Hello all!

This week we all read Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. I’m sure many of us had never read the tale before, but I assume plenty of my classmates had watched the animated Disney film of the same name. I have not. The ride at California Adventure is where I’ve had the most interaction with The Little Mermaid; my friend took me on the ride a couple of times because there’s a slope near the beginning of it that keeps you relatively hidden, so we would hit their wax pen and be all goofy for the rest of our visit. You get the gist of the animated film’s story through attraction: Ariel lives under the sea but yearns to be a human, falls in love with a prince, they get married, neptune attends the wedding and everything is happily ever after. I knew the original story was darker, but I had no idea it was as sad and harrowing as it actually was.

Just a couple of things that interest me about the story:

1. The fact that, in order to gain human legs, she had to give up her tongue is CRAZY. That stacked with the addition of her NEEDING him to marry her or she would die. Physically not being able to explain to the Prince that she was the one who saved him is such a scary predicament – it kinda left a pit in my stomach as I was reading.
2. I think the note about mermaids dying and turning into seafoam is so neat. I wonder if Anderson came up with that himself or if it was a pre-established detail in the mythology around mermaids at the time. I have the image of a lonely sailor coming across a patch of seafoam in the middle of the sea and telling that to himself to make the monotony of floating in the ocean a little less dreadful.
3. I was a little confused about the ending. Did she turn into a cloud? Where was the cloud going? Was she to eventually turn back into a mermaid? I’d love to discuss it.

Those were three big takeaways I got from Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. I really enjoyed my reading of it.