The Little Mermaid

For the 1989 Disney animated movie, see The Little Mermaid (film). For other meanings, see The Little Mermaid (disambiguation).

The Little Mermaid (Den lille havfrue) is a fairy tale about a young mermaid, her love for a human prince, and her desire to gain a human soul. The story was written by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, and was first published in 1836.

1 Story overview
2 Adaptations of The Little Mermaid
3 The Little Mermaid statue
4 External links

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Story overview

Statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen harbour

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The Little Mermaid lives at the sea bottom with her father the Sea King, her grandmother, and her 5 older sisters, born one year apart. When a mermaid turns 15, she may swim to the surface to watch the world above, and as the sisters become old enough one of them visits the surface every year. As each of them returns the Little Mermaid listens longingly to their descriptions of the surface and human beings.

When the Little Mermaid turns 15 she ventures to the surface. She sees a ship with a beautiful prince, and falls in love with him. There comes a great storm, and the prince almost drowns, but the Little Mermaid saves him and she delivers him unconscious to the shore near a temple. Here she waits until he is found by a young girl from the temple. But the prince never sees the Little Mermaid.

The Little Mermaid asks her grandmother whether humans can live forever if they do not drown. She is told that no, humans have an ever shorter lifespan than mermaids. Mermaids live for 300 years, but when they die they turn to foam and cease to exist. Humans, on the other hand, have a short lifespan on earth, but they have an eternal soul that lives on in heaven even after they die. The Little Mermaid spends her days longing for the prince and for an eternal soul. At last she goes to the Sea Witch, who sells her a potion that gives her legs, in exchange for her tongue, because the Little Mermaid has the prettiest voice in the world. But drinking the potion will feel like a sword being passed through her, and walking on her feet will feel like walking on knives. And she will only get a soul if the prince loves her and marries her, for then a part of his soul will flow into her. Otherwise, at dawn on the first day after he marries another woman, the Little Mermaid will die broken-hearted and turn to foam.

The Little Mermaid drinks the potion and meets the prince, who is attracted to her beauty and grace even though she is mute and cannot talk. Most of all he likes to see her dance and she dances for him even though it feels like dancing on knives. The prince loves her like one loves a child.

The time comes when the king decides that the prince is to marry the neighboring king's daughter. The prince tells the Little Mermaid that he will not marry the princess because he does not love her. He can only love the young girl who once saved his life, the girl who unfortunately belongs to the temple. He also tells the Little Mermaid that she is beginning to take the temple girl's place in his heart. However, it turns out that the princess is the temple girl; she had only been sent to the temple to be educated. The prince loves her and the wedding is announced.

The prince and princess are married and the Little Mermaid's heart breaks. She thinks of all that she has given up in order to be with the prince and to gain an eternal soul - her beautiful voice, her wonderful home, her loving family, her life - and of all the pain that she has suffered; all without the prince ever having a thought thereof. She despairs, but before dawn her sisters come to her and give her a knife that the Sea Witch has given them in exchange for their hair. If the Little Mermaid slays the prince with the knife she will become a mermaid again and be able to live out her full life under the sea.

But the Little Mermaid cannot bring herself to kill the sleeping prince lying with his bride and, as dawn breaks, throws herself into the sea. Here her body dissolves into foam, but instead of ceasing to exist, she feels the warmth of the sun; She has turned into a spirit, a daughter of the air. The other daughters of the air tell her that she has become like them because she, like them, strove with all her heart to gain an eternal soul. As a mermaid her gaining a soul was dependent on another, the prince, but as a daughter of the air she will earn her own soul by doing good deeds. When 300 years have passed she will have earned her soul and will rise into the kingdom of God. This time can be shortened for with each good child she finds she subtracts a year while she adds a day for each tear she must shed over a wicked child.

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Adaptations of The Little Mermaid

One of the earliest animated films, based on the fairytale, was the Soviet one, entitled Rusalochka (The Little Mermaid), which was released in 1968. In 1976 a live action film, entitled Rusalochka, a joint production by the USSR and Bulgaria, was released.

In 1989 the fairytale was made into an animated movie by the Walt Disney Company; see The Little Mermaid (movie).

The 1984 Ron Howard film Splash starring Tom Hanks and Daryl Hannah was loosely based on the same premise.

In 2003-2004, Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch aired in TVTokyo. It was inspired by The Little Mermaid.

In fact, the story of The Little Mermaid has long been a favorite in Japan and has been adapted into anime more than most other Western fairy tales. The first Japanese anime adaptation of the story was the 1970 TV series Maho no Mako-chan (Magical Mako-chan). This series, produced by Toei Animation and directed by Yugo Serikawa, kept the basics of the tale but moved the setting to modern-day Japan. The mermaid, Mako, attends high school while she waits for another meeting with her beloved Akira, and also helps those in need with her magical pendant, the "Mermaid's Tear." Maho no Mako-chan is also considered an early example of maho shojo or "magical girl" anime. It achieved some popularity in Europe (i.e., Una sirenetta tra noi in Italy) as well as Japan but was never released in English.

The second anime adaptation of The Little Mermaid was also produced by Toei. In 1975, the studio released the feature-length production Anderusen Dowa Ningyo Hime (Andersen's Story: The Mermaid Princess), directed by Tomoharu Katsumata. The mermaid was drawn as a blonde in this version and given the name Marina. This film was dubbed into English and given a home video release in the United States in 1979. Purists often hold it in higher regard than the Disney version, since it hemmed closer to the original tale than did Disney's version and didn't attempt to sugarcoat the tragic ending (although, like Disney, Toei did add a comic-relief sidekick, in this case the dolphin Fritz).

In the wake of the success of Disney's version, a third anime take on the story surfaced in 1991, with the 26-episode TV series Ningyo Hime Marina no Boken (The Adventures of Mermaid Princess Marina). This series, a Japanese/South Korean coproduction directed by Takehiro Miyano and Yun Suk Hwa, also depicted the mermaid as a blonde and named her Marina. The series aired originally in Japan on Fuji TV from February to July of 1991 and was brought to the U.S. that fall under the title Saban's Adventures of the Little Mermaid. This series added a new ingredient to the mix: a magical whistle, given to Marina by the Sea Witch, which enabled her to shift back and forth between human and mermaid form when she blew it. It didn't come anywhere near to the popularity of Disney's version and disappeared after a brief run in Saturday-morning syndication.

The story plotline somewhat showed in the Japanese drama "Heaven's Coin III". When the main male character, Kazuki, runs out of air while scuba-diving, the main female character, Mahiru, sees Kazuki's friend, Mizuki, yelling for help. Mahiru jumps into the water and rescues Kazuki. Mahiru kisses the unconscious Kazuki in order to give him the "kiss of life". When she sees Mizuki, she runs away. Later, when Kazuki rescues Mahiru from her abusive stepfather, Mizuki quotes that Mahiru was the "real mermaid" (Mizuki lied earlier that she was the one that saved Kazuki). Like the mermaid when she became human, Mahiru can't talk either because she's deaf. There are other similiar things from the story throughout the series.

The Royal Danish Ballet commissioned Russian American composer Lera Auerbach to create a modern rendition of this fairy tale. It was choreographed by John Neumeier and premiered on April 15, 2005.

In Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, the mad composer Adrian Leverkühn claims to have taken the little mermaid into concubinage. Her name, he says, is Hyphialta. The parallels (and reversals) between the Faust legend, in which a man of genius sells his soul to the devil, and the story of the Little Mermaid, are thus made manifest.

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The Little Mermaid statue

The Little Mermaid is a famous tourist attraction

A statue of the Little Mermaid sits on a rock in the Copenhagen harbour (at 55°41′34.39″N, 12°35′56.59″E). This small and unimposing statue is a symbol of Copenhagen, and a major tourist attraction.

The statue was commissioned in 1909 by Carl Jacobsen, son of the founder of Carlsberg, after he had been fascinated by a ballet about the fairytale. The sculptor Edward Eriksen created the statue, which was unveiled on 23 August, 1913. He used his wife Eline Eriksen as model.

This statue has been vandalised several times, but has each time been restored. On 24 April, 1964, the statue's head was sawn off and stolen by politically oriented artists of the situationist movement, amongst them Jørgen Nash. The head was never recovered and a new head was produced and placed on the statue. On 22 July, 1984, her right arm was sawn off. The arm was returned 2 days later by two embarrassed young vandals. In 1990 another attempt was made to cut her head off, which resulted in an 18 cm deep cut in the neck. On 6 January, 1998, she lost her head for the second time, the culprits were never found, but the head was returned anonymously to a nearby TV station, and on 4 February the head was back on. Red paint has been thrown on her several times, including one humorous episode in 1961 where somebody painted her hair red and painted a bra on her, and on 11 September, 2003, the statue was blasted off her rock, possibly with dynamite. She was also draped in a burka as a statement about Turkey being the European Union.

How small she is... is a typical reaction from tourists visiting for the first time. The Little Mermaid statue is only 1.25 meter high and weighs about 175 kg.

There are similarities between the Little Mermaid statue and the Pania of the Reef statue on the beachfront at Napier in New Zealand, and some similarities in the Little Mermaid and Pania tales. The statue of a woman diver in Vancouver, Canada certainly looks like it could have been inspired by the Little Mermaid statue.

An undamaged copy of the statue is located in Solvang, California.

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