A Comparison Between Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan

While there is a depiction of religion at the heart of both H.C. Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and Ursula Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan, there are very few similarities between how each handles the theme. Andersen develops a Romantic, Christian view of religion, while Le Guin criticizes organized religion in general, focusing on negative aspects such as empty rituals and superstitions based in fear. Furthermore, Le Guin often praises the very things which Andersen, on the basis of religious belief, attacks in his fairy tale, including reason, knowledge and experience. That each of these two works develops a view of religion which is seemingly contradictory to the other, is an indication not only of the variation between Le Guin and Andersen concerning the issue of religion, but also a mark of the influence of the period in which each author wrote.

A general idea of each author's view of religion may be determined by the symbols used to represent religion in each story. In "The Snow Queen," the major symbol for divinity is roses, the love for which helps the protagonist Gerda find and save Kay. The link between the Christian God and roses has been made before - for example, by Dante in the depiction of heaven in his Paradiso as the "Rose Eternal" (Dante 30.124) - and may have been in Andersen's conscious when writing. Either way, he explicitly connects roses with Christianity by repeating a hymn, featuring roses, thrice in the story: "The rose in the valley is blooming so sweet/And angels descend there the children to greet" (Andersen). The connotations carried by roses are generally very positive: above all, they represent love; as flowers which bloom newly every summer, they also symbolize restoration (redemption, in Christian terms); through "The Snow Queen," where they feature prominently in Gerda and Kay's joyful childhood, they also come to represent innocence. As such, by linking religion with the rose, Andersen sets us up a positive view of religion. The case is quite the opposite in The Tombs of Atuan, where religion is linked to the tombs which feature in the title of the book, and the labyrinth, wherein exist the greatest gods of the Kargish religion, the Nameless Ones. The negative associations of these two symbols is quite clear: tombs represent death, and the labyrinth represents deepening confusion. Thus, the symbols used in each of these two works predispose the reader to see religion a certain way: positively, in the case of "The Snow Queen," and negatively in The Tombs of Atuan.

While these symbols hint at how each work portrays religion, the two plots touch on concrete events which further develop the two views of religion provided by "The Snow Queen" and The Tombs of Atuan. For example, each work incorporates the motif of separation and unity into its theme of religion. In The Tombs of Atuan, the Kargish religion itself is the greatest force of separation. It cruelly takes Tenar away from a loving family and places her in a Kargish convent; at five, she is made to sleep, in a "little alcove, partly separated from the...main room...where the [other] girls giggled and whispered...and plaited one another's hair" (Le Guin 13); at six, she is made to sleep in an entire house by herself. Worst of all, perhaps, Tenar's constant separation from others, enforced by her religion, results in her gradually accepting, and even embracing her loneliness with pride: her isolation as "the One Priestess" (Le Guin 21) becomes her identity. It takes Tenar's abandonment of the Kargish religion to finally free her from the two walls which had separated her for ten years from the rest of the world. In "The Snow Queen," on the other hand, religion is seen to bring people together, rather than to separate them. At the start of story, the image presented is one of absolute unity between two children who "cared for each other as much as if they were" (Andersen) brother and sister. After the "fine splinters" (Andersen) of the sprite's (ie. devil's) mirror get into Kay's eyes and heart, corrupting him spiritually, a rift occurs between the two, resulting in Kay's eventual isolation from everyone, depicted by the pathetic image of him "alone in the [Snow Queen's] empty halls of ice" (Andersen). Only when Gerda recites the childhood hymn about roses does Kay finally cry out the glass from his eye, enabling him to reunite with his loved ones. Remembering that roses represent divinity, then, "The Snow Queen" conveys the message that religion, and the divine love it inspires, brings people together; the lack of it will ultimately result in isolation.

The symbolism of the devil's mirror is useful in further understanding Andersen's depiction of religion, and in contrasting it with that of Le Guin's. The fact that it is made by a demon who has a "school" (Andersen) indicates a connection between the mirror's corruption and education (Cooper). The changes it affects in Kay - including making him remember his multiplication table in place of prayers, denounce roses for being "cankered [and]...quite crooked" (Andersen) and seek perfection with a magnifying glass - further specify that what Andersen is criticizing is rationalism and the empirical, scientific method (Cooper). This is in line with the Romanticism of the early 1800s (during which time Andersen lived and wrote), which grew, in part, in reaction to the Enlightenment whose emphasis was on perfecting nature (both physical and human nature) by means of the application of reason. The mirror's fall from among the heavens, then, can be regarded as the fall of man: in the same way that Adam and Eve ate fruit from the forbidden tree of knowledge and "fell" from grace, spreading sin into the future of mankind, so too did the sprite's mirror, representative of the rational quest for knowledge, fall, spreading corruption among humans everywhere.

Thus, Andersen, as many Romantics before him, sets up the dichotomy between knowledge and (literally) blessed ignorance. This sense of the irreconcilability between knowledge and innocence is exemplified when the Finland woman says, "[Gerda] must not hear of her power" (Andersen). In other words, the power of Gerda's innocence (and it is, as Andersen portrays, a tremendous power) would be brought to nothing upon the very knowledge of it (Cooper).

The religion of Kargad also exhibits this conflict with knowledge. Tenar is not taught how to read because language "is one of the black arts" (Le Guin 137); this shows how religion uses superstition to limit knowledge. In fact, the entire religion is based on worship of the unknown: its greatest gods are "nameless" (Le Guin 3). In contrast to the Kargish religion, Ged's art, "wizardry, hangs...upon the knowledge - the relearning, the remembering - of [an] ancient language" (Le Guin 131). The followers of the Kargish religion are taught to disbelieve and denounce the powers of Mages - that is to say, the powers of knowledge, language, and names. Kossil states that wizards "think they are Gods themselves" (Le Guin 60) - an accusation which has been echoed throughout history in times of progression by those against it, including the Romantics who felt that industrialization and rationalism were acts of human defiance and impatience towards nature and, by extension, nature's Creator. Ultimately, however, Ged, because of his knowledge of the "ancient language" (Le Guin 131) is able to give back Tenar's name and sense of self, rescuing her from a religious system which had kept her from truth.

Implicitly linked to knowledge is experience, through which knowledge is gained; thus the Romantic knowledge/innocence dichotomy considers experience to be in opposition to spiritual purity as well. In "The Snow Queen," Gerda's quest begins when she leaves the safety of her home and enters into a world of experiences in her search for Kay; experiences are thus the dangers in the story, against which she must prevail without losing her innocence. In The Tombs of Atuan however, Tenar's troubles end once she leaves the religious grounds and enter into the world, to experience all that she has missed for ten years. In this way, Le Guin suggests that true danger lies in a life of repression.

In particular, we see that Tenar is repressed in terms of sexual experience due to the prescriptions of her religion. Only eunuchs, "half-men" (Le Guin 21), may enter the inner grounds of the Place of the Tombs and all other figures in the vicinity are girls or women. Sexual repression is also an element in "The Snow Queen," represented by Gerda casting away her shoes into the river. These shoes are red, the colour often associated with sexuality. Furthermore, Andersen has written another piece entitled "The Red Shoes," in which a girl who wears red shoes to church and can't keep her mind off them is punished severely for her vanity by losing her feet. As Andersen has Gerda cast away her red shoes, it is symbolic of her casting away any sexuality and vanity that may be associated with her girlhood. "The Snow Queen" looks favourably upon Gerda's choice. Readers are drawn to sympathize with her lack of shoes and admire the little girl for sacrificing "the most precious things she possessed" (Andersen) for the love of a friend. In The Tombs of Atuan however, sexual repression, particularly in the form of Manan - who's description as a "yellowish" man with "potato-eyes" and a voice "high as a woman's...but not a woman's voice" is quite sickly -, is shown to be perverse and unnatural.

There is one element in the representation of religion in The Tombs of Atuan which is absent from the concept of religion as presented in "The Snow Queen." The Kargish religion is one that is full of "sacred songs and...sacred dances" (Le Guin 13), rituals and chanting, while in "The Snow Queen" nothing stands out as ritualistic. However, through choosing to depict Kargad as a pre-industrial world that lacked the written word, Le Guin manages to remind readers of their own past in human history and religion. Furthermore, she sets up certain contrasts to current orthodox practices which force us to reconsider them: for example, the initiation of Tenar, wherein she undergoes a mock execution and loses her name, being a ceremony of death, reflects the present day's ceremony of life, the baptism (Cooper). By setting up this parallel, Le Guin forces us to regard the ritualistic aspects of even the most conventional religions, and thus, again, reminds us of the roots of religion in human history.

We can see, then, that while a concept of religion underlies both Andersen's "The Snow Queen" and Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan, these two works, "The Snow Queen" and The Tombs of Atuan, diverge greatly in their approach to the development of the theme of religion. Andersen's fairy tale, written towards the end of the Romantic era and full of those ideas against rationalism and industrialization, presents a Christian view of innocence and experience, praising the ability of religion to unite children and "grown-up persons" (Andersen) alike in pure love. Le Guin, writing after two World Wars and during the Vietnam war, takes a much more cynical view towards organized religion; she sees in religion not the ability to unite, but to separate, and in its endless rituals before an "empty throne" (Le Guin 2), a tendency to pervert truth and the experiences of life. She also deals with the shaking experience of losing faith, which Andersen only alludes to symbolically in the form of Kay denouncing roses, and treats it as a rebirth, an opportunity to live. However, while there are profound differences between the respective views of Andersen and Le Guin, the fact that religion is a theme in both is a mark of its significance in human life over the past two centuries.


SOURCES

Alighieri, Dante. "Paradiso." The Divine Comedy of Dante's Alighieri. Trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1887. Google Books. 14 Apr. 2010 .

Andersen, H.C. Andersen's Fairy Tales. Project Gutenberg. Web. 14 Apr 2010.

Cooper, Susan. Class Lecture on Modern Fairytales. ENG2110: Children's Literature. University of Ottawa, Ontario, CA. 30 Jan 2010. --- Class Lecture on The Tombs of Atuan. ENG2110: Children's Literature. University of Ottawa, Ontario, CA. 27 Mar 2010.

Le Guin, Ursula. The Tombs of Atuan. New York: Simon Pulse, 1970.