December Write-Up
NaNo Season is now over.
I’m spending more time reading again and today I went back to the FutureLearn courses that were basically ignored while I wildly tried to write down words.
Suddenly an ice-cold wind went through the vast hall, and the blind mother could feel that Death had arrived.
‘How have you been able to find your way here?’ he asked, 'how have you been able to get here faster than I have?’
'I’m a mother,“ she said.
Where I left off in my Hans Christian Anderson course were the analyses of his “The Story of a Mother” and my most beloved “Snow Queen” fairy tales.
There was just something about the former–an incredibly short tale, only a couple of pages long–about a mother’s struggle against Death for her child that grabbed me. These lines in particular, and the simplicity of just ‘I’m a mother’, caught me. That, on further analysis, the story is also about the passage through grief made me realise just how clever Anderson was even in very few words.
Anyone who knows “The Snow Queen”, however, knows that this is, by contrast, just about the longest fairytale. Told in seven parts, it’s a story of Gerda’s journey to find her beloved Kay who has been stolen away by the Snow Queen through shards of the queen’s mirror in his heart and eye.
“The Snow Queen” addresses or confronts the kind of world we inhabit today, where we know that chance to a great extent rules our lives and where we do not believe that things happen according to any divine scheme or plan. This is quite remarkable.
Still, Gerda manages to make sense out of everything that happens to her, from incident to incident and from story to story, by integrating it into her story. Thus, Gerda’s story in a certain sense generates itself, but not without all the faith, she invests in it.
I first read this story when I was under ten years of age, and it’s not till now, seeing this analysis, that I realise just how much “The Snow Queen” and stories like it have shaped the way I view the world and the way I narrate my way through it.
FutureLearn is such an amazing resource for those who want to pad out their resume with qualifications, or just study for study’s own sake. It’s free unless you pay for the certificate of completion. In short: go ahead and just do it!
