Tales from the Netherlands
Hans Christian
Andersen's Fairy Tales
Written by Hans Christian Andersen
The Drop of Water
An old man Cribbley Crabbley, looks through a microscope at a drop of ditch
water. He observed ‘thousands of little imps in the water…devouring
each other or pulling each other to pieces’ (pp110 Andersen’s
Fairy Tales) He adds a drop of witch’s blood to the ditch water and
watches them fight. Cribbley Crabbley asks a passing old magician to look
through the microscope and guess what it was he was observing. The magician
observes the creatures being severely inhumane and tearing each other apart
and guesses he is looking at Copenhagen or some other large city.
Analysis
of tales from the Netherlands
• In the story above, it uses adult humour- e.g. the magician sees the
imps being brutal and callous and assumed it was a big city. Metaphorically,
this implies that big cities and the people in them are merciless and self-absorbed,
picking fights about petty things. Politics are involved, badmouthing Liberal
Parties. (pp116 Andersen’s Fairy Tales)
• Anderson’s fairy tales are extremely gruesome- so much so that
they don’t actually seem like children’s tales.
• He has broken the universal patterns of fantasy with his story ‘The
Snow Queen’, as the women in the story are not the archetypal ‘damsel
in distress’ type women. Alternatively, it is the male who needs rescuing
and the woman comes to save him from the powerful, woman character of the snow
queen.
