The Third Booklet of 1837
Andersen's The Little Mermaid, originally titled Den lille Havfrue in Danish, appeared in Copenhagen on April 7, 1837 in the third booklet of Fairy Tales Told for Children. University bookseller C. A. Reitzel published it, with printing by Bianco Luno and Schneider. The booklet also included “The Emperor's New Clothes,” and “The Little Mermaid” began on page 5. It was initially a literary publication to buy or borrow, not a story explaining a later film or urban sculpture.
The first two fairy-tale booklets had appeared in 1835. The new work retained the child-oriented title and storytelling voice while introducing failed love, bodily pain, and the soul's destination. Its first public issue in 1837 thus also reveals Andersen's attempt to broaden subject matter within a children's-story framework.
How Andersen Explained His Conception
Two months before publication, Andersen discussed The Little Mermaid in a February 11, 1837 letter to Ingemann, stressing that the conception was his own and that the character's fate had moved him as he wrote. The letter reveals an author actively comparing works and anticipating readers' responses, rather than simply collecting and recording folklore.
He particularly discussed Fouqué's Undine: if a water-being could obtain an immortal soul only when a human loved her, the outcome depended too much on chance. Andersen wanted another path for his protagonist. This explanation helps illuminate the final turn in the story, but does not justify mechanically matching every suffering she experiences to an event in the author's private life.
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Beneath the Sea, on Land, and Two Desires
The story begins with the sea king's palace and his six daughters. The youngest places a statue of a human youth in her garden and listens to her sisters' accounts of the surface, which she may visit only at fifteen. During a storm she rescues the prince and brings him ashore, but he wakes to see another girl, unaware of his true rescuer. This imbalance of knowledge drives the plot thereafter.
She desires more than the prince's love. Her grandmother explains that mermaids live for three hundred years but become foam when they die, whereas humans, despite shorter lives, possess immortal souls. Love, entry into the human world, and escape from complete extinction overlap. Novelistic inward questioning lies amid bright seascapes, court festivities, and fairy-tale numbers.
References: [1]
Transformation's Price and the Ending
The sea witch gives her a potion to turn her tail into legs, at the price of her voice and severe pain with every step. Transformation brings her near the prince but prevents her explaining the rescue. He regards her as a beloved companion, yet ultimately marries the princess wrongly credited with saving him. Beauty, dancing, and sacrifice do not automatically yield the relationship she seeks.
Her sisters exchange their hair for a knife and tell her that killing the prince will restore her tail. She rejects this means of saving herself and plunges into the sea, then becomes a daughter of the air with an opportunity to earn an immortal soul through good deeds. The story neither concludes with marriage nor stops at dissolution into foam. Its final passage links children's good and bad conduct to the air spirits' period of waiting, turning tragedy toward moral exhortation to its listeners.
A Children's Title and Adult Readers
On July 18, 1837, Kjøbenhavnsposten published a review signed “l.n.” Helena Březinová's research suggests that the initials may belong to its editor Orla Lehmann, an attribution that remains an inference rather than a certain signature. The review praised The Little Mermaid and Thumbelina and noted adults' willingness to read the tales, but criticized the ending's direct admonition to children for disrupting the preceding poetry.
Individual readers left another form of evidence. Březinová cites Henriette Hanck's September 22, 1837 letter reporting a borrower who had read The Little Mermaid five times and wept each time. She also cites Andersen's letter to his publisher that year explaining that the works were for adults as well. Reviews, borrowing, and correspondence together show that children's-book marketing did not delimit actual readers or their emotional responses.
From Reprinting to New Artistic Forms
The tale continued to enter collections. An illustrated Eventyr with 1850 on its title page was actually issued in five booklets in 1849, including The Little Mermaid with Vilhelm Pedersen's illustrations. Such edition evidence shows concretely how the text was rearranged, illustrated, and placed in new readers' hands; the printed year and actual issue date were not always identical.
Performance and sculpture later took the mermaid beyond the page. Henrik Lübker's study in the 2012 volume of Anderseniana notes that after seeing the 1909 ballet, Carl Jacobsen commissioned Edvard Eriksen to make a statue. Dancer Ellen Price declined to model nude, so the sculptor used his wife Eline; the work was installed at Copenhagen's Langelinie on August 23, 1913. Emphasizing waiting and sorrow, the new image selectively interpreted the original. Editions, stage works, and public sculpture each have distinct conditions, and a familiar later image cannot replace the original narrative about voice, choice, and the soul.