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sue lemmo
                 
  little mermaid  

Andersen’s tale of “The Mermaid” tells of the youngest of five daughters of the widowed Merman King.  On her fifteenth birthday she is given the gift of a visit to the world of humans above the sea.  On her visit she first sees the handsome prince celebrating his own birthday on a three-masted ship. 

Suddenly, a terrible storm arises and destroys his ship.  She cannot bear to watch him drown and risks her own life to save him taking him safely to shore.  He does not see the lovely young mermaid who saves his life.

  

Her longing for the young prince causes her to make a terrible bargain with the Sea Witch, trading her lovely voice for a pair of human legs that send pains like treading upon sharp knives when she walks on them.  The witch delivers an ominous warning, “When once you have received a human form, you can never be a mermaid again; you will never be able to dive down through the water to your sisters and your father’s palace. And if you do not succeed in winning the prince’s love… you will gain no immortal soul!  The first morning after his marriage with another your heart will break, and you will turn into the foam of the sea.”

  
    mermaid close up  
 

Alas, the young prince falls in love with another.  But on the night of his wedding celebration the mermaid is given one last chance to save herself. Her sisters have given the Sea Witch their beautiful hair for a knife. If the mermaid plunges the knife into the prince’s heart before dawn and his warm blood spills on her feet, she can transform into a mermaid again and return to her loving family in the sea.  The mermaid takes the knife from her sisters, but as she gazes upon her prince, she cannot bear to take his life and flings the knife into the sea.  She dashes overboard and turns into sea foam. 

As the sun rises she sees hundreds of ethereal beings floating to the sky. She realizes that her form is changing to become like theirs and she becomes a “daughter of the air”.  The wispy beings tell her that because she has suffered and endured she has raised herself “…to the spirit of the air; and now by her own good deeds she may, in the course of three hundred years be transformed into an undying soul.”
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