“The Snow Queen” (“Snedronningen”) was first published on December 21, 1844, in New Fairy Tales. First Volume. Second Collection by C.A. Reitzel in Copenhagen. It is Andersen’s longest fairy tale — structured as seven interconnected stories — and his most philosophically ambitious, addressing the relationship between emotion and reason, warmth and coldness, love and intellect.
The story begins with a magic mirror made by a troll (or the Devil), which distorts everything beautiful into ugliness and everything good into evil. The mirror shatters and its fragments lodge in people’s eyes and hearts, turning them cold and cynical. A splinter lodges in the eye and heart of little Kai, transforming him from a warm, loving boy into a cold, contemptuous one. The Snow Queen — the embodiment of cold reason, mathematical perfection, and emotional death — carries him away to her palace at the North Pole.
Gerda’s quest to find and rescue Kai takes her through a succession of encounters — a woman with an enchanted garden, a princess and her prince, a robber girl with a reindeer, a Lapp woman and a Finn woman — each offering help or hindrance. Gerda has no magic, no weapons, no special powers; she succeeds through the sheer force of her love, which is hot enough to melt the Snow Queen’s ice and warm enough to thaw Kai’s frozen heart.
The Snow Queen herself is one of Andersen’s most complex creations: beautiful, powerful, and not precisely evil — she represents a form of perfection that excludes feeling, a world of pure geometry and eternal cold that has its own terrible beauty. Her palace, where Kai sits trying to spell “Eternity” out of ice fragments, is the image of a life reduced to pure intellect — complete, perfect, and dead.
Collecting The Snow Queen
Individual illustrated editions are collected as art objects; the story appears in all major Andersen collections.
Market values:
- Notable illustrated editions (Edmund Dulac, Kay Nielsen, Arthur Rackham): $100–$500
- Modern illustrated editions: $10–$50
- Danish first appearance (1844): museum-level rarity