With this discussion of fairy tales this week, I instantly thought - it’s the Ice Queen for me - my fave ever!
My husband
asked what it was about, and I told him that this evil queen puts a bit of ice
in a little boy’s eye and it makes everything ugly look beautiful. And he
leaves his beloved sister and goes to live in the ice queen’s evil castle,
until the sister finds him again, and her goodness and love warms his heart,
and he cries, and the crystal melts. And he sees the truth about the ugliness.
Then my husband said he thought it would be a fabulous gift
to have something in your eye that made ugly things look beautiful.
But I explained it made the little boy enchanted with the
horrible things in the world. That part was always kind of interesting and
meaningful to me.
Well, I looked it up on Wikipedia tonight, and OMG, did I
ever have it wrong! It’s not an ice crystal, it’s a shard of a troll mirror
that gets in his eye. (Backstory: the trolls wanted to bring the mirror to heaven and
mock the angels with it, but it shattered before they could get it up there.
Totally don’t remember that part.)
Also, the mirror shard makes beauty and goodness look ugly, not the other way around.
Oops!
Still, this fairy tale is so meaningful to me, just for the
idea of a change of heart making things look different, and especially the idea
of a softened heart making things look closer to their true state, or a
softened heart letting you see the goodness and beauty where you hadn’t seen it
before.
I had that right, and everything else wrong. Also, it’s
called the SNOW QUEEN.
