The Queen, the Princes and the Mermaid: Hans Christian Andersen’s Most Enchanting Tales

Listen closely! We’re about to begin. And when we reach the end of the tale, let’s hope we know more than we do now, for it concerns an evil goblin, one of the very worst – the Devil himself! One day, the Devil was feeling mighty pleased with himself because he’d made a special mirror. The mirror took anything that was good or lovely and shrank it to almost nothing. But if something was useless or bad, the mirror magnified it and made it look even worse. The most charming landscape looked like boiled spinach in the mirror, while the nicest people turned nasty or stood on their heads with their middles missing, and their faces so twisted that nobody knew who they were. And if you had a freckle, you could be sure that the mirror would stretch it across your entire mouth and nose. “What a hoot!” cried the Devil. If someone had a kind thought, then a sneer would appear in the mirror, which made the old goblin laugh at his own cunning. The goblins who went to goblin school – for you see, the Devil ran a goblin school – all chattered about the miracle. They thought that now they could see what humans and the world really looked like. They ran everywhere with the mirror and, in the end, there was not one person or country that it didn’t twist out of shape. Then the goblins decided to fly up to Heaven, to mock the angels and God himself. The higher they flew with the mirror, the harder it laughed, and they could barely hold onto it. Higher and higher they flew, nearer and nearer to God and the angels – and then the mirror shook so hard with laughter that it slipped from their hands and tumbled down to earth, where it shattered into millions and billions of pieces. That created more trouble than ever. Some pieces were hardly bigger than a grain of sand, and they flew all around the wide world – and whenever a piece got in someone’s eye, it stuck fast. Then the person could only see what was wrong with everything, because each of these tiny bits had the same power as the whole mirror. Some people also got a sliver of mirror in their hearts – and that was truly terrible, because it turned their hearts into lumps of ice. Sometimes a piece was large enough to use as a windowpane; but it was no good looking at your friends through a window like that. Other pieces ended up in eyeglasses – and then it was awful when people put them on in order to see and do things properly. It all tickled the Devil so much that he roared with laughter and his belly nearly split. All the while, more and more tiny shards of glass were flying about in the air. And now we’ll hear what happened next!