By the following spring, Gerda has learned a song that she sings to Kai: Roses flower in the vale there we hear Child Jesus' tale! Because roses adorn the window box garden, the sight of roses always reminds Gerda of her love for Kai. Looking out of his frosted window one winter, Kai sees the Snow Queen, who beckons him to come with her. Kai's grandmother tells the children about the Snow Queen, who is ruler over the 'snow bees' - snowflakes that look like bees.Īs bees have a queen, so do the snow bees, and she is seen where the snowflakes cluster the most. Gerda and Kai have a window-box garden to play in, and they become devoted to each other as playmates, and as close as if they were siblings. The two families grow vegetables and roses in window boxes placed on the gutters.

One could get from one's home to the other's just by stepping over the gutters of each building. Years later, a little boy Kai and a little girl Gerda live next door to each other in the garrets of buildings with adjoining roofs in a large city. These splinters are blown by the wind all over the Earth and get into people's hearts and eyes, freezing their hearts like blocks of ice and making their eyes like the troll-mirror itself, seeing only the bad and ugly in people and things. The devil, who is headmaster at a troll school, takes the mirror and his pupils throughout the world, delighting in using it to distort everyone and everything the mirror makes the loveliest landscapes look like 'boiled spinach.' They attempt to carry the mirror into heaven in order to make fools of the angels and of God, but the higher they lift it, the more the mirror shakes with laughter, and it slips from their grasp and falls back to earth, shattering into billions of pieces, some no larger than a grain of sand. The magic mirror fails to reflect the good and beautiful aspects of people and things, and magnifies their bad and ugly aspects. The devil, in the form of an evil troll, has made a magic mirror that distorts the appearance of everything that it reflects. The Snow Queen is a tale told in seven stories:ģ - The Flower Garden of the Woman Who Knew Magic.ħ - What Happened at the Snow Queen's Palace and What Happened Afterwards.

The story centers on the struggle between good and evil as experienced by Gerda and her friend, Kai. The tale was first published 21 December 1844 in New Fairy Tales. The Snow Queen is an original fairy tale written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen. Snedronningen = The Snow Queen, Hans Christian Andersen

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