The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen
Quick answer: The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen: the real 1837 ending explained, full summary, themes of sacrifice and the soul, and the craft of the tale.
A mermaid trades her voice for legs that feel like knives at every step, gambling three hundred years of life on a man who never learns what she gave. Hans Christian Andersen published The Little Mermaid in 1837, and readers raised on the animated film are routinely stunned by the original: there is no wedding for her, no restored voice, and the knife her sisters bring up from the sea witch is meant for the prince's heart.
The tale is Andersen at his most extreme: physical pain, theological longing and unrequited love braided into one story ostensibly for children. Students search for the real ending and the soul question; writers should study how Andersen prices every wish, and how he bolted onto the ending a consolation critics have argued about ever since.
The story in brief, ending included
The sea king's youngest daughter is allowed at fifteen to rise and see the surface. She watches a young prince's birthday aboard ship, saves him when the storm wrecks it, and leaves him on a beach where a temple girl finds him; he never sees his rescuer. Her longing fixes on two things: the prince, and the immortal soul merfolk lack, since mermaids live three hundred years and then become foam on the sea. Her grandmother explains the one path: only if a man loved her entirely and married her would a soul flow into her. So she visits the sea witch, who names the price of legs: her tongue, cut out, for the finest voice in the ocean. Every step on her new feet will feel like walking on knives, and if the prince marries another, on the morning after his wedding her heart will break and she will dissolve into foam. She pays.
The prince finds the mute girl on his steps and keeps her near, fond and oblivious; she dances for him though each step cuts. Then his parents send him to a neighbouring princess, who turns out to be the temple girl from the beach; believing her his rescuer, he marries her joyfully. On the wedding ship that night, the mermaid waits for sunrise and foam. Her sisters surface, their hair shorn as payment to the witch, bearing a knife: kill the prince before dawn, let his blood fall on her feet, and she becomes a mermaid again with her three hundred years. She enters the tent, watches the couple sleeping, kisses the prince's brow, and throws the knife into the waves. She leaps after it, and instead of ending, finds herself rising among transparent beings: the daughters of the air, who need no man's love but can earn an immortal soul through three hundred years of good deeds. The tale closes with her first tears and a coda in which the invisible spirits watch children: good ones shorten the trial, bad ones add days of weeping to it.
The characters
Andersen's cast is small, and pointedly, nobody in it is wicked.
Themes: the soul, the voice and the price list
The exam-standard themes are sacrifice and unrequited love, but the tale's true axis is the soul question: the mermaid's desire predates the prince, she interrogates her grandmother about immortality before the witch is ever mentioned, and marriage is presented as the mechanism, not the goal. That doubling lets the tale be read two ways, as a love tragedy or as a religious quest wearing a romance, and strong essays hold both. The voice is the other great theme: to gain access to the human world she surrenders exactly the thing that made her extraordinary in her own, and her muteness becomes the tale's cruellest irony, she cannot even tell the prince the story that would make him love her.
The sharper point concerns the ending Andersen chose. The knife scene offers the tale one last transaction, a life for a life, and the mermaid declines it, making her only unpriced act the refusal. The daughters of the air then convert her from a bargainer into an earner: a soul through deeds, not through a man. Critics split between reading this as the tale's escape hatch and finding the coda about well-behaved children a sentimental flinch. Either way, say it plainly: she does not get the prince, and she does not quite die; Andersen even considered titling the tale Daughters of the Air.
The craft: making wishes expensive
The tale's engine is its economy: every desire has a stated, physical price, the voice for the legs, pain for every step, hair for the knife, blood for the reversal. Andersen understood that fairy-tale wishes bore when they are free, so he runs the story like a ledger and lets the reader feel each debit. The technique transfers directly: decide what your character's wish costs in the body, name the cost before it is paid, and never discount it later. The knives under her feet at the wedding ball, where she dances better than anyone, is the whole method in one image.
Point of view does the quieter work. We never leave the mermaid, and the prince's inner life stays as inaccessible to us as to her, so his obliviousness reads as texture of the world rather than villainy. The result is a tragedy without an antagonist: every character behaves decently and the catastrophe still arrives, one of the hardest structures in fiction to build. A story that achieves it tends to sweep the emotional columns of any rubric; Writory's Short Story Contest marks emotional impact separately.
Behind the tale
Andersen published the story in 1837, in the same booklet as The Emperor's New Clothes, and wrote it while smarting from his own history of loves that could not be returned; biographers connect it to his devotion to Edvard Collin, on the eve of Collin's marriage. He was proud of one departure from the mermaid tradition: unlike Undine, whose soul depended entirely on marriage, his heroine is given a path of her own earning. The tale saturates culture: the bronze mermaid on the Copenhagen harbour rock, unveiled in 1913, is the most photographed statue in Denmark, still gazing toward a shore that never claims her.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, establish that the soul quest precedes the romance; the grandmother scene is your evidence, and it reframes the whole tale.
- Itemise the transactions, voice, pain, hair, blood, and use the refused knife as the tale's single act outside the economy.
- State the real ending precisely: no marriage, no death by foam, but three hundred years' probation among the daughters of the air.
- Compare with Undine or with the sanitised film ending for an easy discussion of how endings change meaning.
- As a writer, price every wish in the body and collect payment on the page; free magic is dead weight in a story.
- Attempt a tragedy without a villain: let every character act kindly and build the catastrophe from what they cannot see.
Try it yourself
Write a story in which a character trades their defining gift for access to a world that cannot perceive the sacrifice, and bring them to a final scene where one violent act would reverse the trade. Let the refusal, not the reward, be the ending.
Questions
What happens at the end of the original Little Mermaid?
The prince marries the temple princess, and the mermaid refuses her sisters' bargain to kill him and save herself. Leaping into the sea at dawn, she becomes not foam but a daughter of the air, who may earn an immortal soul through three hundred years of good deeds.
Why does the little mermaid want a soul?
Merfolk live three hundred years and then dissolve into foam, while humans have eternal souls. The mermaid's longing for immortality is established before she loves the prince; marrying him is the only mechanism her world offers for gaining a soul, which fuses the two desires.
Why did Andersen add the daughters of the air?
He wanted his mermaid's fate in her own hands rather than dependent on a man's love, a deliberate change from the Undine tradition he knew. The coda lets her earn immortality through deeds, though critics still argue over whether it is transcendence or a sentimental patch.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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