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In the Land of the Snow Queen

a long-awaited journey into a fairy tale

By Nick JoubertPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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Reindeer in Lapland

In a riverside town in Denmark, a little girl and a little boy become the best of friends. Gerda and Kai both come from poor families, with few toys or shiny clothes to wear, and they never get to ride in carriages. But they have each other. Tending the roses that bloom in the hanging boxes between the gables of their parents’ garrets, they form a neighborly bond. They sit together under the flowers, and in wintertime in the yard below, they pelt each other with snowballs, or stick coins to the windows and peer at each other through holes in the frost.

But something terrible happens. One blustery midwinter evening, Kai is gazing through the window at Gerda’s grandmother’s house when he sees a spectral figure beckoning from the other side of the glass. Leaning closer, he feels something sting his eye, and darts backwards, clasping his face. ‘What’s happened?’ Gerda asks. But he won’t tell her. He’s been struck by a piece of glass from the devil’s magic mirror, a shard that makes its way down from his eye to lodge itself in his heart.

‘What’s the matter, Kai?’ Gerda asks, many times over the coming days and weeks. She can barely recognize her friend. He’s moody, taciturn, unwilling to play. One afternoon, she looks for him around the ice-covered river, where children are sliding about, tying their sleds to the farmers’ wagons. Kai attaches his sled to a strangers’ sleigh, and its owner – a woman in a white fur coat and hat - encourages him to climb onboard. Before Gerda can find him, he’s gliding out of town, scaling the hills, crossing the plains, speeding towards Lapland as fast as the wind. He’s been abducted by the Snow Queen, and she has no intention of ever letting him leave her palace.

The Steadfast Tin Soldier, one of Hans Christian Andersen's most popular fairy tale characters

‘Lights out! Reading time’s over!’

As a seven-year-old, I wasn’t very good at following that instruction. I’d been given a torch by an uncle, and a book of fairy tales by my grandmother. Amongst the tales, the stories of journeys really captured my imagination: the Arabian prince working the levers of the ebony horse; Hansel and Gretel’s eerie wander in the Black Forest; the Irish mis-adventurer Gilly Blackfoot riding through the air with a troop of cantankerous fairies. But it was Gerda’s journey in search of her friend Kai that beguiled me the most. I loved her as a character: the best of friends who ignores all the doomsayers and sets out to free her friend, forgiving and forgetting all the sour words he’s thrown at her. As a child, I yearned for friends like Gerda, and when I found them, I held close to them.

And I loved the settings of this story. The northern landscape seemed remote yet familiar: it was Santa-Claus-land, with its talking reindeers and pine forests, and its gift-giving prince and princess; but it was also a dangerous place, haunted by robbers who’d ambush your carriage and threaten your life with their knives. For many years, I dreamed of visiting, riding my way across the plains of Lapland, guided by the luminous green sky-worms of the Aurora Borealis. But the years went by and it remained exactly that: a dream. After all, nobody gets to travel to fairy-land, unless the doors between worlds have been flung wide open… or do they?

A traditional Danish play-room

Everybody else assumes that Kai must have drowned, but Gerda refuses to listen. There’s no way Kai is dead – she’s got witnesses to his survival. The sunbeams and swallows insist he’s alive. So she clambers into a boat on the river and floats down to a beautiful flower garden. There, an old woman in a broad-brimmed hat invites Gerda to stay with her, tending her magical talking flowers. And it’s a lovely place to be, listening to the strange stories told by the hyacinth, the tiger lily and the narcissus. But Gerda doesn't forget her friend. One day she escapes the flower garden, bare-footed and barely clothed, and makes her way to a palace.

The prince and princess who live there are kind to her: they give her boots, mittens and a golden carriage to ride, along with plenty of fruit and candy. But along the way, the carriage is ambushed by robbers. Things are looking dicey. The robbers kill the coachman and servants and are planning to eat Gerda, when a little robber girl bites her mother’s ear and insists she must have Gerda for a play-mate. Not only does the girl save Gerda’s life, she presents her to a talking reindeer, instructing the animal to take her to the Snow Queen’s palace. So off Gerda rides, crossing the snowy plains, stopping at the hut of a Lapp woman, who writes a message to a Finnish woman on a dried codfish; then to the sweltering hut of the Finnish woman, who is able to see inside the Snow Queen’s palace with her magical arts.

Reindeer and snowmobile in Inari, Lapland

Climbing down from a ferry across the Gulf of Bothnia, I looked up at a grey leaden sky. It looked like the lid on a casket, holding Finland in its sunless winter tomb. Not much chance of clambering onto the back of a talking reindeer, so I went for the next best thing: a hired Skoda Estate. A journalistic assignment had brought me here – at last, the palace of the Snow Queen was within reach!

Darkening forests thickened and the falling snow, which looked like furnace sparks under the glow of the street-lamps, resolved itself into rising banks of snow either side of the gunwales. Whenever I stopped, I could feel the intensifying cold. I could taste it when I opened the door, like an iron cable between my teeth, and I could see it measured in the neon signs of the petrol stations: minus five and falling.

Sliding over snowdrifts and ice, I stared into the spectral vision in the windscreen: banks of snow under silver crests of candle spruce, fir and pine. In some places, the snow was so thick the trees appeared to float in the air. Snow-covered peat bogs slid across the side-windows, replaced in turn, like shifting dioramas, by the platinum disk of a lake, then a snow-clad pine forest that made me think of angular sentinels wearing shiny white trench-coats. Sleepless but exhilarated, I drove under a spreading platinum blue light to the house of a reindeer herder. His brown hair squeezed under a fur hat with long ear-flaps, his feet coddled in curly-toed reindeer-skin boots, he loaded up his snowmobile and drove me out to meet his herd. ‘You get reindeer when you’re young,’ he told me, ‘gifts from your elders, and you build up your herd. I learned it all by watching my parents and my grandparents. You must know every lake, every river, if the ice is going to crack under your feet.’ In a glade surrounded by snow-smothered pine trees, he pulled the feed pellets out of his sack, a reindeer-specific Santa Claus, and the animals came running, gliding out from every pathway between the trees, clicking hooves and knocking each other’s antlers. It’s not an easy life, Petri assured me, with a grim twitch of his lips: it can be hard to keep the reindeer safe from predators. But it feeds and clothes his family, as it has done for many generations.

Feeding time for the reindeer of Inari

At last, Gerda approaches the palace of the Snow Queen. What a formidable place it is, with its huge halls and archways, guarded by spectral snow-monsters. But the angels descend from heaven to give Gerda help, and she steps inside. Her visit is well-timed: the Snow Queen has decided to set off for the volcanoes of Italy, leaving Gerda free to approach Kai, who is black and blue with cold. He doesn’t even recognize her: he’s more concerned with completing the puzzle he’s been set, trying to form blocks of ice into the word ‘eternity’ - if he succeeds, the Snow Queen has promised him all the world and a new pair of skates. But Gerda wraps her arms around him, and her tears are so hot, they melt the ice and the glass splinter that’s lodged in his heart. ‘Gerda, it’s you!’ he exclaims. His memories have been awoken. ‘Oh Kai, you remember!’ Gerda kisses his hands and feet to warm him up and together they step out of the palace, drinking reindeer milk and riding the reindeer to get away before the Snow Queen returns.

The Snow Castle of Kemi

It was on the Gulf of Bothnia, where Finland faces Sweden, that I found a snow palace, in the town of Kemi. It’s hardly a new idea. In his sixteenth century Description of the Northern Peoples, Olaus Magnus wrote about snow castles built in Finland every winter: ‘they busily erect defenses shaped like the walls of military camps; a building of this sort, which is fitted with windows, they sprinkle continually with water, so that the snow, being bound together by the water, may become more effectually hardened as the cold comes on. By their care and enthusiasm the forts are made so strong that they could stand up not only to light blows but to brazen balls and even, if necessary, to the shock of tortoise formations.’

Hans Christian Andersen knew Magnus’ book, so it may have been an influence on his iconic story. I’d been reading Andersen’s journals, his travels across Europe, his lifetime of heartache, and the terrible poverty from which he dragged himself in his astonishingly resilient life. For all his flaws (and they were many), I’d grown to love this big-footed, socially awkward storyteller, and this had fed back into my love of ‘The Snow Queen’, a story whose origins, Andersen claimed, lay in the textures of his own difficult childhood; a story whose influence can be tracked in so many stories since, from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Disney’s Frozen.

On the edge of the shore at Kemi, the last breakers of autumn appeared as ice-cream-like slicks, as if the motion of the sea had been magically stilled by a wand. It’s a good spot for a snow castle: ice and snow are harvested from the sea, and heaped back at the end of the season. Usually, around 20,000 cubic meters are collected, but this winter had been unusually warm, so only half that volume had been gathered. When I arrived, the palace was in its last day of construction. Snow ploughs were howling around the site. A snow-sprayer was filling the molds for the battlements, while workers in hard hats and hi-vis jackets bustled around. Shouldering against the wind, I could feel it pouring into my mouth and raking my hair.

‘There’s so much to do,’ said one of the workers, ‘I get sweaty even though it’s so cold!’

Inside, artists from Russia were using chainsaws and scalpels to create futuristic sci-fi scenes: pencil-thin towers stalking above saucer-shaped domes, robots sitting on swings, a child riding a giant slug under falling rockets. In one room, a wall was transformed into a two-dimensional tree; in another, a tyrannosaurus bared its massive jaws. I interviewed the artists and engineers, and with my hi-vis jacket on, prowled the corridors they were carving. All through the evening, flares glowed around the snow-ploughs and sprayers, as bright as dragon’s breath; machinery skulked around the castle like roaring beasts spewing snow and flame.

Around midnight, the workers had all left. Under the dubious authority of my hi-vis jacket, I tip-toed down the corridors, enjoying the thrill of having the snow castle to myself. Sitting on a slab of ice, I read ‘The Snow Queen’ on my e-reader, looking up occasionally to relish the granular sparkle of the walls. I hadn’t been subjected to as many challenges as Gerda, but I’d had my snow palace experience. It came at the end of several months’ travelling, research in Germany, Italy, Denmark and France. And now, like Gerda, I was ready to go home. Channeling my seven-year-old self, I took one last look around: made it to the Snow Palace at last!

Inside the Snow Palace

The reindeer carry Gerda and Kai as far as the snow plains endure. Where the snow has molten, they carry on by foot. Along the way, they encounter old friends: the Lapp Woman dresses them in fresh clothes, the Finnish Woman gives them a warm meal, they meet the robber girl setting out into the big wide world, and are entertained by the Prince and Princess. When they reach home, springtime flowers are blooming, the roses are bright in the boxes between their old windows, and Gerda’s grandmother is waiting for them in her rocking-chair.

Barely anything has changed since they’ve been away… except for one thing, perhaps the most important of all. Because, during the course of their journey, Gerda and Kai have grown up.

But in their hearts (the storyteller hastily adds), they will always be children.

solo travel
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