Den fly vende kuffert
A fairy tale with an embedded fable, “The Flying Trunk” offers both exotic romance and social satire. Even with a setting in Turkish lands and motifs from The Thousand and One Nights, the tale is distinctively Danish, with characteristic Andersen touches. The haughty matches that flare up and quickly extinguish were evidently meant to mock contemporary Danish critics. The section with speaking objects was originally intended to be a separate story called “The Matches,” with the pots, tinderbox, and quill pen each representing a different social acquaintance. The caged nightingale might be a reference to Andersen himself, who can also be seen as the nomadic merchant’s son, forever destined to tell tales rather than to settle down and marry a princess.
“The Flying Trunk” stages Andersen’s ambivalence about home and abroad in dramatic terms, and, for that reason, I have included it in the section of tales for adult audiences. On the one hand, the author of fairy tales seems to delight in the trivial chitchat of the domestic objects, orchestrating their conversations to reveal their shallow, narrow-minded views. Yet he also sends his hero into exotic lands and delights in grotesque caricatures of its inhabitants. Just as Chinese Emperors punch their subjects in the stomach, the Turks are presented in stereotypical terms, wearing gowns and slippers and tossing their slippers up to their ears when they witness something astonishing. In the end, the merchant’s son elects to travel around the world, settling down nowhere. A nomadic existence seems to suit him best, as he turns from the world of commerce, then magic, to storytelling.
There was once a merchant so wealthy that he could pave an entire street and maybe a little alley as well with silver coins, but he didn’t. He had other ways to use his money. When he spent a penny, he received a dollar in return. That’s the kind of merchant he was. And then he died.
His son inherited his entire fortune and lived extravagantly. He attended costume balls every night, made origami dragons out of bank notes, and skipped stones on the lake using gold coins instead. With a life like that, money can vanish quickly, and it did, until finally he was left with no more than four pennies. He had nothing to wear but a pair of slippers and an old dressing gown. His friends no longer cared about him,1 since they couldn’t go out on the town together, but one of them, who was nice, sent him an old trunk and said, “Pack up!” That was very nice of him, but he had nothing to pack, so he just sat down in the trunk.
It was an odd trunk. As soon as you pressed on the lock, the contraption would fly through the air, which is what happened to him. Swoosh, up the trunk went with him over the chimneys, high above the clouds, farther and farther away. Its bottom began creaking and he was terrified that it would fall to pieces, for he would have had quite a spill! God help us!
He arrived in the land of the Turks2 and hid the trunk in the forest under dry leaves. Then he went into town. He could do that without problems, because the Turks all walk around wearing just what he was wearing: a dressing gown and slippers. First he encountered a nanny with a little child. “Hello, Turkish nanny,” he said. “Tell me about that large castle over there near the city, with the windows set up so high.”
KAY NIELSEN
The merchant’s son arrives in Turkish lands with a burst of light and energy. The crescent, which is on the Turkish flag today, appears in each one of Nielsen’s illustrations for “The Flying Trunk.”
“The king’s daughter lives there,” she said. “Since it has been foretold that some man will make her very unhappy,3 no one is allowed to see her unless the king and queen are present!”
“Thank you,” said the merchant’s son, and he went into the forest, sat down in his trunk, flew up to the roof, and climbed in through the princess’s window.
She was lying on the sofa, fast asleep. She was so beautiful that the merchant’s son had to kiss her.4 The princess awoke and was dreadfully frightened, but he told her that he was the god of the Turks and that he had come down to her from the sky. She was quite happy about that.
The two sat next to each other, and the merchant’s son told the princess tales about her eyes. They were the loveliest dark pools, with thoughts swimming in them like mermaids. He described her forehead, which was like a snow-covered mountain with the most magnificent chambers and images. And he told her about the stork, who brings adorable babies.
He told lovely stories, and then he proposed to the princess, and she accepted right away.
“But you must come here on Saturday,” she said, “The king and queen will be here for tea5 then! They will be very proud that I am going to marry the god of the Turks, but be sure that you have a really lovely fairy tale to tell, because my parents are especially fond of fairy tales. My mother likes them to be serious and have morals, but my father likes them to be funny, so he can laugh!”
“Then I will bring a fairy tale as my bridal gift,” he said. And then they parted. The princess had given him a sword covered in gold coins that he really needed.
Off the merchant’s son flew. He bought a new dressing gown, then he settled down on a spot in the forest and made up a fairy tale. It had to be finished by Saturday, and that’s not as easy as you might think.
At last he was finished, and by then it was Saturday.
The king, the queen, and the entire court came to tea in the princess’s rooms. He was welcomed in such a charming way!
“Could you please tell us a fairy tale?” the queen asked. “One that is profound and instructive.”
“But one that will also make us laugh,”6 said the king.
“Absolutely,” he said, and began telling his own story. But we must listen carefully to it.
There was once a bundle of matches, and they were extraordinarily proud of their noble heritage. Their ancestral tree—that is to say, the large pine tree from which they were splinters—had been a great old tree in the forest. The matches were now lying on a shelf between a tinderbox and an old iron pot, and they told the two of them about their youth.
“Yes, that was the life back then,” the matches said. “We were really living in the lap of luxury! Every morning and every evening we drank diamond tea that came from the dew; we soaked up rays of sunshine all day long while the sun was out; and we heard stories from the little birds. We knew that we were rich, because the hardwood trees were only dressed up in the summer, while our family could afford to wear green in the summer and winter. When the woodcutters came, there was a huge upheaval, and our family was scattered. The main trunk became the mast of a magnificent ship that could sail around the world if it wanted to. The other branches went other places, and we now have the job of bringing light to the down-trodden masses. That is how aristocrats of our kind ended up down here in the kitchen.”
“My story is entirely different,” said the iron pot, the one right next to the matches. “Ever since I came into the world, I’ve been scoured and boiled many times! I take care of substantial things and I am, when it comes right down to it, the finest object in the house. My only joy—after dinner, that is—is lying on the shelf all clean and shiny and having a good chat with my friends. But, with the exception of the water bucket that sometimes goes down into the courtyard, all of us spend our lives indoors. Our only source of news is the market basket, but she talks in such a distressing way about the government and the people that just the other day an old ceramic pot got so upset that he fell over and broke into pieces! The market basket is surely liberal-minded, I can tell you!”
“Now you’ve talked too much,” said the tinderbox, and the steel struck the flint so it sent out sparks. “Couldn’t we just have a pleasant evening?”
“Oh yes,” said the matches. “Let’s talk about who among us is the finest!”
“No, I don’t like talking about myself,” said the clay pot. “Let’s have some evening entertainment. I’ll start by telling about something that everyone has experienced. We can all relate to that kind of thing so well,7 and that’s a nice feeling: On the shore of the Baltic Sea among the Danish birches—!” “That’s a lovely start,” said all of the plates. “That is definitely going to be a story that we can enjoy.”
“Yes, that is where I spent my youth, with a quiet family; the furniture was polished, the floors were washed, and the curtains were changed every two weeks.”
“You really know how to tell an interesting story,” said the feather duster. “You can tell right away when a woman is telling a story. There’s such a clean streak in it!”
“Yes, you can feel that,” said the water bucket, who, out of delight, made a little hop and then clattered on the ground.
The pot continued telling its story, and the ending was as good as the beginning.
All of the plates clattered with joy. The feather duster took some green parsley out of the storage room and crowned the pot, knowing that this would annoy the others, and thought, “If I crown her today, she’ll crown me tomorrow.”
“Now I want to dance,” said the poker, and danced. God save us, how it could raise its single leg! The old chair cover over in the corner ripped just from watching it! “May I please be crowned?” asked the poker, and she was.
“They are just commoners,” thought the matches.
Now it was the teapot’s turn to sing, but it had a cold, and said it couldn’t sing unless it was boiling. But that was just snobbery: it didn’t want to sing unless it could stand on the table in front of the master and mistress.
Over in the window sat an old quill pen that the maid used for writing. There was nothing unusual about it, except that it had been dipped far too deeply into the inkwell, and it was quite proud of that. “If the teapot doesn’t want to sing,” the quill said, “then leave it alone. There’s a cage right outside with a nightingale in it that can sing. It hasn’t studied music, of course, but we won’t say anything mean about that tonight.”8
“I find it quite inappropriate,” said the tea kettle, who was the kitchen singer as well as half-sister to the teapot, “that we should listen to a foreign bird like that. Is that patriotic? I’ll let the market basket decide.”
“I am just annoyed,” said the market basket. “I am more deeply annoyed than you can imagine! Is this an appropriate way to spend the evening? Wouldn’t it be much better to put the house to rights? Everything would be in its proper place and I would direct the whole show. That would be something!”
“Yes, let’s put on a show!” they all said together. At that very moment, the door opened. It was the maid, and so they all fell quiet. No one let out a peep. But there was not a pot among them that did not know what it was capable of and how fine it was. “Yes, if I had wanted to,”9 they thought, “it would have been quite a lively evening!”
The maid took the matches and struck them—God almighty, how they spluttered and burst into flame.
“Now everyone can see that we are the finest,” they thought. “How we gleam! What light!”10—and then they burned out.
“That was a lovely fairy tale,” said the queen. “I felt just as if I was in the kitchen with the matches. Yes, you shall have our daughter now.”
“Certainly,” said the king. “You shall have our daughter on Monday.” They now addressed him informally, since he was going to be part of the family.
The wedding was arranged and the night before the ceremony, the whole town was illuminated. There were rolls and pastries for the masses; street urchins stood on their toes, crying “Hurrah!” and whistling through their fingers. It was really magnificent.
“Well, I had better do something as well,”11 thought the merchant’s son. He bought rockets, noisemakers, and as many kinds of fireworks as you can imagine, put them into his trunk, and flew up into the air with it.
Boom, how the fireworks crackled! How they sparkled!
All the Turks jumped in the air when they saw the fireworks, and their slippers flew up to their ears. They had never before seen such a sight in the heavens. Now they knew that it was indeed the god of the Turks who was going to marry their princess.
As soon as the merchant’s son landed back down in the forest on his trunk, he thought: “I’ve got to go into town to hear what people have to say about it!” And it was completely clear why he wanted to do that.
Well, people surely were talking! All the people he asked had seen it in their own way, but it had been lovely for all of them.
“I saw the god of the Turks himself,” one of them said. “He had eyes like shining stars and a beard like foaming waters!”
“He flew in a cape of flames,” said another. “The loveliest angel children peeked out of the folds of it.”
He heard lovely things, and he was going to be married the next day.
The merchant’s son returned to the forest to get back in the trunk—but where was it? The trunk had burned up. A spark from the fireworks had been smoldering and caught fire, and the trunk had turned into a pile of ashes. He could no longer fly, and he could not go back to his bride.
All day she stood on the roof, waiting for him. And she is still waiting while he is traveling all around the world, telling fairy tales.12 But they are not as funny as the one he told about the matches.
KAY NIELSEN
The patient princess, with a crescent on her head, waits serenely for the merchant’s son.
1. His friends no longer cared about him. The merchant’s son resembles in many ways the soldier in “The Tinderbox.” Both fellows lose their friends as soon as the money runs out. Both court princesses whose parents are opposed to a marriage.
2. in the land of the Turks. The South and the Orient were Andersen’s destinations as a tourist, and he avoided traveling in northern regions. As he wrote to Henriette Hanck in 1835: “I do not belong here in the Northern countries and regard it as one of my earthly accidents that I was born and brought up on the corner of Greenland and Novaja Sembla” (Kleivan 289). Andersen traveled to the Orient, as he called it, over a period of nine months in 1840 and 1841. After seeing Athens, he sailed through the Dardanelles and the Sea of Marmara to Constantinople. According to Jens Andersen, no Dane before Andersen had made that journey.
3. “some man will make her very unhappy.” The same prophecy appears in “The Tinderbox,” and the princess in that story is also kept isolated from the rest of the world.
4. She was so beautiful that the merchant’s son had to kiss her. A sleeping princess (again, as in “The Tinderbox”) is irresistible, and the merchant’s son awakens his sleeping beauty with a kiss. The attractions of beauty are so powerful that they lead to an irrepressible desire for erotic contact.
5. “will be here for tea.” The mix of the bourgeois and the banal with the regal and the poetic is more pronounced here than in many other works by Andersen. The mingling of high and low, aristocratic and ordinary, foreign and familiar imparts a certain charm, as it does in “The Nightingale.”
6. “one that will also make us laugh.” The requirement that stories be both instructive and entertaining goes back to Horace’s dictum that poets can strive to delight or instruct (aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae). The merchant’s son must combine the two in order to satisfy both the sultan and his wife.
7. “We can all relate to that kind of thing so well.” The clay pot’s notion of “safe” narratives that merely evoke the familiar and remain in the register of the idyllic is a jab at Danish critics, who veered away, in Andersen’s view, from anything that was exotic, edgy, and controversial.
8. “we won’t say anything mean about that tonight.” Andersen mocks his critics by representing one of them as a quill pen who believes that birds need to study music before they sing rather than creating song spontaneously. “The Flying Trunk” contains Andersen’s most sustained critique of the Danish critics who disparaged him for his lack of education, and he delighted in reading the story out loud.
9. “if I had wanted to.” Like many of the inanimate objects in Andersen’s stories, most notably the tin soldier, the objects claim voices and agency yet are unable to speak or move when humans enter the room. Note how the maid’s entrance produces stillness and silence.
10. “What light!” In “The Little Match Girl,” the light from the matches supplies only a brief moment of illumination, but one that is incandescently poetic. Here the matches claim to offer the same kind of luminosity, but in fact they seem to sputter and fizzle quickly, providing none of the sparklingly brilliant effects found in the visionary experiences of the match girl. Andersen intended them to represent his critics.
11. “I had better do something as well.” Up until this point in the narrative, the merchant’s son has relied on words alone to impress first the princess, then her parents. Inspired by the lighting up of the city, he decides to use sound and light to impress its inhabitants. But note that these brilliant effects consume themselves, turning into nothing but ashes. The matches too can only flare up and then expire, leaving nothing behind but burnt flint or ashes.
12. traveling all around the world, telling fairy tales. Just as Andersen represents himself at the end of “The Nightingale” as the poet at whose window the nightingale has made a nest, he provides a self-portrait here by presenting the merchant’s son as a traveler famous for telling fairy tales that combine wit and humor with moral instruction.
