Yesterday was the spring equinox, the first day of spring, so I thought I’d do a small fairy tale spotlight that sort of goes with the theme — Thumbelina.
While a lot of Thumbelina imagery revolves around summer and winter, the season Thumbelina most longs for and the season she most fears, the story has always felt very spring-y to me. Especially because she’s born of a tulip, which has always been a spring flower in my mind.
So let’s get to it!
Whenever I think of Thumbelina, I think of the Don Bluth movie. In that version, much like the original, Thumbelina is a pretty flower maiden with a beautiful voice, which attracts lots of attention, mostly from less-than-desirable corners. The only difference is that her fairy prince is present the whole movie, rather than only appearing at the end. It’s charming, if a bit simple, and with that oddly dark Don Bluth style, but I remember it fondly since it was part of my childhood.
It took me a while to get around to reading ‘Thumbelina.” It didn’t entice me at first, not when there were other stories out there with much more interesting plots, like Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast. But when I finally got to read it, I was surprised. Thumbelina’s tale is one big adventure, where she ends up out of the frying pan and into the fire more often than not. It was so much more interesting than I gave it credit for.
“Thumbelina” is a fairy tale penned by Hans Christian Andersen in the early 1800s. There are some excellent sources on where Andersen came up with the ideas for this story, but I’ll sum up some of that information for you. It’s thought that Andersen was inspired by the English story of “Tom Thumb,” and also of the miniature Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels. Many scholars also believe that Thumbelina is based on Jenny Lind (fans of The Greatest Showman will recognize this name as the great opera singer Barnum almost fell for), whom Andersen loved, though she didn’t reciprocate any of those feelings.
Regardless of whether or not that’s true, Andersen created a tiny, extraordinarily beautiful young girl with a stunning voice, and sent her on an adventure where she must navigate the treacherous world around her that is much, much bigger than she could ever hope to be.
The story opens with a wish. An older woman longs for a child, and asks a fairy how she might go about getting one. This fairy gives her a seed of barleycorn for her to plant. This seed grows into a beautiful flower, from which Thumbelina is born.
Thumbelina, or Tiny as she’s mostly known in the story, grows happily under the woman’s care, though she never gets any bigger than one inch tall. She plays often in a dish of water the woman sets out for her, and sings to her heart’s content. Until one night a mother toad catches sight of her, and kidnaps her, walnut bed and all, to force her to marry her unintelligent and ugly toad son.
They put her on a lilypad in the middle of a stream, which she can’t possibly swim for being so tiny, and go to prepare her future home. The fish of the stream take pity on her and gnaw away at the stalk of the lilypad, letting it float away on the river. It seems Thumbelina is free! But disaster strikes again. Thumbelina is plucked from her lilypad boat by a cockchafer, or an ugly brown beetle, and carried away.
The other cockchafers mock and scorn her, calling her ugly because she only has two legs, no feelers, and a slim waist. They abandon her on a daisy, and she weeps bitterly, believing their words that she’s ugly. (Perhaps there are ties to Jenny Lind here, who some said was plain or even ugly except when she sang?)
She spends a harsh winter wandering around, barely keeping warm in dried leaves, until she stumbles across the home of a field mouse. The field mouse offers shelter in exchange for housework and stories, which Thumbelina happily provides. But even this isn’t a happy circumstance for her, because a frequent visitor of the field mouse is a rich blind mole.
The field mouse thinks the mole would make an excellent husband for Thumbelina, in time. Thumbelina doesn’t think so, for the mole scorns the sun and flowers and everything Thumbelina loves. But for now, the three of them remain as friends, with the mole digging a passage between his house and the field mouse’s house so they might visit often. It’s in this passage that Thumbelina discovers a frozen swallow.
She warms the swallow back to life with her care, and the swallow asks her to fly away with him to places where it never grows cold, but she refuses. She cannot abandon the kind field mouse like that. So the swallow flies away to enjoy spring and summer, leaving Thumbelina miserable underground.
Finally the mole agrees, he would like to marry Thumbelina. The wedding date is set, immediately after summer’s end, and the field mouse and some spiders get to work on her wedding attire. Thumbelina miserably reflects that she doesn’t want to marry the mole, and misses her dear friend the swallow.
One day Thumbelina goes outside to say farewell to the sun, stretching her arms up to it and asking it to say farewell to the swallow as well, when the swallow suddenly appears. He asks again if she might not migrate with him to warmer climes, and this time she agrees. She climbs on his back and off they fly.
He takes her to a warm countryside, and to a crumbling marble pillar where beautiful flowers are blooming. There she meets a beautiful prince with delicate wings and a golden crown. The prince thinks she’s stunningly beautiful and crowns her with his own crown, asking to marry her. She finally agrees to marry, and is bestowed beautiful wings and a new name, Maia. And she lives happily ever after.
Though Thumbelina craves her sun and summer, and her triumph actually happens in the autumn, I still can’t help but think of spring, flowers, new life, and so on. Thumbelina is born of a flower and ends her story in her native environment, with others who are like her and who don’t force her to sing for them, or call her an “other” name like Tiny. It’s a perfectly lovely fairy wedding, with the dear swallow singing the wedding song over them both. It just feels like spring.
There are lots of connections of this story to the myth of Hades and Persephone, which is probably another reason I think of spring when I think about “Thumbelina.” Much like Persephone, Thumbelina was kidnapped from her loving mother and held beneath the earth, away from the sun and the flowers she loved so much. But unlike Persephone, she escapes for good and gets to live in the warm sun in a beautiful flower with a beautiful prince.
Additionally, the swallow is a common symbol of hope, regeneration, and thus, the coming spring. When Thumbelina nurtures the swallow back to life and keeps him warm through the winter, his “regeneration,” so to speak, coincides with the coming of spring around them. Though at first it seems like this does nothing for her, as the swallow flies off without her after she refuses his offer to leave the first time, it actually becomes her rescue. In a way, Thumbelina rescues herself since she warmed the swallow back to life.
The swallow is also meant to somehow represent Andersen, as well. Swallows are migratory, and Andersen did a lot of traveling around the time he penned this tale. Not only that, but the end of the story has the swallow flying back to Denmark and making a nest in the window of a writer of fairy tales, who heard his song, and that’s how we have this story.
All in all, “Thumbelina” is a charming story that I think doesn’t get enough credit sometimes. It’s certainly not a popular story to retell, but I think there’s a lot that can be done with it. Various ways to showcase feminine strength, perhaps, or spin the tale so that Thumbelina does a bit more active self-rescuing, or so on. Either way, it was a pleasant way to celebrate the first day of spring. Happy Spring Equinox!
For some additional sources on annotations, places to find scholarly sources about Thumbelina, and other interesting links, check below!
SurLaLune’s Annotations for the story
SurLaLune’s bibliography for their annotations
Amazon link to Maria Tatar’s Annotated Hans Christian Andersen
Sydney Austin’s article Cultural Thumbelina: The Influence of Literary Movements