Snow Queen Week: Read More About It

I'm at the point of December when I realize not everything I planned or hoped to accomplish is going to happen. The critical stuff is done, but the extras are now demanding prioritization. I'm so happy my traveling is done for the month. I planned and planned but the trip earlier this month still brought me home way behind.

I confess at this point one of the lower priorities is the blog but I am still committed to daily posts, especially since I have already gathered materials for Snow Queen Week. I just haven't had much time to sort and edit very well.

Then today when I checked my blog roll, I discovered that The Fairy Tale Cupboard has a lovely entry about the Snow Queen, discussing its history and relation to other stories, such as Father Frost, the Snow Maiden and even C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the the Wardrobe. To read it yourself, see Queens of snow and ice. So I don't have to worry about writing something similar during the holiday crunch. Thanks!

That said, I myself came to The Snow Queen late in life. I had never read it until I started SurLaLune years ago. It wasn't included in my Andersen's tales growing up and it escaped my notice consequently. As a child I loved fairy tales and fantasy books, but I had no one guiding my steps beyond what I discovered on my own--my visits to the library were infrequent and no one explained the 398 call number to me. (Fairy tales in the nonfiction section? Never imagined it! I thought there were so few because they were considered childish and thus ignored, not because they had their own section in the library.) My fairy tale reading was consequently quite limited to a few volumes at home but I read through quite a bit of the fiction stacks. And now you know another reason for SurLaLune--I have not just rediscovered but discovered many tales during my voracious research over the years. Needless to say, Snow Queen was a revelation to me.

The illustration above is by Milo Winter for the tale. Excepting images of Gerda with the reindeer by other illustrators, it is one of the most popular images for the tale on SurLaLune and one of my personal favorites, too. It is also available on several items in SurLaLune's CafePress Shop.