The Heartbreak Behind The Little Mermaid

The Little Mermaid is one of the most beloved stories in the world — but almost everyone knows only the bright, singing cartoon version, with its crab and its happy ending. The original fairy tale, written by the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen in 1837, is something else entirely: a haunting, painful story of silent suffering, self-erasure, and unrequited love — and the darkest truth of all is that Andersen wasn’t writing about a mermaid. He was writing about himself, and a heartbreak he never got over.

To understand it, you have to read what Andersen actually wrote. In his tale, a young mermaid falls in love with a human prince she saves from drowning, and longs so desperately to join his world that she goes to the sea witch for help. But the price is horrifying. To gain human legs, she must give up her voice — and the witch does not simply take her song. She cuts out the mermaid’s tongue, permanently, leaving her mute forever. And the legs themselves are a curse disguised as a gift: the witch warns her that although she will walk and dance more gracefully than any human, every single step she takes will feel as though she is treading on sharp knives, a searing agony that will never stop, for the rest of her life. The mermaid agrees to all of it — eternal pain and eternal silence — just for the chance to be near the man she loves.

The Horror

And it is all for nothing. This is what makes Andersen’s original so devastating. The mute mermaid cannot tell the prince who she is or what she did for him. She cannot speak of her love. She dances for him in agony, smiling through the knives, and he grows fond of her — but only as a sweet, silent companion, a kind of pet. He never sees her as she truly is. And then, believing another woman to be the one who saved his life, the prince marries that other woman instead. For the little mermaid, this is a death sentence. The terms of her bargain were absolute: if the prince married another, she would die the very next dawn, her heart breaking as her body dissolved into nothing more than foam on the sea.

On the night of the wedding, as the mermaid waits to die, her sisters rise from the waves — and they have made a terrible sacrifice of their own. They have cut off all their beautiful long hair and given it to the sea witch, and in exchange they have been given a knife. They hand it to their little sister and beg her to use it: if she plunges the blade into the prince’s heart, and lets his warm blood fall on her feet, she will become a mermaid again and be allowed to live out her full three hundred years in the sea. All she has to do is kill the man who broke her heart, the man sleeping beside his new bride. The little mermaid takes the knife. She stands over the sleeping prince. And she cannot do it. She loves him too much to save her own life at the cost of his. So instead, as the sun rises, she throws the knife into the waves and then throws herself into the sea after it, giving herself up to death, expecting to become nothing but foam.

The Modern Relic

Andersen, ever so slightly, softened the very end — instead of simply ceasing to exist, the mermaid’s spirit is lifted up by the ethereal “daughters of the air,” and told that because of her selfless suffering, she may earn an immortal soul through hundreds of years of good deeds. It is a sliver of hope in an ocean of grief. But the story is, unmistakably, a tragedy: a tale of someone who sacrifices her voice, her body, her family, and finally her life for a love that is never returned, and is never even fully seen.

And that is because of who Andersen really wrote it for. When he was composing The Little Mermaid in 1836, Hans Christian Andersen was in the depths of heartbreak over a real person: a man named Edvard Collin, the son of his patron. Andersen, who biographers believe was attracted to both men and women, was passionately, painfully in love with Collin, and wrote him letters of aching intensity — “I long for you as if you were a beautiful girl… my feelings for you are those of a woman.” But Collin did not, and could not, return those feelings — and in 1836, Collin married a woman. Andersen was devastated, and would pine for him for the rest of his life. Scholars have long read The Little Mermaid as Andersen’s coded confession of exactly that grief: the mermaid is the outsider who can never belong to the world of the one she loves, who is silenced and unable to speak her true heart, who watches the object of her love marry someone else, and who gives up everything and receives nothing. The mermaid’s silence was Andersen’s silence. Her impossible, invisible love was his.

The relic sits on a rock in the harbour of Copenhagen, in Andersen’s own Denmark. In 1913, a bronze statue of the Little Mermaid — modelled by the sculptor Edvard Eriksen — was placed on the waterfront, gazing wistfully out to sea, and it has become one of the most famous statues on earth, a symbol of the entire country. And in a strange, dark echo of the story’s themes of pain and violation, the statue itself has been attacked again and again over the decades: she has been decapitated more than once, had an arm sawn off, been blown off her rock with explosives, and been splashed with paint. Each time, Denmark repairs her and sets her back on her rock, to keep watching the water. She sits there today — the silent girl who gave up everything for a love that could never be — a monument, whether the millions of tourists who photograph her know it or not, to one man’s private, lifelong heartbreak, hidden inside a fairy tale for children.

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