Snowballs for Angels: Essay by Priya Sridhar

Editor's Note: Today's essay, by Priya Sridhar, takes Hans Christian Andersen's tale of "The Little Match Girl," and looks at it through a modern literary interpretation. Enjoy!

Modern takes on classic fairy tales can prove fascinating when they subvert the original narrative. Whether it's differing values, updated understanding of gender and economics, and plain wanting to add a new message, you can always find a new spin on older tales.  

Hans Christian-Andersen (HCA) earned fame in Denmark for his fairy tales. While a few had happy endings, the more infamous ones went to the downer conclusions. HCA believed that true love was hard to find and that sometimes death is the only happiness someone can find in their quest for dignity, or for a warm bed at night. Then modern writers like Terry Pratchett would lovingly mock this, and affirm that everyone may live, getting some comfort.  

Matches In The Snow

"The Little Match Girl" is one of the most depressing HCA tales, and that is saying something. Even the first line warns us about the depression to come: "It was so freezing."

We see the title character attempt to sell matches during a cold wintry night. She has a few coverings, and while she left the house with oversized slippers, a boy stole one of them and a horse carriage accidentally knocked off the other. If she doesn't sell any matches, then her father will beat her for bringing no coins home. Rather than go home after no customer comes to help, the girl crouches between two sumptuous houses and starts lighting matches to keep warm. They show her visions of loveliness to help her cope with the cold. People ignore her while going about their commute to work, or doing the shopping.  

As the night gets cold, the matches show different scenes: warmth from a stove, a good Christmas meal, and a shooting star. When she sees her grandmother in heaven, the girl asks for her grandmother to take her there. 

HCA was not in a happy state of mind when he wrote this. You can tell that he knew how to get into the mindset of someone facing a bitter cold in winter. 

Hogfather Says No To This Ending

In Discworld, the fantasy parody series by the late Terry Pratchett, the little match girl story plays out during a segment in both the novel and television special Hogfather. Albert and Death encounter her still body in the snow, while Death is filling in for the world's Santa Claus, the Hogfather. Death says that a little girl should not freeze in the night. He says that it is not fair, and this is a chance to right a wrong. 

Albert, a retired wizard, and overall cynic, tells Death that it's how the winter stories go. Going against the status quo should find disruption. Everyone romanticizes a girl freezing to death in the snow while thanking their stars that it wasn't them. Normal folks have enough food and coal to get through the night and if they don't, then at least they aren't a child freezing in the snow. They can tell stories to make up for the drafty holes in the wall. 

If Death weren't the Hogfather, and if not for events in previous books, he would have accepted this state of affairs. Death is not fair, and he comes for everyone. An earlier book had him chide an apprentice for saving a princess from a pre-appointed assassination, complete with smacking him on the face for insubordination. But here, Death says no. He gives life, rather than reaps it. The match girl is not a fictional character, but an actual child that he can carry in the snow. 

You may not see this in the film because it would have broken the budget, but the "affronted" angels show up to collect the match girl's soul and take her to heaven. Albert responds by tossing snowballs at them so they will go away. Even though Albert tells Death to let the story play out as is, he listens to his master. 

Unlike the original fairy tale, we see the angels attempt to complete the tale. Death asked why didn’t they come earlier, to give the child a hot drink and a blanket. He has a point and shows that he puts his money where his mouth is by picking up the child and asking several constables to give her a place to sleep for the night, and a meal. Angels are supposed to be protectors. Yet they did not protect an innocent kid. 

Why is it important that Albert toss snowballs at the angels? He shows them how humans feel about the cold, and how an object traditionally used for child's play can prove annoying and disruptive to a formal occasion. This is not a time to be civil, but to show anger.

Add A Level Of Disruption

Sometimes we cannot accept children freezing in the snow. We can't tell a crying kid, "There are starving children in Somalia, cheer up." You can't let the little match girl serve as your cautionary tale against parental abuse and thieves that steal slippers from the vulnerable. 

Pick up that child if you can, and change the story. Show that happiness is possible, even if difficult to reach. Instead of waiting for the angels, shoo them away, and use your powers for a new ending. 

Priya Sridhar has been writing fantasy and science fiction for fifteen years, and counting. Capstone published the Powered series, and Alban Lake published her works, Carousel and Neo-Mecha Mayhem. Priya lives in Miami, Florida with her family.

Illustration: The Little Match Girl by Arthur Rackham

The Other (Better) Beast Story, by Kitta MacPherson

Editor’s note: Despite having read The Blue Fairy Book, by Andrew Lang, I didn’t recall “The Wonderful Sheep.” Kitta’s moving, inspiring essay will send me to read it again. I know you’ll enjoy this as much as I did.

A sweet, innocent girl is abandoned to danger. A mysterious, wealthy, anthropomorphic beast appears. Broken promises provoke grave consequences.

With such beguiling story elements, the fairy tale called “The Wonderful Sheep” might seem destined for popularity. Yet, it has long been overshadowed by a similar story, Beauty and the Beast.

While both appeared in Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book in 1889, it was the Beauty tale about a girl forced to live with a hideous, wild beast to save her father’s life, first written by the French writer Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, that would go on to enjoy enormous, enduring popularity. (Editor’s note: The de Beaumont version, which is still very well known today, was shortened and rewritten by de Beaumont, and published in 1756, 16 years after the first written version by de Villeneuve.)

In the house where I grew up, however, the darker “wonderful” sheep story of a cast-out princess rescued by a large, talking ram by the French novelist Countess D’Aulnoy ruled as our favorite. More than any other fairy tale—and I love many—this story of a king cursed to be a sheep and his undying love for a special girl stood out to me precisely because of its pathos. From Jesus Christ, the Christian “Lamb of God,” to the Greek zodiac’s primary symbol, Aries the Ram, sheep are powerful signs of goodness in world culture and have always entranced me.

As a child, I believed that I loved the Sheep story because sheep were my favorite animals. They were sweet and approachable. I wanted to hug their thick, curly coats. They would never dream of snarling.

I also knew—because she read it more often than any other story—that the tale held tremendous power over my serious, intelligent mother. She wept as she read it aloud, growing increasingly upset near the end, her musical, soprano voice dipping to a flat alto.

Tales like Sheep and Beauty, based on what folklorists describe as animal bride or bridegroom stories, have a tenacious hold on the human imagination, spun by cultures worldwide since ancient times. The 2,000-year-old book The Golden Ass by the Roman novelist Apuleius about a man magically transformed into a donkey inspired many later writers, from Boccaccio to Shakespeare.

But the 1740 Beauty story and D’Aulnoy’s decades-earlier tale end differently from one another, which helps explain the public's continuing fascination with Beauty and my family’s devotion to the other. Stalled by evildoers, the Beauty returns from a visit with her ailing father just in time to save her dying Beast, providing a happy ending.

In contrast, Princess Miranda, who insists on leaving the sheep king twice to visit family, forgets him the second time. Soon after, he dies, brokenhearted.

Why did the Sheep story affect my mother so deeply and why did she read it—repeatedly—to her only daughter? Was it a warning? A lesson?

My mother, a talented starlet who appeared as a cast member on “The Today Show” in the 1950’s, married a brilliant and (she would later discover to be) troubled man after WWII. Dad had returned to her as a decorated officer for his service as a lead navigator for the U.S. Army Air Force, but he had secretly become a raging alcoholic. Dad then was the opposite of the wonderful Sheep: a human on the surface but a monster underneath.

You couldn’t blame Mom for missing the signs. As Dad would later admit, he was an overachiever and good at hiding his disease—working all week, excelling in his role as an attorney at the U.S. State Department, and drinking for much of the weekends. Because he wasn’t stupid enough to be drunk during a date, she didn’t suspect anything. But soon after they married, Mom quickly discerned his pattern of weekend drinking and inevitable blackouts.

Mom knew nothing about addiction and thought only that her new husband was sad about losing some war buddies and would get over it. His self-destructive pattern went on for years, intensifying, never abating, coming to a terrifying head one fall weekend when Dad forced his wife (six months pregnant),  my older brother, and me into his turquoise Buick. During a terrifying, 90-minute, drunken ride from our home in Oyster Bay, a charming hamlet on the North Shore of suburban Long Island, east to a swanky seaside destination, Sag Harbor, he drove at breakneck speed, weaving between lanes on the Long Island Expressway, nearly crashing several times.

My brother remembers my mother’s shrieks, Mom’s pleas to pull over. I recall nothing. Many years later, Mom revealed that when we arrived at our destination miraculously intact, she was shaken but never more self-aware, and told him she was leaving him and taking the children unless he joined Alcoholics Anonymous. She meant it. He did what she asked.

***

In her 1995 book, The Interpretation of Fairy Tales, the late scholar Marie-Louise von Franz noted: “Fairy tales are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes.”

Now, decades later, I believe my mother was working out her own personal conflicts as she read to me, aided and encouraged by the other-worldly story. As von Franz indicated, fairy tales speak to us, the story’s archetypal subjects instinctively understood because they are rooted in us: the actions of both humans and non-humans in the stories representing a distillation of our own human thoughts and desires.

“The Wonderful Sheep” is riveting because it is replete with profound ideas that only sound simple. Love is powerful. Appearances are deceiving. Men can be beasts but are capable of much more. Women often want to leave. Women exert unseen power. Love is a balancing act.

When my mother read the Sheep story to me, she was still in the early stages of her marriage, my father working to fight his very real demons, diving into his participation in AA, and using his intellectual prowess to explore his spirituality through writers like the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Mom was steadfastly in love, but was probably also aware that, at any given moment, she might need to leave.

A month after our traumatic car ride, Mom went into premature labor, giving birth to a second son, Mark Ross. Weighing 7 pounds, 7 ounces, the only-ever dark-haired MacPherson child fought to live for seven hours. In those days, the early 1960s, there was nothing to be done. His not-yet-fully-developed lungs failed while my parents watched him turn blue and suffocate.

My parents’ marriage lasted 53 years. Dad built a successful post-State Department career as a corporate attorney, and never stopped his efforts to be sober, regularly attending AA meetings until he died at the age of 89. Like the Sheep, it turned out, he couldn’t live without Mom, who had “left” him when she passed on the year before.

My mother’s tears each time she read the fairy tale to her small daughter were both a warning and a lesson. In our favorite fairy tale and in our own lives, there were not and would never be any lucky breaks. Decisions were and would forever be life-or-death matters. She endorsed the story’s potentially conflicting values to love fiercely but to act decisively and accept the consequences. By bestowing this wisdom on her princess, she consigned me to a life that would be both difficult and worthwhile.

***

Bio: Kitta MacPherson is an award-winning science writer who has worked in daily newspapers and at Princeton University. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Copperfield Review, Mused, Medium, and on the Dirty Spoon Radio Hour. She teaches English at St. Benedict's Preparatory School in Newark, N.J