The old woman, dressed in black, is “Night” and she has heard the lullabies the woman has sung to her child every night through her tears. The mother pleads with this woman to tell her what direction Death took. He runs swifter than the wind, and what he takes he never brings back.” “Death has been in your house,” said the strange woman, “I saw him hurrying off with your child. The first person she encounters is an old woman dressed in black. The woman sets off on a path to recover her child from Death. Unlike most fairy tale characters her journey begins out of the pain and sorrow of one inattentive moment, one brief nodding off from exhaustion, from the weakness of simply being worn out. Now, like many characters out of fairy tales, the woman begins her journey. She will carry this guilt and blame to her own grave. That this will be an even more painful burden to bear than the death of the child. This fairy tale is haunting because, as a parent, I understand that the mother will now blame herself for her child’s death. Symbolic of how we all feel this stopping of time when someone we love dies.Īs a parent, there would be nothing more traumatic than the death of a child. Then the heavy weight drops and falls out of the clock, causing time to stand still. As the clock resounds with a “Boom!” she realizes the old man was Death himself. Then the woman wakes with a start, trembling from the cold, and discovers that the old man is now gone. Hans Christian Andersen follows this mentioning that the old man was Death with the condition of the poor, sorrowful mother, “Her head was heavy – she had not slept for three days and three nights – for a moment her eyes were closed.” Andersen describes this poor, exhausted woman using the fairy tale rule of “three.” Three days is another common trope in fairy tales: three tasks, three days to accomplish it, three bears, three guesses, and so forth. Sometimes it is that step-parent who leads to the death of a child, such as in “The Juniper Tree,” one of the darkest fairy tales I’ve ever read. Death often happens at the beginning of such tales, usually, it’s a mother or father, Then enters the cruel step-parent. Because death was so prevalent for those first tellers of tales, they sought to explain why Death happens. Some are merely foretellers of Death, such as the Morrigan in Celtic mythology. The next sentence chills the reader, “It was Death himself who had come into her room.”įairy tales are filled with tales that personify Death, whether it’s the Brothers Grimm’s “Godfather Death” or the Armenian story “The Soul-Taking Angel” or the Slovenian “Jump In My Sack.” In some, Death is outwitted or banished. While she does, the old man sits by the cradle and she asks, “I will be allowed to keep him, won’t I? Our Lord wouldn’t take him from me?” The old man nodded curiously. The woman feeling compassion for him allows the old man in and even goes to warm a beer on the stove for him. It’s an old man, shivering from the wintry cold outside. As this mother keeps watch over a child who is pale and gasping for breath, there comes a knock at the door. ” Instead, Andersen begins this tale with, “A mother sat by the bedside of her little child she was very sorrowful, for she feared her little one was dying.” Death is a staple element in many fairy tales after all, when these stories were first told, death was a common thing and the mortality rate, especially for children, was extremely high. This fairy tale, unlike so many others, does not begin with “Once upon a time. It was these tales that he said pulled him up from the “swamp of life,” as he called it. It was only then that he began to put into writing all of the tales that his grandmother once told him. He tried and failed as a poet, novelist, and playwright. Though he is now considered the greatest of Danes and they hail him as their Shakespeare, Andersen struggled as a writer for much of his career. Hans Christian Andersen is probably most known for fairy tales like “The Little Mermaid,” “The Matchstick Girl,” “The Snow Queen,” and “The Ugly Duckling.” Yet the fairy tale of his that had the deepest impact on me was a far lesser known one entitled “The Story of a Mother,” which was first published in December 1847.
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