“The Little Mermaid” (“Den lille Havfrue”) was first published on April 7, 1837, in the collection Fairy Tales, Told for Children. New Collection. First Booklet by C.A. Reitzel in Copenhagen. It is Andersen’s most complex and emotionally devastating story — a tale of impossible love, physical suffering, and spiritual aspiration that resists any simple interpretation.
The mermaid of the title is the youngest daughter of the Sea King, who falls in love with a human prince she rescues from drowning. She visits the Sea Witch and trades her beautiful voice for human legs — but every step she takes on those legs causes her agony, as if she were walking on knives. She cannot speak to the prince; she can only be near him. He loves her as a companion but marries another woman, and the mermaid, rather than killing the prince to save herself (as her sisters urge), throws herself into the sea and is transformed into a spirit of the air.
The story is usually read as a tale of unrequited love, but Andersen’s own framing is more complex. The mermaid does not merely want the prince — she wants an immortal soul, which mermaids do not possess. Her love for the prince is also a spiritual aspiration: she wants to transcend her animal nature and achieve something permanent. The final transformation into a “daughter of the air” — condemned to three hundred years of good deeds before earning a soul — is not a happy ending but not quite a tragic one either; it is a deferral, a continuation of longing beyond death.
Andersen wrote the story during his intense (and unrequited) attachment to Edvard Collin, and the mermaid’s silence — her inability to express her love in words — clearly reflects Andersen’s own situation: loving someone he could never tell.
Collecting The Little Mermaid
Individual illustrated editions are collected as art objects; the story appears in all major Andersen collections.
Market values:
- Notable illustrated editions (Edmund Dulac, 1911; Kay Nielsen, 1924): $200–$1,000+
- Danish first appearance (1837): museum-level rarity
- Modern illustrated editions: $10–$50