The snow queen has been driving her sleigh through my recent reading.
In surrealist artist Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet (1974), 92-year-old Marian Leatherby, made aware that her family is conspiring to send her to an institution, dreams of travelling to the arctic. She muses on the snow queen, remembers how she read Hans Christian Anderson’s tale as a girl, imagining ‘Little Kay doing multiplication problems in the icy castle’. There is a problem Marian feels she must solve for the queen, who the narrative playfully configures as an aspect of a syncretic mother goddess.
She is the sphinx of the North with crackling white fur and diamonds on the ten claws of every foot, her smile is frozen and her tears rattle like hail on the strange diagrams drawn at her feet.
The original story calls her Snedronningen, queen of the ‘white bees swarming’, the snowflakes of a winter storm. ‘She flies at the heart of the swarm’ says Gerda’s grandmother:
She never lies on the ground. She soars up again into the the dark cloud. Many’s the winter night she flies through the streets of this very town and spies through the windows, making them freeze over with patterns like flowers.’
Devils tried to carry a twisted magic mirror up to heaven to laugh at god, but the glass shattered and two of its broken pieces pierce the eye and heart of Gerda’s friend Kay. The mirror makes ‘everything good look ugly and small and anything bad look fine and grand.’
Next winter, the snow queen comes for Kay. She takes him to her palace, where Gerda must seek him out across the seasons and arctic lands. At the centre of the queen’s icy lair is a frozen lake, the Mirror of Reason. There, while his heart freezes, Kay must try to spell out the word ETERNITY in ice blocks of intricate, impossible patterns.
The Ice Palace (1962) by Norwegian writer Tarjei Vesaas can be read as a kind of modernist reworking of the fairy tale. In this version, the snow queen and her palace are one and the same, merging into a huge frozen waterfall into whose creviced chambers eleven-year-old Unn is subsumed.
Unn explores deep inside the ice palace, captivated and perilously alone. ‘Why am I here'?' she wonders. ‘She attempted to find the solution to this riddle. Meanwhile she walked, strangely exalted, half unconscious.’
In Snedronningen, once Gerda has found Kay and melted his heart-ice-splinter with her tears, they cry and laugh while the ice dances for joy and the spelling of ETERNITY falls into place. But in Vesaas’ book, the dancing icicles of Unn’s captor, lit by the winter sun, do not allow for escape.
The pattern in the ice wall danced in the room, the light shone more strongly. Everything that should have been upright was upside down - everything was piercingly bright.
There’s a mirror in The Ice Palace too. Near the beginning of the book, Unn and her friend Siss look into one together, sharing a strange, melding experience:
Four eyes full of gleams and radiance beneath their lashes, filling the looking-glass. Questions shooting out and then hiding again […] Gleams and radiance, gleaming from you to me, from me to you alone - into the mirror and out again, and never an answer about what this is, never an explanation […] It’s ourselves! We can do nothing about it, it’s as if it comes from another world. The picture begins to waver, flows out to the edges, collects itself, no it doesn’t. It’s a mouth smiling. A mouth from another world. No, it isn’t a mouth, it isn’t a smile, nobody knows what it is - it’s only eyelashes open wide above gleams and radiance.
Both the girls and the palace are repeatedly described with the vocabulary of light and vision. Vesaas’ description of their absorbed gazes within the mirror evokes the movements of the northern lights, seen most often in the coldest, clearest times of the year, in the arctic regions where the snow queen lives.
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These stories all express the fascination of ice and its many refractions - whether it represents cold rationality, the sublime, or the divine feminine - in all its edged beauty. A tension lies at the heart of its appeal. Ice, like the snow queen, is both alluring and dangerous.
Its power is also seen in the art of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004). Her experience walking on the Grindelwald glacier in Switzerland in 1949 inspired a series of paintings and sketches, where she tried 'to combine in a work all angles at once, from above, through, and all around, as a bird flies, a total experience.'
The ice is animated. ‘It seemed to Breathe!’ Barns-Graham wrote, marvelling at:
[The] massive strength and size of the glaciers, the fantastic shapes, the contrast of solidity and transparency, the many reflected colours in strong light, the warmth of the sun melting and changing the forms […]
Despite their fragmented shapes, the forms have a sense of depth that make me feel as if I could walk amongst them, like ice houses or henges.
I’m not sure if I can twist all these threads together, complete the jigsaw. I’ve found repeated themes of ice and snow queens - palaces, mirrors, puzzles, light, isolation - unexpectedly. You go about your day-to-day and mysteriously connected images skitter into your mind, needle your imagination. Like mirror shards, like splinters of ice. You are forever turning pieces over, attempting to discern the right pattern. Doing ‘multiplication problems in the icy castle.’ Trying to stop your heart becoming a lump of ice.
The queen and her snow bees paid a visit across the UK this month, bringing the most snow and cold I’ve witnessed at home in December for a long time. Now it’s midwinter. The longest night, the darkest time of the year in the northern hemisphere. It also marks the incremental return of light, a promise that warmth will come back and find us.
Quotations from ‘The Snow Queen’ are from the translation by Neil Philip and quotations from ‘The Ice Palace’ are from the Penguin Modern Classics edition, translated by Elizabeth Rokkan.