember here the mock human being of coat and hat on an alpenstock set up to deceive the chamois?
Triumphant, laden with trophies, Rudy now makes the arduous mountain journey back home, edging the great Jungfrau/Jomfru, following the Lütschine upstream now, and passing close to the Schreckhorn. This chapter – V, ‘Paa Hjemveien’, ‘On the Journey Home’ – is the most difficult to grasp on first reading, yet it surely contains the key to the work's central preoccupation. For it presents the first direct confrontation by Rudy of Iisjomfruen, the Ice Maiden (or, more literally, of one of her representatives, or servants). Behind the history we have followed of a young man leading a recognisable enough life, we have already been made aware of an unquenchable malignant power, which has expressed itself in the two deaths so consequential to his history. We must now look at what Andersen has told us so far about the Ice Maiden, and the portents in his descriptions of what is devastatingly to come.
We hear of her first in the opening chapter, after Andersen has revealed how Rudy's mother died. Though her son did not perish, but was rescued and restored by the men of the party, the Ice Maiden has not forgotten him. Her palace may lie within the fatal glacier, but she is also ‘et Luftens Barn’,21 ‘a child of the air’, able to scale the iciest, tallest peaks with the grace of a chamois and to sail down rapid Alpine rivers. She declares: ‘“min er Magten! … En deilig Dreng stjal man fra mig, en Dreng jeg havde kysset, men ikke kysset til døde. Han er igjen imellem Menneskene … min er han, jeg henter ham!”22 ‘“Mine is the power! … A handsome boy they stole from me, a boy I had kissed, but not kissed till dead. He is again among human beings. … he is mine, I will get him!”’ She has minions to carry out her will, chief among them Svimlen (Giddiness or Vertigo), an unfortunate enemy for the intrepid climber, Rudy to have. Thanks to the lessons of the cat – and the example of the chamois themselves – he manages to evade her attentions, not least as the beloved of the force within Nature actively opposing her, represented by ‘Solstraalernes Døttre’,23 ‘the sunbeams’ daughters' and manifest in the celebrated alpenglow on the mountains in the evening.
The second presentation of the Ice Maiden occurs, in the same topographical context, during eight-year-old Rudy's return journey to the Rhône Valley. For a moment, no more, he remembers what he has been told about his mother's death and his own narrow escape. The terrain all around awes him; he appreciates its deadliness when he sees the butterflies and bees which have flown too high up as little corpses among the snows, and thinks the glaciers look as if they are holding hands (that is, united in their hostility to living beings): ‘hver er et Glaspalads for Iisjomfruen, hvis Magt og Villie er: at fange og begrave’,24 ‘each was a glass-palace for the Ice Maiden whose power and wish are to capture and to bury’. This fresh experience of the forces that rule the mountains enters the boy's ineradicable sense of what life entails, just as his infantile one has been incorporated into his psyche. ‘Indtrykket af den hele Vandring, Nattekvarteret heroppe, og Veien videre frem, de dybe Fjeldkløfter, hvor Vandet, i en tankesvimlende lang Tid, havde gjennemsavet Steenblokkene, heftede sig uforglemmelig i Rudys Erindring’.25 ‘The impression of the entire trek, the night-camp high up, and the path going onwards, the deep mountain clefts where the water, for a mind-dizzying length of time, had sawn through the stone blocks, fastened itself unforgettably on to Rudy's memory.’ These indelible features can be all classed as appurtenances of the Ice Maiden, a personification of what in Nature we find hardest to grasp – and also to avoid.
By the time of Rudy's third encounter (Chapter V) he is more man than boy, tested by severe misfortune and by his own consistent pitting of his wits against Nature at its most dangerous. Moreover, he believes himself mature enough for love, and with the daughter of a socially well established man. Once more he is making the Bernese Oberland /Canton Valais crossing, at a great altitude with the river Lütschine roaring beside him.
Tæt ved Rudy gik pludselig en ung Pige, han havde ikke bemærket hende, før hun var lige tæt ved ham; ogsaa hun vilde over Fjeldet. Hendes Øine havde en egen Magt, man maatte see ind i dem, de vare saa selsomt glasklare, saa dybe, bundløse.
‘Har Du en Kjæreste?’ spurgte Rudy; al hans Tanke var fyldt med at have en Kjæreste.
‘Jeg har ingen!’ sagde hun og loe, men det var, som hun talte ikke et sandt Ord.26
Suddenly a young girl was walking beside Rudy; he hadn't noticed her before she was quite close to him; she too was bound over the mountain. Her eyes had a peculiar power, one had to look into them, they were so weirdly crystal-clear, so deep, fathomless.
‘Do you have a sweetheart?’ asked Rudy; all his thoughts were filled with having a sweetheart.
‘No, I do not!’ she said and laughed, but it was as though she didn't speak a true word.
She laughs, one assumes, because she intends her sweetheart to be Rudy himself. And in asking so bold a question wasn't Rudy soliciting her? Next she proposes they take a short cut over the pass which Rudy knows only too well will lead to a crevasse. The girl tells him she knows the mountains better than he does; he belongs essentially to the valley. ‘“Heroppe skal man tænke paa Iisjomfruen, hun er ikke Menneskene god, siger Menneskene!”’27 ‘“Up here one should think about the Ice Maiden, she is not good to people, the people say.”’ He protests, ‘“Jeg frygter hende ikke”’, ‘“I am not frightened of her.”’ But perhaps it would have been better for him had he allowed himself to be so; fearlessness is too often attained at the expense of proper knowledge, including self-knowledge, and so makes for catastrophe. The matter central to this close-worked, perplexing short chapter will reassert itself in Chapter XII, ‘Onde Magter’, ‘Evil Forces’.
Nothing in this strange incident refuses to yield to a subjective interpretation. Here is a young man homeward bound who, for the first time ever, has won himself a sweetheart who really appeals to him. His conscious mind is too much under the influence of custom and convention for him to admit to anything less than wholehearted joy over this. But his unconscious has reacted very differently. The erotic charge of the encounter with this mountain maid can scarcely be doubted, and seems stronger still when taken into conjunction with what we will find in Chapter XII. Babette – as has been made only too clear to us – is still immersed in adolescent romance about jewellery, beaux, engagements and weddings, and while this is for the moment delightfully attractive to him, she has not managed to reach the deeper, darker regions of his being, part-formed by those very features of Nature he is now facing again.
What truly has happened is that he has successfully met a social challenge that satisfies his self-image as a male in exactly the same way as winning the marksmanship contest did. Andersen means us to take the two triumphs in tandem – and to see the hollowness behind them. Just as the shooting in Interlaken was not of the endangering, morally debatable kind in which Rudy excelled up in the Alps, so his courtship of Babette has bypassed the fiercer, hard-to-tame aspects of his own sexuality. But here – in the anti-human desolation of the Alpine pass – he sees them, face to face, probably for the first time ever … It grows dark, the girl offers to help him; he needs no girl's help, not yet, he says, and turns his back on her.
Behind him in the gathering blizzard Rudy hears her laughing and singing: ‘det klang saa underligt. Det var nok Troldtøi i Iisjomfruens Tjeneste; Rudy havde hørt om det, da han som Lille overnattede heroppe paa sin Vandring over Bjergene’.28 ‘it sounded so strange. It was some magic creature in the Ice Maiden's service. Rudy had heard about that when as a child he spent the night up here during his trek over the mountains.’ Exactly so; he can import material from his childhood both to endorse and to exteriorise his present bewilderment. But then, gaining the eminence after which the path descends towards his home valley, he sees in the clear sky towards Chamonix two bright stars. The known physical universe has asserted itself, leading him to think with mistaken complacency about Babette – and the second half of his history can begin. We can follow this in the knowledge that Rudy has now at last become aware of the Ice Maiden – externally and, terrifyingly, internally. This being the case, we see that the course of his life could never meet the desiderata of the norm.
The miller, happy to see Rudy in his home on account of his sporting prowess and delighting in his tales of this, is, on the other hand, unsure of him as a suitor for his beloved only daughter. Once more this novella is dealing with the very stuff of conventional fiction, and entirely accurately. He makes a wager with him. Rudy has admitted to turning down an Englishman's offer of gold, the reward for bringing down alive an eaglet now occupying a remote lofty nest on a Canton Valais mountainside. Madness to try, he'd thought, there's a limit to everything. Now the miller tells him, half in jest, that if he attempts the feat and succeeds, he can certainly have Babette. Rudy accepts the challenge, performs the task he himself declared impossible, and thus wins the miller's consent and Babette's hand. This constitutes what Ludwig Tieck called the Wendepunkt, essential in his view to the novella, its surprise turning-point. It surprises because what should constitute the start of Rudy's progress to the desired state of fulfilment marks instead the victory of those dark forces of which we have been only intermittently aware – and he himself, until that last episode, aware only vicariously. If, however, we look more closely at the chapter entitled – as Andersen had once intended the whole work to be – ‘Ørnereden’, ‘The Eagle's Nest’, we can see that the history's dark conclusion is nothing less than an inevitability.
The first stage of the eaglet's capture – against which his friends, while impressed by his daring spirit, advise Rudy – has to be carried out at night. Then, when day breaks, the fierce eagle guarding the nest can be shot, and, at enormous bodily risk, Rudy will be able to reach out into the nest – defying, as he does, the Ice Maiden's minion ‘Svimlen’, ‘Giddiness/Vertigo’ – to get the young bird who is the object of the whole operation.
For the second time – the first preceded his uncle's death from the avalanche – Rudy has deliberately, following his own hunter's code, brought about the orphaning of a wild creature, depriving it of the relation to a caring mother indispensable to every animal, bird or mammal, inflicting on it his own fate dealt him en route to Grindelwald. Furthermore, the undertaking reveals the omnipresence of cruelty in earthly existence, a cruelty Rudy is now himself compounding. As he peers into the nest itself, he chokes on the stench of the carrion there, all the rotting corpses of lambs, chamois, other birds that the eagles have preyed on. His deed – without his realising it – has placed him on the side of his apparent enemy, the Ice Maiden, and against the harmonious life available in Bex. Paradoxically, by first risking his life and then saving it, he has, in the longer run, lost it. His victory wins him the miller's kindness and the hand of Babette, but, ironically, it ensures that he never enjoys the warmly human reward he believes he is seeking. He will continue to belong to the wilderness to the point of abandoning the living for the realm of death itself.
og nede i det sorte, gabende Dyb, paa det ilende Vand, sad Iisjomfruen selv med sit lange, hvidgrønne Haar og stirrede med Dødsøine som to Bøssepiber.
‘Nu fanger jeg Dig!’29
and down in the black gaping deep, on the rushing water the Ice Maiden herself, with her long, pale green hair sat and stared with eyes of death like two barrels of a gun.
‘Now I will get you!’
When he comes down from the Valais mountainside back to the house in Bex, the miller and his daughter are so impressed that Rudy and Babette are as good as affianced. But Andersen's account of the arrival of the captured bird in the miller's house is a vivid and disquieting one, and surely constitutes the novella's very kernel:
‘Her er det Forlangte!’ sagte Rudy, der traadte ind hos Mølleren i Bex og satte paa Gulvet en stor Kurv, tog saa Klædet af, og der gloede frem to gule, sortkransede Øine, saa gnistrende, saa vilde, ret til at brænde og bide sig fast hvor de saae; det korte, stærke Næb gabede til Bid, Halsen var rød og dunet.’30
‘Here is what you asked for!’ said Rudy, as he entered the miller's house in Bex and set down on the floor a large basket, took the cloth off, and there glared out two yellow, black-rimmed eyes, so flashing, so wild, ready to burn and to fasten on to whatever they saw; the short, strong beak opened to bite, the neck was red and down-covered.
What pity we feel for this wild bird brought into a world he cannot understand or escape because of a faux-romantic whim! But the interest of this paragraph doesn't end there. We have been enabled at last to ‘place’ Rudy in the scheme of things: the resentful eaglet he has orphaned is an analogue of himself. In truth he is as thoroughly an outsider in this bourgeois home as the bird of prey, and this despite the subsequent billing-and-cooing with Babette during the ensuing winter cosiness as the two plan their wedding. Not only this! Rudy is essentially an outsider in society itself, as it is establishing and confirming itself in this ever more progressive and affluent country, whose career has parallels with that of Denmark. Rudy's dilemma is, in Andersen's view, inseparable from the complex development of Switzerland, as he had followed it over three decades.
2
By the time Andersen was writing ‘The Ice Maiden’, Switzerland was considered a template for socio-political development within Europe. For all the antiquity of its traditions, it represented an American-style federation of peoples differing from one another in language and faith but bound together by common belief in what nationhood should signify, by firm moral priorities and by centuries-long shared experience of geographically unique territory. Switzerland appealed to the thinkers of the Enlightenment, while the historians contemporaneous with them stressed the pivotal importance to the country's identity of the fourteenth-century hero commemorated in ballads and folk drama, William Tell. In the next century Schiller's great drama, his last, Wilhelm Tell (1804) and Rossini's opera Guglielmo Tell (1807)31 emblazoned this charismatic figure more fully on the European consciousness: his being compelled by representatives of Austrian Hapsburg tyranny to shoot an apple placed on his own son's head, his killing of the cruel enforcer of this test, not as part of a personal vendetta but out of desire for his country-folk not to suffer any longer. In ‘The Ice Maiden’ the miller has a weathervane on the turret of his house in the shape of Tell's apple.
It is absolutely central to Andersen's thesis that Rudy, who combines in his own person the two dominant ethnic groups of Switzerland, should be, like its national hero, an expert marksman, winning championships and bringing down its most elusive and prized fauna, quintessential to Alpine life (chamois and eagle). The question we are invited to ask ourselves is what could be the meritorious advantage, let alone the societal relevance, of such accomplishments – and the deeds proving them – to the vanguard society Switzerland had become by the 1860s: prosperous, neutral, internationalist, sophisticated, and thriving on that most internationalist and sophisticated activity: tourism?
Already the country's more turbulent recent history had receded from popular view,32 though Andersen takes great care to remind us of key features still discernible. Victorious Revolutionary France dismantled the Swiss cantonal structure in 1798, replacing it with centralised government. The Helvetic Republic was not popular with the majority of its subjects, who subsequently refused to fight for it against France's enemies when the Russians and Austrians invaded. In 1803 Napoleon's Act of Mediation gave back to the Swiss their canton system. And the Congress of Vienna of 1813, so detrimental to Denmark, worked favourably for Switzerland, recognising its independence and neutrality and bringing back into the Confederation three cantons not included in the Helvetic Republic, one of them being the Valais. Rudy's uncle was pro-French, we recall, with a French wife; he sang songs honouring Napoleon and liked to speak of French achievements, above all the construction of the Simplon Pass in the Valais, which transformed travel into Italy. However, disputes between cultural blocs were stressful, and led to the formation of the Sonderbund by seven Catholic and conservative states, – and to the brief Sonderbundskrieg, the Sonderbund war of November 1847, only a month long and with only a hundred casualties.
This conflict, resolved by the new Swiss Constitution of 1848, which, while allowing for certain canton rights, was strongly federalist, has definite relevance to Rudy's personal history. The Valais was not just a member of the Sonderbund but the last to give in to central military force. Its government built fortifications at St Maurice, on the opposite bank of the Rhône to Bex, as we have seen, from which it intended to launch an attack on Vaud, that historical stronghold of Protestantism. This was called off. But when the miller and Rudy encounter one another at Interlaken in the early 1850s, armed opposition between their cantons is a comparatively recent experience. The miller's heartily expressed feeling that men from the Valais in general, and Rudy the champion in particular, are brothers because of the French language they share, is not therefore without inner qualification. For his part Rudy would have realised this, and been pleased and relieved at the man's friendliness – perhaps indeed, on this very account, overrating his bonhomie. In truth there is ambivalence on Rudy's side too, not just about the Vaudois, whom he may well think of as ‘stuck-up’, but about French culture generally. After all, Rudy had had to be informed that the Rhône he saw every day later flowed past the great sophisticated city of Lyons, which his uncle was so proud of having visited. And he will remain throughout his short life not only a (francophone) Valais youth and backwoodsman, but a boy of the Bernese Oberland, reared in a remote German-speaking wood-carving and goat-herding community. Even there he had been more at home in the wild than in the village.
During the harsh winter that follows, the Ice Maiden keeps her eye on a seemingly changed Rudy. For all the power of Andersen's personification, which includes the credible rhetoric ascribed to her, we can legitimately regard her as an interior force begotten on the psyche by exterior forces and phenomena that most modern belief- or value-systems find hard to accommodate:
Iisjomfruen red paa den susende Vind hen over de dybeste Dale. Sneetæppet var lagt heelt ned til Bex, hun kunde komme der og see Rudy inden Døre, mere end han var vant til, han sad hos Babette.33
The Ice Maiden rode on the howling wind across the deepest valleys. The blanket of snow lay right down to Bex, she could go and see Rudy indoors, more than was usual for him, he was sitting at Babette's.
Is it she who is stalking him, as the literal reading would indicate, or are we, in truth, seeing into a Rudy stifled by this uncharacteristic and interior way of passing time, and thus unwittingly compelled to find an external correlative for his condition? The second interpretation is by no means vitiated by the next chapter, IX, actually entitled ‘Iisjomfruen’, which presents her particular Weltanschauung (but is it also – were he able to intellectualise his position – Rudy's own?) while insisting that we view her – as we are now viewing Rudy and Babette – as components of Switzerland itself.
It is spring, traditionally the time of courtship, love and weddings, and the Rhône – river of the French Cantons of Valois and Vaud – is rushing along in fullest spate, swollen with melting glaciers, effluvia from the Ice Maiden's Palace in the high Alps of the German cantons. Up there she sits and looks down, and what she sees of human activity infuriates her. For in the sunlight of the new season people are on the move, hard at work, breaking up rocks: the construction of roads and tunnels and railways is under way, to diminish Nature's power, facilitate communication, ease some of the hardships of life in so stubborn a land – and, not least, to enable more and more human beings from elsewhere to look wonderingly at the stupendous mountain scenery. All this fills the Ice Maiden with violent loathing: ‘#x201C;Aandskræfter, som solens Børn kalder Eder! … Kryb er I! En rullende Sneebold, og I og Eders Huse og Byer ere masede og udviskede!”’34 ‘“Intellectual powers, as the sun's children call you! … Vermin you are! One rolling snowball, and you and your houses and towns are crushed and obliterated!”’
Time and time again, every year of our lives, are her words vindicated – and yet isn't there something splendid and virtuous about enterprises that counter this perpetual threat? These human endeavours – which Andersen now lets us see more closely – and those planning and carrying them out, the engineers, builders, architects – we remember Dickens's celebrations of these dedicated, new professional men in Bleak House and Little Dorrit35 – and those toiling intently, tirelessly, even selflessly, on their behalf, are in fact serving the creative forces of Nature, visible everywhere in the capabilities of animals and birds, and at no season more so than spring. (They are morally preferable, we feel, to the stalking of chamois to their deaths, or the violation of a nest, which make up Rudy's greatest achievements.) ‘“De lege Muldvarp”,’36 ‘“they're playing moles,”’ observes the Ice Maiden, ‘“de grave Gange”’, ‘“they dig passages”’. And again, ‘“De lege Herrer dernede, Aandskræfterne! … Naturmagternes Kræfter ere dog de raadende!”’, ‘“They are playing at gods down there, the intellectual powers! The powers of Nature's forces are still the controlling ones.”’
But the Ice Maiden is speaking only of those she has under her sway. Nature also contains benign generosity, and the powers that represent these aspects applaud and bless all creative undertakings. ‘Men Solens Børn sang endnu høiere om Menneske-Tanken, der raader, der spænder Havet under Aag, flytter Bjerge, fylder Dale; Menneske-Tanken, der er Naturkræfternes Herre.’37 ‘But the children of the sun sang even louder about Human Intelligence, which prevails, which hitches the sea to its harness, shifts mountains, fills valleys; human thought which is the master of Nature's forces.’
And even as the Ice Maiden speaks her scorn, a party of well-equipped travellers, perilously near her glacier palace, manage to evade her elemental expression of it, and a train comes along through the valley she is grimly surveying. She can see every passenger on it – and they include Rudy, Babette and the miller himself (in jovial mood). The eastern end of the Rhône valley now has a train service – we have reached the 1850s – which will undergo improvements to everyone's benefit by the end of the decade, which is also the end-point of the novella itself. ‘“Der sidde de To!”’ fumes the Ice Maiden, ‘“Mangen Gemse har jeg knust, Millioner Alperoser … jeg sletter dem ud!”’38 ‘“There sit those two … Many chamois have I crushed, millions of Alpine roses … I wipe them out”’
With seamless artistry Andersen moves from invisible forces rendered disturbingly visible and articulate to a topographical presentation perfectly consonant with his own factually immaculate travelogues; it brings to mind on the one hand Baedeker, on the other the whole line of nineteenth-century novelists intent on limpid descriptions of recognisable places, from Flaubert and Turgenev, through de Maupassant to Henry James. It is a deft transition too since we have arrived where that train, which so incensed the Ice Maiden, was bound: the resorts which make a garland, as Andersen puts it, on the north-eastern shore of Lake Geneva (Lac Léman): Villeneuve, Vernex (for seeing the Château de Chillon made famous by Byron), Clarens, Montreux where Babette's English godmother is staying, the reason for the trip, and Vevey. ‘At Montreux,’ wrote Andersen, ‘was wrought my Wonder Story “The Ice Maiden” … in which I would show the Swiss Nature as it had lain in my thoughts after many visits to that glorious land.’39 And indeed, as we have seen, thinking about Switzerland – its constituents, its progress, its likely future – is what has promoted the whole novella, which now takes a new turn, just as it does topographically: we watch Rudy the victor translated into Rudy the loser, the discarded.
Babette's English godmother has brought to her Montreux pension her daughters and their cousin, a foppish, flirtatious young man who lays instant siege to Babette. A friendly woman, keen to make friends with her god-daughter's fiancé, the Englishwoman generates an atmosphere of well-to-do culture – books, sheet music and drawings spread out on the table in her room! – with which Rudy simply cannot cope. ‘Rudy, der ellers altid var kjæk, livsfrisk og freidig, følte sig slet ikke i sit Es…40 ‘Rudy, who normally was always bold, lively and confident, felt himself not at all in his element…’ Being so ill at ease affects even his usually lithe movements. While his companions stroll leisurely about like the sightseers they are; he becomes apathetic. Looking at tourist high spots like the Château de Chillon41 bores him, and he is downright irritated when the English cousin presents Babette with Byron's poem, ‘The Prisoner of Chillon’ (translated into French). Normal enough male jealousy is obviously one reason for his objection, but so too is his own utter indifference to the romantic appeal of both place and associations. He sees Chillon, says Andersen, as merely the site of an execution in the past, he has a severely literal mind, and therefore longs to be away from all the civilised chatter and Babette's obvious enjoyment of it – to be for example out on the lonely little island in the lake with the three acacia trees. And yet, could he understand or tolerate them, the opening lines of Byron's sonnet are not inapplicable to Rudy himself:
Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! Thou art,
For there thy habitation is the heart –
The heart which love of thee alone can bind;42
Rudy's reactions to these English visitors – and to Babette's very different response to them – are conveyed with a shrewd sensitivity; Turgenev, Henry James, Theodor Fontane come to mind as we both feel for Rudy's emotional states and place them sociologically and psychologically. The reactions intensify, and when later he not only discovers that the English cousin is a guest at the mill in Bex, but that he has climbed up to have a view of Babette in her bedroom, his fury turns violent. Convincingly, Andersen portrays Babette as not wholly guiltless in all this business, but it is an innocent kind of complicity; at nineteen years old, she is, perhaps a little too easily, flattered by the young Englishman's advances, and the idea of seeing Rudy jealous amuses her (and pleases her vanity). Babette is presented throughout the chapters of their courtship as a normal enough, indeed not especially interesting, specimen of young womanhood; it is only on the last page that she will undergo her unforgettable transfiguration.
In truth Babette has not connived at the Englishman's foolish venture to her window, but Rudy chooses to believe the worst of her, and goes off in dudgeon. He takes the path over the mountains from Bex to his home village, partly to assuage his anger with strenuous exercise; this is territory which he feels is his own, the southern range of the Berner Alps. With its uncannily inspirited side he is already familiar. Up here – Chapter XII is specifically entitled ‘Evil Forces’, ‘Onde Magter’ – he meets one of the Ice Maiden's minions, but is she this? Maybe she is a mere country girl who, like Rudy himself, belongs to the untamed rather than the tamed world. Certainly she bears more than a passing resemblance to that first girl towards whom Rudy was drawn sexually rather than through romantic convention or social aspiration: the schoolmaster's Anette. She may even be Anette, Rudy for a few moments believes. As on the way home from the marksmanship contest, Eros asserts itself to Rudy in elemental rather than domestic or social terms. This Eros is less an opponent of Thanatos than its concomitant. ‘“Du er kjaek!”’43 ‘“You are bold!”’ Rudy tells the girl; “‘Du ogsaa!”’ ‘“You too!”’ is her reply, endowing him with that quality he temporarily lost while at Montreux with the cultured English. And bold he immediately proves himself, as he possibly never could be with Babette, with whom he always had to refine away parts of his real self. After he has accepted the strange girl's surprising offer of wine:
hans Øine straalede, der kom et Liv, en Glød i ham, som om alle Sorger og Tryk dunstede bort; den sprudlende, friske Menneskenatur rørte sig i ham.44
his eyes shone, a liveliness, a glow entered him, as though all sorrows and stress [had] evaporated; sparkling, hearty human nature stirred within him.
Of this, raw sexuality is a component, irresistible, overwhelming. When the girl says she will let Rudy kiss her if he gives her his engagement ring, symbol of the socialisation, the downscaling of Eros, he complies – without realising the gravity of his action:
Pigen her paa Bjerget var frisk som den nysfaldne Snee, svulmende som Alperosen og let som et Kid; dog altid skabt af Adams Ribbeen, Menneske som Rudy. … ja, forklar, fortæl, giv os det i Ord – var det Aandens eller Dødens Liv, der fyldte ham, blev han løftet, eller sank han ned i det dybe, dræbende Iissvælg, dybere, altid dybere; han saae Iisvæggene som et blaagrønt Glas; uendelige Kløfter gabede rundt om, og Vandet dryppede klingende som et Klokkespil og dertil saa perleklart, lysende i blaahvide Flammer, Iisjomfruen gav ham et Kys, der iisnede ham igennem hans Ryghvirvler ind i hans Pande, han gav et smertens Skrig, rev sig løs, tumlede og faldt, det blev Nat for hans Øine, men han aabnede dem igjen. Onde Magter havde øvet deres Spil.45
This girl here on the mountain was fresh like the new-fallen snow, full as an Alpine rose, and as nimble as a kid. Yet she was created from Adam's rib, human as Rudy. … Yes, explain, recount, give it us in words – was it the life of the spirit or of death that filled him? Did he become raised up or did he sink down into the deep, deadly ice chasm, deeper always deeper? He saw ice-walls like blue-green glass; fathomless canyons gaped all around and water dripped ringing like a Glockenspiel and so crystal clear, shining in blue-white flames; the Ice Maiden gave him a kiss that froze him through his vertebrae into his forehead, he gave a scream of pain, tore himself free, toppled and fell; it became night in front of his eyes, but he opened them again. Evil forces had played their game.
What to make of this? Has their game resulted in victory for the evil forces? When he returns, after a six-day interval, to the mill, he feels that his extraordinary experience up on the mountain has given him some new insight into himself, something surprising in one whose life has so depended on the exterior world and physical acts. Now, however, he appreciates that the hunt can be pursued inside his own heart, that the Föhn wind can blow through his own spirit. In the light of this new knowledge should he confess all to Babette when back at her father's mill? But he cannot, it would be a duty impossible to discharge; in this sense the novella is true to the conventions of man/woman relations in the society of the times with which the ordinary novel makes us familiar. But he wants first to hear from Babette, for whom he feels a fresh rush of love, that she is sorry for flirting with the Englishman, then he for his part will tell her how repentant he is for ever having doubted her fidelity. And indeed a great reconciliation between them follows – though Andersen implies (this being more apparent on rereadings) that it is of a somewhat over-sentimental kind, corresponding, as so much of their courtship has done, to a code that popular romances and ballads have done their best to promote. The previous chapter has made only too clear, in its near-hallucinatory poetic prose, that Rudy in the depths of his being is unable to enter into a world of domesticated loving. He belongs to the boundless, captivity of any kind is inimical to him, and in this context it will not be wedding and marriage that await him but death.
And yet in the final sentence of Chapter XIII, ‘I Møllerens Huus’, ‘In the Miller's House’ everything would appear to be turning out well in romantic storybook fashion, and the couple are sitting together for the very last time before the wedding day:
Udenfor var Alpegløden, Aftenklokken klang, Solstraaernes Døttre sang, ‘Det Bedste skeer!’46
Outside was the alpenglow, the evening bell rang, the daughters of the sunbeams sang, ‘The best things will happen!’
When we have reached the tragic conclusion to the novella, and been able to reflect on it in relation to the whole work, with its beautifully wrought palimpsest of emotional epiphanies, we find – whatever our preference for even qualified happiness in this hard life – that the sunbeams' daughters' pronouncement is a true and fair one. In the end we see that justice is done, any future different from the one actually granted was always a chimera; and, interestingly, this would seem to be Babette's final verdict too.
In Chapter XIV, ‘Syner i Natten’, ‘Visions in the Night’ the Föhn arises, and clouds develop threateningly over the Rhône. The Ice Maiden has come from her glacier palace because the wedding of Rudy and Babette is imminent. And that young Englishman in Babette's life – seemingly routed for good and all by Rudy – turns out to have a psychic, if not a social or a physical, presence in her life. … Babette has an astonishing and deeply disturbing dream. She has been married to Rudy for years, and he is now away hunting chamois, just as you might expect. She is sitting next to the Englishman about whom she has, it seems to her dream-self, long stopped thinking. She feels attracted to him (as, one assumes, she did in recent reality). She takes his hand and descends with him from the house, but, as she does, she feels she is committing a sin against Rudy (as we know he already has against her); worse, a sin against God. As she goes down the path, thorns rip at her clothes, and her very hair, she realises, has turned grey, she is no longer young. She raises her eyes to the crest of the mountain and sees him, Rudy. She stretches out her arms to him, but he turns out to be not his flesh-and-blood self but just such a form as his uncle and he used to construct to decoy the chamois to their deaths, with the hunting-coat and hat hung on an alpenstock. Babette cries out that she would like to have died on her wedding day because that would have been a merciful act of God, ‘da var det Bedste skeet, der kunde skee for mig og Rudy’,47 ‘then the best would have happened that could have happened for me and Rudy’. In her agony at this situation she throws herself into the crevasse, the Ice Maiden's habitat, repeating, without knowing it, the tragic fate of Rudy's mother. She hears a string snap (the thread of life), and the note of a lament (death, to which Rudy belongs).
This dream, the description of which is one of the highlights of Andersen's art at its most visionary and psychologically penetrating, disperses as dreams do, though Babette knows it was of an appalling nature. Yet she remembers that the Englishman featured in it. She was truthful in her reply to Rudy that she hadn't been seeing or even thinking of him for months, yet, now that her unconscious has brought him back to her, she can't help wondering whether he is still in Montreux, and whether she might not see him at her wedding. And – ‘Der gled en lille Skygge hen om den fine Mund.’48 ‘There passed a little shadow across her refined mouth.’ Could anything reveal more tellingly her deep-down unlikeness to Rudy and her equally deep-down awareness of this? Yet soon she is smiling again and thinking of the glorious wedding day ahead.
In the evening the bridal pair walk out to Chillon, and Babette is possessed by a great desire to go out to the little island of acacias. They see a small boat and Rudy, a natural oarsman, rows out there, to find just enough space for the two of them to dance. The two are as happy as a couple in their position should be, delighting in each other's existence, while beyond them the lake and its shores are lovely in the sunset; and after the shadows have lengthened they see, higher up, an alpenglow the like of which they have never witnessed before playing on the famous Dents du Midi:
‘Saa megen Deilighed! saa megen Lykke!’ sagde de To.
‘Mere har Jorden ikke at give mig!’ sagde Rudy.49
‘So much loveliness, so much joy!’ said the pair.
‘Earth has nothing more to give me!’ said Rudy.
And after reaffirming the blessings of existence, his own delight in them and the goodness of God, he reiterates this last declaration, making us aware of its disquieting ambiguity. Isn't what makes them feel so blissful now but an overture to their happy life together? Rudy, for the moment anyway, thinks this. ‘“Imorgen er Du ganske min! min egen lille, yndige Kone”’,50 ‘“Tomorrow you're completely mine! My own lovely little wife”.’
It is then Babette notices that the small boat has come loose from its moorings and is drifting away. Seemingly a chance occurrence, this is, we come to realise, on one level or another, the operation of those secret powers the story has made us aware of. Rudy behaves now as the complete storybook hero, and of course takes off his coat and boots, and jumps into the water to catch hold of it.
Why then does he feel compelled to give ‘kun et eneste Blik’,51 ‘just one single glance’ into the lake? He sees there in the cold turquoise water fed by the mountain glaciers the ring he gave away to the troll girl (Anette?). And inside the ring, a circle which expands and expands, Rudy can see the glacier and whole troupe of ‘Unge Jaegere og unge Piger’, ‘young hunters and young girls’, and a parodic wedding service going on, and on the lake floor the Ice Maiden herself who rises up to meet him: ‘“Min, min,”’52 ‘“Mine, mine” she echoingly claims, ‘“Jeg kyssede Dig, da Du var lille! kyssede Dig paa din mund.”’ ‘“I kissed you when you were little! Kissed you on the mouth!”’ Now she will kiss him all over, he is all hers at last! And as he hears these words he disappears into the depths of the water.
Pre-Freudians though they were, there surely could have been no readers of the novella unaware of the sexual symbolism and implications of this culminating section, at once folksong-like stark in what is actually narrated, and yet laden with significant, suggestive detail. The young man meeting his death has not consummated his relationship, he is leaving his loved one marooned on the island a virgin, and what meets him are vaginas self-enlarging enough to absorb him and take from him his life. Is Rudy himself a virgin, even after the mountain encounter with the magical ‘Anette’? Did what happened up there – gaining him, Andersen specifically tells us, insights into his own nature – fill him with horror, such horror indeed that he never wants to repeat the act – let alone with Babette, for whom he feels such tenderness?
This is possible, even arguable, but – considering the proofs of his susceptibility to the opposite sex we have been given – I do not believe that Rudy's moments anterior to death amount to a repudiation of female sexuality. Rather they constitute a fervent psychic and physical rejection of all domesticity, of being appropriated and tamed – which goes to the heart of the cultural debate of the novella. Rudy draws back from consummation with Babette and makes a sexual entrance into a cold, destructive world because he is incapable of being the lover, the husband, the father all so necessary to harmonious social living.
And perhaps it was best that he died before he could bring Babette and himself painful confirmation of this profound inability of his, this instinctual turning back to very different, atavistic priorities. The most extraordinary words of the whole tale are still to come, and when we read them we must again remember Andersen's obsessive yet determined preoccupation with immortality.
Deiligt at flyve fra Kærlighed til Kærlighed, fra Jorden ind i Himlen.
Der brast en Stræng, der klang en Sørgetone, Dødens Iiskys beseirede det Forkrænkelige; Forspillet endte for at Livs-Dramaet kunde begynde, Misklangen opløses i Harmonie.
Kalder Du det en sørgelig Historie?53
How beautiful to fly from love to love, from earth to Heaven.
A string snapped, a mourning tone rang out, death's icy kiss conquered the corruptible [flesh]; the prologue ended before the drama of life began, discord was dissolved into harmony.
Would you call this a sad story?’
Apparently the author does not. Of course Babette suffers terribly, as is mirrored in the fearful storm which proceeds to take over the island while she is alone there. But even in her distress she realises – itself surely curious – that Rudy will be lying as if under the glacier where his mother once lay before him, and that the Ice Maiden has taken him. And then she sees the Ice Maiden herself in all her majesty, with Rudy at her feet, and, agonised, begs God for enlightenment. Her enlightenment is to appreciate the truth of her own dream, which concluded with her wishing the best for herself and Rudy. Has Rudy died because her hopes for the two of them were sinful? No, surely not! Rudy felt – in a rush of joy – that the earth had no more to give him (that he was not made for the kind of happiness that civilisation brings) and so there is a rightness in his death.
All this happened in 1856. But Andersen gives us a glimpse of Babette's present life, a tranquil one, not in her father's mill but in this same considerably developed part of the canton in which we took leave of her. Now greatly extended railways bring travellers down the Rhône valley, from Bex down to Chillon and the Lake of Geneva, and she herself can many times enjoy from a safe position, as they all do, the wonderful alpenglow and take comfort from it.
The novella poses questions almost impossible to answer. That is why it is such a powerful and successful work, artistically, emotionally, intellectually.
Do we prefer a civilised life, emphasising peace and harmonious coexistence, to a more primitive one with its premium on self-acquittal in struggle? Of course! How could we not? How could readers of such refined, intricately wrought literature as Andersen's tales not have this preference? Do we prefer the Switzerland of resorts and comfortable hotels, of well-appointed homes and efficient transport (and the opportunity to be at our ease as we contemplate the magnificent scenery) to those mountain valleys of eastern Valais and the Oberland where life can still be hard and is much more closely bound up with the difficulties each season brings? Answers to this question come far less readily. We may even feel, with Rudy-like atavism, that the first place lacks something that the second transmits to the deeper regions of our being. But then how much do we really value the intrepidity, the unflinching strength and determination of a Rudy? We may well not esteem the purposes for which he exercises these qualities, but neither can we quite dismiss them, even if we have built up a society in which they seem redundant, and are proud to have done so. Come any threat of danger – an attack, an invasion, a war – and we find we are not only grateful for them but admire those who possess them, especially those who possess them unreservedly. We may forget this uncomfortable fact later on, but time, history, will see that its hour comes back.
Thus ‘The Ice Maiden’ refuses to make pat judgements about self and civilisation, even as it compels us to face up to the questions about them which it dramatises. We face up to them by means of the tale's complex verbal richness, its controlled abundance of psychically penetrative imagery, its narrative that never once loses metaphoric force and its haunting ambivalence of sympathy. If we feel for Rudy, we also feel for Babette; if we are basically at one with Babette and admire the serenity she wins through to, we cannot forget the adventurous, bold, irrepressible Rudy and banish him from our hearts and our lives. If we are with Rudy, however, then we remember innocent Babette alone and vulnerable there on her island, without the one she loved and with the elements beating at her furiously.
3
On 2 March 1862, Andersen had published another speculation on the future, ‘Det nye Aarhundredes Musa’, ‘The New Century's Muse’,54 far more essay than fairy tale. The Muse here is the summation of our own (and our predecessors') better tendencies, which have however to be first identified and then analytically discussed. There is much that is working against these, powerful reductive elements in both science and commerce which threaten the imagination and are therefore injurious to the Muse's health. The present age is far too busy making money and over-dependent on the roar and clatter of machinery to give poetry (synonym for all genuine artistic endeavours) the requisite attention. Instead, in its crass utilitarianism, it prefers to ascribe creativity and altruism to mere automatic responses of the nervous system.
‘Al Begeistring, Glæde, Smerte, selv den materielle Stræben er, sige de Lærde os, Nervesvingninger. Vi ere Enhver – et Strængespil.
Men hvem griber i disse Strænge? Hvem faaer dem til at svinge og bæve? Aanden, den usynlige Guddoms Aand, som lader, gjennem dem, klinge sin Bevægelse, sin Stemning, og den forstaaes af de andre Strængespil, saa at de klinge derved i sammensmeltende Toner og i Modsætningens stærke Dissonanser. Saaledes var det, saaledes bliver det i den store Mennneskeheds Fremadskriden i Friheds Bevidsthed!55
All [one's] enthusiasm, joy, pain, even physical exertions are, the learned tell us, nerve vibrations. We are every one of us – a stringed instrument.
But who moves these strings? Who makes them vibrate and tremble? The Spirit, the unseen Divine Spirit, which lets its emotion, its feelings, sound out among them, and it is understood by the other stringed instruments, so that they ring out in synthesising tones or in the strong dissonances of contrast. So it was, so it will be in humanity's great forward march in consciousness of freedom.
The Muse is thus not only a guardian angel of humanity but a functionary of the Divine Spirit. We are to imagine her having a father, a mother and a nurse, all of whom contribute to her nature and to her growth. On her father's side she is a child of the people, earnest yet humorous also, and practical. Her mother, by contrast, is high-born, academy-educated, an emigrant's daughter, with golden rococo memories. But independently of her parents, this New Century's Muse has to develop an awareness of a far vaster universe than any known to previous generations. Humankind would, in the foreseeable future, have expanded the heavens themselves.
Through her nurse, songs and tales from earlier (pre-literate) cultures have become part of the Muse's self. But this author with an international reputation for fairy-tale interestingly doesn't regard the legacy of primitives or ancients with unqualified admiration, any more than he automatically values all things childish. Yes, the infant Muse should be familiar with the Icelandic Eddas, the Persian Shah-Nama (Book of Kings), the Minnesingers, those medieval ballads so inspiring to Andersen's friend and mentor, Heinrich Heine, and, obviously, The Thousand and One Nights, that rich and gratefully valued quarry for Andersen himself. But just remember the savage horrors that fill the Eddas! These should never be repeated, in art or life. Even stories for the very young, making use of ancient folk material, should be moral improvements on their ancestors, however respectful of them.
When the Muse exchanges cradle for nursery, she can explore such bequests from earlier phases of civilisation as Greek tragedy, Roman comedy, successive schools of art and literature, the music of Beethoven, Mozart and Gluck. But will even this embarras de richesses withstand the exponentially increasing strains and contradictions of the Western world as it evolves towards the next century? Andersen reminds us that while this Muse of the new century is still at her educative play, whole nations are busily engaged one against another in power games, there are cannons sounding, and pens issuing implacable, bellicose commands, and the real purpose behind all this activity is, like many old runes, still indecipherable. (And, of course, four years hence the second Dano-Prussian War over Schleswig-Holstein would break out.)
Rising to meet pressing contemporary conflicts Andersen pictures the Muse donning a Garibaldi hat (a sign perhaps of some optimism about Italy) and reading the perennially inspiriting Shakespeare and also the perennially wise Molière, further tribute to Britain and France at the expense of the German lands.56 By this time the Muse should have achieved the desirable quietness of soul, matching the more serene and Nature-loving of the biblical Psalms, while not forgoing hopeful expectations of what lies beyond this mortal life. She will have a Homeric courageousness, her soul fusing the finest qualities of Ancient Greece and Judaeo-Christianity.
Therefore Andersen now, bolder than many of his intellectual associates, asks whether the emergent Muse of the new century will actually be Christian? Which, obviously, is also to ask whether twentieth-century Europe will still be Christian and will have succeeded in its various missions to Christianise the rest of the globe.
Hvorledes staaer det sig med hendes Christendom? – Hun har lært Philosophiens store og lille Tabel; Urstofferne have knækket een af hendes Melketænder, men hun har faaet nye igjen, Kundskabsfrugten bed hun i paa Vuggen, aad og blev klog, – saa at ‘Udødelighed’ lynede frem for hende som Menneskehedens genialeste Tanke.57
How does it stand with her Christianity? – She has learned the great and the little tables of philosophy; the elements have broken one of her milk teeth, but she has grown them [a] new [one] again, the fruit of knowledge she bit in her cradle, ate and became wise, – so that ‘Immortality’ shone out from her as humanity's happiest idea.
In her fine essay examining Andersen's ideas, ‘The Toll of Andersen's Bell’ (2005),58 the critic Vera Gancheva views ‘The New Century's Muse’ as an expression of belief in the immanence of Spirit within Nature – in distinction to the older Romantic view that Spirit and Nature are coterminous. She thus sees it manifesting a Neoplatonism long congenial to Andersen and reinforced by H.C. Ørsted's synthesis of science and cosmology. ‘Neo-Platonists advocated their view that the soul's function is to fuse the situated above and the situated below in creation, as well as the belief that love is the power guiding and directing the soul. Their ambition was to create a universal philosophy and a universal language, which would express the subtlest shades of human thought and discourse; a language that would be beautiful and gratifying to people all over the world. Some Neo-Platonists went even further than that and suggested the possible unification of all world religions.’59
Returning to the culture of the next century Andersen admits that he does not know where its Muse will arise, and that he can think of her principal attributes only in terms of desirable negatives. He feels confident that she will not be divorced from technological progress for all its dangers; she will indeed be borne to us by modern means of transport, thus endorsing the enthusiasm for modernity of ‘Thousands of Years to Come’, with which we opened our study. But from which country will airship or speedboat bear her? Not from America surely where the native inhabitants have been so mercilessly hunted down and Africans so cruelly enslaved – though California's incomparably venerable redwood forests suggest themselves. From Australia? Egypt? Britain, where Shakespeare still reigns? Or his own Denmark, land of Tycho Brahe, even though it eventually dismissed the great astronomer?
Andersen feels on surer ground when listing what the Muse will not concern herself with. She will not be expressive of times long past, will not employ the conventions and vocabulary of bygone art. Neither will she distort human language to suit tastes for novelty. She will fuse the poetry of High Culture and the plain prose of ordinary speech; not for nothing is she the result of union between her two contrasting parents. She will not chisel from Icelandic saga-blocks celebrations of old gods, for the excellent reason that ‘de ere døde, der er ingen Sympathie for dem i den nye Tid, intet Slægtskab’,60 ‘they are dead, there is no sympathy for them in the new age, no kinship’. On the other hand she will have no interest in the modern French novel, she will bring us an elixir for living, not the chloroform of preoccupation with everyday materialism. She will not go down the road of callow nationalism, for there will be such an intermingling of the West and East – thanks to the advance of railways and other means of transport – as to arrive at a luminous cultural syncretism that will enhance and stimulate all mental activity.
Power, Andersen concludes, may seem now to reside in the machine – even the Great Wall of China itself is vulnerable to it – but the truest power dwells within. One should not, however, think of this as only benevolent. If it is the soul that wields ultimate authority, and not ‘Mester Blodløs’, ‘Master Bloodless’ (Andersen's name for the ‘mind’ of the machine, a pejorative term he will use memorably again), then it has to be in first-class health, otherwise it is capable of initiating hideous acts of destruction. One of his greatest, most resonant later stories ‘Det Utroligste’ (‘The Most Incredible Thing’, 1871) will demonstrate precisely this, and has had a significant posthumous life accordingly.
Therefore we Europeans – for who else are this essay's addressees? – must not indulge in facile enthusiasms and expectations. There is biblical sternness in the essay's last sentences which we – knowing that war not only between Denmark and Prussia, but between France and Prussia will have scarred the continent in ten years' time – cannot but find ominous:
Vær hilset, Du Musa for Poesiens nye Aarhundrede! Vor Hilsen, løfter sig og høres, som Ormens Tanke-Hymne høres, Ormen under Plovjernet skæres over, idet et nyt Foraar lyser og Ploven skærer Furer, skærer os Orme sønder, for at Velsignelsen kan groe for den kommende nye Slægt.
Vær hilset, Du det nye Aarhundredes Musa!61
Greetings, you Muse of Poetry's new century! May our greeting rise and be heard as the thanksgiving hymn of the worm is heard, the worm to be cut up under the iron plough, as a new spring gives out light, and the plough cuts furrows, cut us worms to bits, so that the blessing can extend to the coming new generation.
Greetings, you muse of the new century!
4
‘The situation looks very bleak,’ Andersen wrote in his Diary on 12 December 1863. ‘It is as though Denmark faces her final hour. All I can think of now is war and rebellion. … It's all over for Denmark and for the existence of my happiness – the night of death draws near.’62 On the last day of the year he would pronounce, ‘the outlook is pitch-black, sorrowful, bloody [for] the New Year’.63
By 1 April 1864 his mood was no less dark: ‘The past year of my life has been full of trials and tribulations. First Jonas Collin was mean to me – he is now out of my heart. … The king died. The war is threatening Denmark with destruction. I've got old. I have false teeth that torment me. I'm not in good health. I'm heading for death and the grave.’64
Of these lamentations let us deal first with young Jonas Collin (born 1840),65 the companion of the European tour that resulted in ‘The Ice Maiden’. Edvard's son was named after his grandfather, and, as it happened, ‘Father Collin’, Andersen's single greatest benefactor, died as Andersen and Jonas junior were making their way homewards from their European expedition on 28 August 1861.66 Andersen was overcome with feelings of inconsolable sadness, attended the funeral (2 September) and had a commemorative poem on him published in Dagbladet the same day. Later, even during the mourning period, Andersen would feel that the older man had not understood him quite as completely as he could have wished, and that his own anxiety to please him had had a certain inhibiting effect on his imagination.
Certainly his relationship with his young namesake was to be very nearly as complicated and fraught with misunderstandings, rows and reconciliations as that with the youth's father, Edvard. In photographs Jonas looks very like Edvard, the same kind of masculine, well-set-up figure, and handsome, intelligent face. He was moody, irascible, argumentative, even truculent, capable of affection (he was genuinely moved when Andersen proposed they used ‘Du’ to each other, and he agreed to it, as his father had not) but also wilful, over-conscious of his own social standing (and of Andersen's lowly provenance) and thus capable of arrogant unkindness. Andersen took Jonas, as he had done his cousins Harald, Viggo and Einar Drewsen, on long tours abroad, partly to repay the past generosity of the Collin family (not only patron Jonas senior but Edvard also, his constant business manager and literary agent). He did so because he himself was apt to become intolerably lonely and bored on his travels even though these were often the only answer he could find to his gnawing compulsion to alleviate restlessness, melancholy or dissatisfaction. Edvard and Jette Collin, who saw rather clearly the difficulties of their son's temperament (and behaviour), were warmly articulate in their gratitude to Andersen for his kindness – and munificence – to Jonas, from whom they doubtless heard many stories of Andersen's impossible ways when he was his travelling companion.
And, to a young man, impossible they must often have seemed. One can detect in Andersen's attitude to him far too much of those pleading, possessive, over-emotional, self-preoccupied qualities he had shown over the years to Edvard (to the latter's exasperation), too fulsome and embarrassing a pleasure when well disposed towards him, too injured and complaining a displeasure when upset. Here are two consecutive entries from his diaries, 14 and 15 May 1861, when Andersen and Jonas Collin were staying in Rome. Jonas had just irked Andersen by volunteering that he rated his first cousin Viggo Drewsen (who would later, in fact, become his brother-in-law too) more highly than the distinguished Norwegian writer Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson67 whom Andersen had just introduced him to – because he was more his own man!
It's approaching 12 o'clock at night, and I'm still up! Jonas hasn't come home yet; I don't want to write down what I'm thinking and feeling. – Now it's 12.30, and he isn't here yet. Everyone all around is asleep; I am nervous. My legs are shaking under me; my head is burning hot. I'm not going to think any more!
Wednesday 15 May. He didn't come home until after 12.30. He'd been at the club and later with the others at the café. He seemed sorry that I was still up. I left him with a less fond heart than usual and went to bed; was very nervous and upset. Today it was around 9 o'clock when we got up; he later than I. My mood is not pleasant. What will he do now? What will the day bring? It may well be me who gets unpleasant this time. …68
Saturday 18 May was even worse. Jonas ‘has no consideration for me, just like Drewsen's sons; I was grieved and offended’ – so much so indeed that he found himself ‘jumping out of bed, and ranting’.69 The next day, though, brought comparative and very welcome tranquillity. ‘Later, when Jonas came home, I put my arms round him, said a few kind words; and he was moved and agreeable. It made me happy.’70 All this would surely have driven even a less irritable and self-regarding young man than Jonas Collin stark crazy. One would never suspect from all these pitiful words that they were written by a writer of quite literally unequalled world fame aged fifty-six about the twenty-one-year-old son of an old friend far less eminent than himself. But Jonas never ceased to remind Andersen how enormously indebted he was to Jonas Collin senior, indeed the whole Collin tribe, and in a moment of more than usually blunt honesty Andersen wrote down that he was repaying this harped-on debt to ‘a presumptuous conceited cashier’.71 One cannot help thinking that, even at this late stage of his development, Andersen would have been happier and healthier psychologically if he could for once have insisted that proper respect was due to him simply as a successful middle-aged male.
The longest journey on which Jonas accompanied Andersen was to Spain and back from late July 1862 to March 1863, though they arrived home in Denmark separately. There was much intermittent tension between them, and the situation worsened as time progressed. Jonas, for all his immersion in natural history, was keen to revisit the bullfight, which Andersen had utterly detested, deploring the cruelty to horses as well as to bulls. I Spanien (In Spain, 1863)72 was the fruit of these travels which included crossing over to Tangier and covering mountain territory on horseback. Surely the enterprising Jonas must have enjoyed all that, and been grateful to Andersen for providing him with such exotic experiences? But gratitude was not something Jonas found easy to express, assuming that he ever really wanted to. On Thursday 15 October 1863 Andersen wrote:
At Edvard's today there was a little of the Collin brand of unpleasantness. Jonas is really an insolent twerp on whom I have wasted the kindness of my heart etc.73
But as with Edvard himself, the friendship the two enjoyed was surely more complex than any letter or diary account can indicate, and fuller of mutual affection and sense of kinship than the many expostulations and hostile judgements on both sides would suggest.
The apocalyptic terms in which Andersen viewed the imminence of a second Schleswig war are far from mere hyperbole. They can, on the contrary, be seen as realistic, as only too prophetic. He understood, with a mind more sharpened than most by long experience of representative Germans, not least in the previous decade, that another conflict over Schleswig-Holstein – against a stronger, far more resolute Prussia, led by a Bismarck determined on some major show of military might, and, in the event, joined by Austria – would mean certain disaster for his country. And indeed it did; Danish defeat led not only to deaths and casualties themselves in distressing numbers but to removal of about 40 per cent of the crown territory, to a loss of face in Europe, and to a profound damage to self-image that would not truly recover until the mid-twentieth century.
In one sense the war was provoked by what seems now something of a folie de grandeur on Denmark's part, part-stoked by too great and unthinking a national self-confidence after the victories of the First Schleswig War. In another sense Prussia was waiting for just such provocation as it was given (as in 1870 with Napoleon III and France), and a victorious campaign against Denmark provided an opportunity to demonstrate the nature of its authority. Also, since the Prussian defeat in the Three Years War, the cause of German nationalism had greatly intensified, and Holstein provided a suitable (and in many eyes eminently justifiable) rallying-point.74
Under the late Frederik VII, the death of whom was a great sorrow to Andersen, a constitution had been drawn up integrating the Duchy of Schleswig, with its majority Danish population, into the Kingdom of Denmark. Frederik's heir, Christian IX, expressed serious reservations about the wisdom of this but felt compelled to put his signature to a document that went completely against the London Protocol of 1852. This, while, as we have seen, affirming the Danish federation as a ‘European necessity and standing principle’, also insisted that the two duchies were autonomous, and that Schleswig had no tighter constitutional link to Denmark than Holstein had. The ‘November Constitution’, however, violated this agreement, and on 1 February 1864 Prussian forces crossed the border into Schleswig.
In appalling wintry conditions fighting concentrated on the long linear earthworks called the Danevirke, dating from Viking times and thus having deep cultural meaning for the kingdom. Stretching from the marshes of the Eider estuary to the town of Schleswig, it protected the neck of the Jutland peninsula. For Danes to be forced by Prussians and Austrians to withdraw from the symbolically and strategically significant Danevirke, in snow-carrying gales for four days and nights without respite, made them compare themselves to Napoleon's soldiers in their winter retreat from Moscow. It was in the conflicts that followed, though, that they began to suffer heavy losses, at Dybbøl especially, the site of such success in the first war. Here Viggo Drewsen, a Collin grandson taken on a trip by Andersen, and hero to his cousin Jonas, was captured by the Prussians. Andersen, deeply upset as he was by the deaths of so many friends' sons, worried about him greatly. To the relief of all, Viggo had come off comparatively lightly, with a leg injury.75
On Bismarck's orders the Austrians now pushed up into Jutland. Prussians also fought northwards. To hear that the Prussian General von Falckenstein signed his name in the book of Skagen church must have made very bitter, poignant news for Andersen. The decisive battle was at Als (now reincorporated into Denmark) from 29 June to 1 July 1864, which cost the Danes 3,000 men, killed, wounded or taken prisoner.
On 20 July 1864 there came the ceasefire, and on 1 August the Danes prepared a preliminary peace treaty. Britain, France and Russia had taken a greatly more detached stance to the Second Schleswig War than they had done to the First, and had then announced that they would stay neutral; Norway and Sweden did not send military help as expected, something which so shamed and angered Henrik Ibsen that it brought about his years-long dissociation from his native country. On 30 October the Treaty of Vienna was signed, and Denmark lost both duchies and also enclaves inside western Schleswig that were properly and legally part of itself. It was deprived of some 200,000 Danish-speakers, a community that would not be returned to its natural homeland till the 1920 plebiscite after the First World War, when it voted to join it.
The rest of this book should be read with the Danish defeat always in mind, like a ground-bass in music. How it could be other than an abiding sorrow – a hostile aggressive neighbour invading areas of the country beyond the disputed territories, a disproportionately large number of dead and wounded, a sense of friendless isolation in Europe that would lead to political insularity (Denmark would be neutral in the First World War and occupied in the Second)?
Yet posterity can justifiably entertain a more sanguine reading of the situation alongside the one expressed above, especially if the result of the later 1920 plebiscite is taken into consideration. As historian Knud J.V. Jespersen says:
What little remained of Denmark was as close-knit as could possibly be imagined in terms of a perfect nation state. There was a single nationality with a single language: Danish. The modern small homogenous nation state of Denmark is thus the product of the catastrophe of 1864.76