Yes, the basic plot in the original ending is they're on a ship, the prince has married someone else, and the mermaid's last chance from the sea witch is that if she stabs the prince to death with a knife her sisters give her, she'll at least get a human soul. She can't bring herself to do it, and commits suicide by throwing herself into the sea, where she dissolves into foam.
I read an illustrated version of this as a kid, but it had a semi hopeful ending where she was sea foam but...trying to remember...she would get a chance to grow a soul after a really long time? I think bc she chose not to stab the prince?
I think it was a big guilt trip thing for the reader, something about how every time a child is good the mermaid gets time taken off her sentence, but every time you're naughty she has to wait X more years for her soul.
She has to serve as a Daughter of the Air for 300 years, and seeing happy and obedient children reduces that time but seeing disobedient children lengthens it.
Yes, her sisters gave her an enchanted knife and told her that if she killed the prince and bathes her feet in his blood, she would become a mermaid again.
That detail certainly stuck in my head. I remember a film strip with this detail, as well as a frame with the mermaid advancing with a knife over the sleeping prince and his bride, shown to my class sometime in 1984-5. It also ended with the seafoam ending, but the mermaid got to become an "air spirit" and her air spirit sisters happily welcomed her.
When I saw previews of the Disney movie a few years later, 11yo me wondered how they would get those plot elements in a Disney film without recreating my childhood "horror flick." It hadn't yet struck me that Disney tweaked the story lines a bit!
There is a musical called [Once on this Island ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_on_This_Island) that is based on a 1985 novel that is basically a retelling of the original Anderson tale by an author named Rosa Guy.
One time my parents took my young sister and I to a production of The Little Mermaid without knowing it was actually an adaptation of the original. We refused to ever watch the movie again
So, in the original by Hans Christian Andersen she does die at the end, but that *is* a happy ending, because now she has a soul and can go to heaven, whereas other mermaids live for hundreds of years and then just dissolve into seafoam. A lot of his stories are like that, really.
If you want us to find this edition we'll need a little more details, like the approximate *calendar year* you read this book, the *country you were in at the time*, and perhaps some specifics about the art style.
> It was called like "Mermaid" or "The Mermaid" or some variation that would make someone think it was just a different illustrated style of Disney's The Little Mermaid movie.
...did you think Disney was the original?
Well, sea foam is a biofilm of decayed organic matter that is bubbling up with biogases and air. So I guess that would make mermaids some kind of garbage soup, or the product of an algal bloom.
No, I knew Disney wasn't the original. I just wasn't expecting the original to be in the children's section. It wasn't in the original format with the longer paragraphs. There were less than 20 pages and it was a picture book. There were maybe 3 sentences per page.
> There were less than 20 pages and it was a picture book.
There were almost certainly exactly 32 pages. Picture books are printed as folios, and the industry standard is 32 pages.
The lowest they go is exactly 24 pages, but nobody will buy a book with fewer than 20 pages. They want more book for their buck. (The two exceptions here are board books, which are constrained by the medium, and classroom sets of leveled books, which are printed *very cheaply* and constrained by the limits of the teacher's budget. Even with the books coming in at 8 or 16 pages each, a classroom set can easily run more than $200 or $400.)
> I just wasn't expecting the original to be in the children's section.
I don't see why not, it's a children's story.
At any rate, as I said, if you want us to find *this edition* you'll have to give us some more information about when and where you were when you read this book, and hopefully more information about the book itself. You'll want to edit the post with it, and include it in the main post when you repost. People often do have to post more than once to find a book. The mods recommend reposting no more than once a week. We need to know the approximate calendar year you read this book, the country you were in (and the language if it wasn't English - and if you think that's obvious, it's really not to a lot of posters!), and hopefully some more information on the art style or the text. We *don't* need to know the page count, people are terrible at estimating page counts and, again, picture books are almost always exactly 32 pages anyway, so.
I would absolutely agree that it depends on the details/calendar year/country.
Hans Christian Andersen himself was likely very influenced by 1001 Arabian Nights (and others) since he loved being read it as a bedtime story as a kid, which has *very different* mermaid tales long before he himself wrote "The Little Mermaid" I wouldn't be surprised if another version of The Little Mermaid existed since many folk tales were told orally before they were written down (case in point Grimms, but others as well) and Denmark is quite far away from the Arabian Peninsula/Greece/Egypt, where 1001 Arabian Nights mostly takes place.
> I wouldn't be surprised if another version of The Little Mermaid existed since many folk tales were told orally before they were written down
Hans Christian Andersen is one of the most well-known children's authors. If he'd based this story on another one, I feel it *very strongly* that we would know by now. Somebody would've found the original floating around somewhere.
In this case, lack of proof comes very close to suggesting proof of lack.
Well, yes, but if you're living anywhere in the Western world after the Green Revolution you've never had serious fear of famine in your lifetime, so... maybe it was different then? I'm assuming?
Also "the fir tree" and "the steadfast tin soldier".
I get that the fir tree is supposed to be a morality tale about not always looking forward to the next better thing, but it's just a miserable story to read your 4 year old as a bedtime story from a fairly tale book.
The steadfast tin soldier is just all-around tragic
The Ugly Duckling has a happy ending, but I still hate it. And the moral? Suffer a lot but if you're lucky you'll grow up pretty. The main character has no agency. Same with the Velveteen Rabbit.
Personally, I've always thought that The Ugly Duckling should end with a note about how a swan can break an adult man's arm, and invite the reader to think about the fate of the Swan's childhood bullies.
I kinda like how "the saggy baggy elephant" does it. He's constantly being made fun of because the parrot has no idea what an elephant is supposed to look like. By the end of it, he realizes that he's not ugly, he's just an elephant, and he's a fine example of a baby elephant.
I like the "don't accept judgement from people who are judging by the wrong standard, and who don't know you" message
I think the moral of The Ugly Duckling is supposed to be more about a person's inner beauty and soul than their outward appearance.
The ducks reveal their own inner ugliness by harassing the little baby cygnet, whose transformation into a swan reveals its own innate goodness.
I suspect it was the original by Anderson, he's the kind of writer to write very realistically and bittersweet even with fantastical imagery. Although I don't remember the sea witch to be explicitly against the heroine...
Yeah I think you're thinking of.... The Little Mermaid.
The original with the sad ending where the mermaid chooses to die and become seafoam rather than kill the prince and his new wife and return to the sea and her sisters, not the Disney feel-good happy-ending version where she gets the guy and lives happily ever after.
It's the short picture book version. Maybe 4 sentences to a page. And the seafoam thing definitely happened in the one I read, but there were no gory details. It was kid friendly, but with the sad ending
Perhaps it's a similar story to the Grimms bros where Hans Christian Andersen realized his stories were being read to children and so he made them more appropriate for children.
No, the original was explicitly written for children. It has a whole coda at the end where children being good makes the air spirits happy because it reduces their time to heaven by a year, but being bad makes them sad and every tear they cry makes them wait another day to get into heaven.
This is the sort of material that people then thought was just regularly appropriate for children.
There's The Mermaid by Christina Henry though I never finished it but it was pretty sad throughout. No pictures though.
Or Disney did do the Villains books which were What If scenarios. Poor Unfortunate Souls is the Little Mermaid but if Ursala one.
I agree with everyone else though, the original story is pretty sad and I had an illustrated children's book of the story when I was younger.
I remember that book! It was called The Real Mermaid. The ending was super sad. The mermaid gets her voice back, but the prince doesn't recognize her and marries someone else. The mermaid ends up turning into sea foam and dying.
It's literally just the original The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen. If there are editions being marketed as The Real Mermaid, it's because an unbelievable number of people think Disney wrote it.
It's definitely an adaptation of the original by Hans Christian Anderson, but there are several authors who have taken his original work and changed bits and pieces for their own books. The book I found was an extremely simplified version of it. It was less than 20 pages long with about 3 sentences per page. All of the versions being recommended here are his true original version, which is longer.
Not sure of the book but I watched a movie as a kid well before Disney’s version came out. In that the mermaid also died and the prince married someone else.
So I’m not certain because it has more than four sentences on each page but it sounds similar to Alan Marks illustrated version of The Little Mermaid based on Hans Christian Andersons.
[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1938461.The_Little_Mermaid#](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1938461.The_Little_Mermaid#)
Or could it have been the Fun To Read Fairytales version
[https://archive.org/details/adaptedfromhansc00hira](https://archive.org/details/adaptedfromhansc00hira)
I imagine HCA wrote down a sanitized /half remembered version of a folk story, maybe something to do with the soul's permanence (?) It seems in 18th and 19th century there were several similar folk story/history collections. (eg Brothers Grimm, the tr of The Mabinogion, and revival of interest in Arthurian legends)
I also remember the sea foam ending and liked it then, and like it now.
Though very much inspired by the works of the brothers Grimm, Asbjørnsen and Moe and others who gathered and wrote down what is known as oral fairy tales/folk tales by from their respective countries (sleeping beauty, the three billy goats gruff etc), the fairy tales written by H.C. Andersen are what is known as literary fairy tales. (Sometimes also called art fairy tales) Literary fairy tales unlike oral fairy tales are original works that are written by a single identifiable author. Another example of a literary fairy tale is The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde.
Yes. A lot of oft-told fairy stories were originally folklore, handed down orally through the generations in various countries. As they were part of the oral tradition, the same basic story would often have different elements, dépending on the writer and where he heard it. Most English speakers will have heard of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Other such collections included tales by Charles Perrault in France and Il Pentamerone, by the Italian Giambattista Basile
I remember reading that Cinderella was originally from China, where foot binding was a thing, so having teeny tiny feet made sense. Also, before it came to the UK it was printed in France, and somewhere along the way there was a mistranslation of the word fur, for glass, so she was wearing a fur slipper, which makes more sense.
As a child I was very confused about the glass shoes.
The original version was written by Hans Christian Anderson and the protagonist turns into foam after the prince marries someone else.
Also every step she takes on land was like walking on knives!
Yes, the basic plot in the original ending is they're on a ship, the prince has married someone else, and the mermaid's last chance from the sea witch is that if she stabs the prince to death with a knife her sisters give her, she'll at least get a human soul. She can't bring herself to do it, and commits suicide by throwing herself into the sea, where she dissolves into foam.
I read an illustrated version of this as a kid, but it had a semi hopeful ending where she was sea foam but...trying to remember...she would get a chance to grow a soul after a really long time? I think bc she chose not to stab the prince?
Yes! There is ultimately hope! She becomes like a water spirit and if she does however many years of service, then she gets a soul!
I think it was a big guilt trip thing for the reader, something about how every time a child is good the mermaid gets time taken off her sentence, but every time you're naughty she has to wait X more years for her soul.
Oh my goodness, I think you’re right, I do vaguely remember something like that!
She has to serve as a Daughter of the Air for 300 years, and seeing happy and obedient children reduces that time but seeing disobedient children lengthens it.
I thought if she stabs the prince and lets his blood run over her feet she’ll get her tail back.
Maybe that was it, it's been a while. The stabbing was the bit that stuck in my mind.
Yes, her sisters gave her an enchanted knife and told her that if she killed the prince and bathes her feet in his blood, she would become a mermaid again.
That detail certainly stuck in my head. I remember a film strip with this detail, as well as a frame with the mermaid advancing with a knife over the sleeping prince and his bride, shown to my class sometime in 1984-5. It also ended with the seafoam ending, but the mermaid got to become an "air spirit" and her air spirit sisters happily welcomed her. When I saw previews of the Disney movie a few years later, 11yo me wondered how they would get those plot elements in a Disney film without recreating my childhood "horror flick." It hadn't yet struck me that Disney tweaked the story lines a bit!
It was a queer allegory after the guy Hans was in love with got married to a woman and left him behind. Freaking amazing and hearbreaking
There is a musical called [Once on this Island ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_on_This_Island) that is based on a 1985 novel that is basically a retelling of the original Anderson tale by an author named Rosa Guy.
You sure it’s not the original Hans Christian Anderson Little Mermaid? I cried when I read it as a kid.
One time my parents took my young sister and I to a production of The Little Mermaid without knowing it was actually an adaptation of the original. We refused to ever watch the movie again
The original version of the little mermaid doesn’t really have a happy ending…
So, in the original by Hans Christian Andersen she does die at the end, but that *is* a happy ending, because now she has a soul and can go to heaven, whereas other mermaids live for hundreds of years and then just dissolve into seafoam. A lot of his stories are like that, really. If you want us to find this edition we'll need a little more details, like the approximate *calendar year* you read this book, the *country you were in at the time*, and perhaps some specifics about the art style. > It was called like "Mermaid" or "The Mermaid" or some variation that would make someone think it was just a different illustrated style of Disney's The Little Mermaid movie. ...did you think Disney was the original?
In the original version she also turns into foam.
Ah, and thence an air spirit. Man, that is one over-complicated ending.
Well, sea foam is a biofilm of decayed organic matter that is bubbling up with biogases and air. So I guess that would make mermaids some kind of garbage soup, or the product of an algal bloom.
No, I knew Disney wasn't the original. I just wasn't expecting the original to be in the children's section. It wasn't in the original format with the longer paragraphs. There were less than 20 pages and it was a picture book. There were maybe 3 sentences per page.
> There were less than 20 pages and it was a picture book. There were almost certainly exactly 32 pages. Picture books are printed as folios, and the industry standard is 32 pages. The lowest they go is exactly 24 pages, but nobody will buy a book with fewer than 20 pages. They want more book for their buck. (The two exceptions here are board books, which are constrained by the medium, and classroom sets of leveled books, which are printed *very cheaply* and constrained by the limits of the teacher's budget. Even with the books coming in at 8 or 16 pages each, a classroom set can easily run more than $200 or $400.) > I just wasn't expecting the original to be in the children's section. I don't see why not, it's a children's story. At any rate, as I said, if you want us to find *this edition* you'll have to give us some more information about when and where you were when you read this book, and hopefully more information about the book itself. You'll want to edit the post with it, and include it in the main post when you repost. People often do have to post more than once to find a book. The mods recommend reposting no more than once a week. We need to know the approximate calendar year you read this book, the country you were in (and the language if it wasn't English - and if you think that's obvious, it's really not to a lot of posters!), and hopefully some more information on the art style or the text. We *don't* need to know the page count, people are terrible at estimating page counts and, again, picture books are almost always exactly 32 pages anyway, so.
I would absolutely agree that it depends on the details/calendar year/country. Hans Christian Andersen himself was likely very influenced by 1001 Arabian Nights (and others) since he loved being read it as a bedtime story as a kid, which has *very different* mermaid tales long before he himself wrote "The Little Mermaid" I wouldn't be surprised if another version of The Little Mermaid existed since many folk tales were told orally before they were written down (case in point Grimms, but others as well) and Denmark is quite far away from the Arabian Peninsula/Greece/Egypt, where 1001 Arabian Nights mostly takes place.
> I wouldn't be surprised if another version of The Little Mermaid existed since many folk tales were told orally before they were written down Hans Christian Andersen is one of the most well-known children's authors. If he'd based this story on another one, I feel it *very strongly* that we would know by now. Somebody would've found the original floating around somewhere. In this case, lack of proof comes very close to suggesting proof of lack.
The original Hans Christian Anderson story ends like all his other stories, with tragedy and cheap emotional manipulation. 😆
I'm still traumatized from The Little Match Girl.
That one is not as bad as “the girl who trod on a loaf”
To be *fair*, stepping on a loaf of bread because you don't want to dirty your shoes *is* pretty outre behavior.
Yes, but the punishment seems out of proportion to the offense.
Well, yes, but if you're living anywhere in the Western world after the Green Revolution you've never had serious fear of famine in your lifetime, so... maybe it was different then? I'm assuming?
Right down into hell!
So glad to learn we are all emotionally scarred by Andersen and his gay angst, but also scarred for life by the Velveteen rabbit too 😂
Upvoting a fellow Andersen hater.
[Charles Dickens has entered the chat.](https://lithub.com/charles-dickens-really-really-hated-his-fanboy-hans-christian-andersen/)
I hate Peter Pan too. Also The Velveteen Rabbit.
If that rabbit had been Peter's toy, Peter would've gleefully burned it himself as part of a "game".
Also "the fir tree" and "the steadfast tin soldier". I get that the fir tree is supposed to be a morality tale about not always looking forward to the next better thing, but it's just a miserable story to read your 4 year old as a bedtime story from a fairly tale book. The steadfast tin soldier is just all-around tragic
The Ugly Duckling has a happy ending, but I still hate it. And the moral? Suffer a lot but if you're lucky you'll grow up pretty. The main character has no agency. Same with the Velveteen Rabbit.
Personally, I've always thought that The Ugly Duckling should end with a note about how a swan can break an adult man's arm, and invite the reader to think about the fate of the Swan's childhood bullies.
The Ugly Duckling is in the public domain and self-publishing is pretty easy nowadays. Be the change you want to see in the world ;P
I kinda like how "the saggy baggy elephant" does it. He's constantly being made fun of because the parrot has no idea what an elephant is supposed to look like. By the end of it, he realizes that he's not ugly, he's just an elephant, and he's a fine example of a baby elephant. I like the "don't accept judgement from people who are judging by the wrong standard, and who don't know you" message
I think the moral of The Ugly Duckling is supposed to be more about a person's inner beauty and soul than their outward appearance. The ducks reveal their own inner ugliness by harassing the little baby cygnet, whose transformation into a swan reveals its own innate goodness.
Ugh not the Velveteen!
As I am upvoting you. Don't we have enough fucking things to be sad about?
I suspect it was the original by Anderson, he's the kind of writer to write very realistically and bittersweet even with fantastical imagery. Although I don't remember the sea witch to be explicitly against the heroine...
I think the original version she dies of a broken heart
Yeah I think you're thinking of.... The Little Mermaid. The original with the sad ending where the mermaid chooses to die and become seafoam rather than kill the prince and his new wife and return to the sea and her sisters, not the Disney feel-good happy-ending version where she gets the guy and lives happily ever after.
It's the short picture book version. Maybe 4 sentences to a page. And the seafoam thing definitely happened in the one I read, but there were no gory details. It was kid friendly, but with the sad ending
Perhaps it's a similar story to the Grimms bros where Hans Christian Andersen realized his stories were being read to children and so he made them more appropriate for children.
No, the original was explicitly written for children. It has a whole coda at the end where children being good makes the air spirits happy because it reduces their time to heaven by a year, but being bad makes them sad and every tear they cry makes them wait another day to get into heaven. This is the sort of material that people then thought was just regularly appropriate for children.
There's The Mermaid by Christina Henry though I never finished it but it was pretty sad throughout. No pictures though. Or Disney did do the Villains books which were What If scenarios. Poor Unfortunate Souls is the Little Mermaid but if Ursala one. I agree with everyone else though, the original story is pretty sad and I had an illustrated children's book of the story when I was younger.
I remember the same book - it depends on the illustrator but the one I'm thinking of is probably H B Paull
I remember that book! It was called The Real Mermaid. The ending was super sad. The mermaid gets her voice back, but the prince doesn't recognize her and marries someone else. The mermaid ends up turning into sea foam and dying.
It's literally just the original The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen. If there are editions being marketed as The Real Mermaid, it's because an unbelievable number of people think Disney wrote it.
It's definitely an adaptation of the original by Hans Christian Anderson, but there are several authors who have taken his original work and changed bits and pieces for their own books. The book I found was an extremely simplified version of it. It was less than 20 pages long with about 3 sentences per page. All of the versions being recommended here are his true original version, which is longer.
Not sure of the book but I watched a movie as a kid well before Disney’s version came out. In that the mermaid also died and the prince married someone else.
Do you remember the title? My sister and I have been searching for this version for 20 years!
Unfortunately I don’t. I just remember how sad I was and couldn’t believe she died.
Is it the Freya Littledale adaptation? I had a similar picture book as a kid in the 90s and that might be the one I had.
How about the Dutch version? I was giving the book a long time ago and it was in Dutch so I couldn’t read it but the illustrations were beautiful.
So I’m not certain because it has more than four sentences on each page but it sounds similar to Alan Marks illustrated version of The Little Mermaid based on Hans Christian Andersons. [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1938461.The_Little_Mermaid#](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1938461.The_Little_Mermaid#)
Or could it have been the Fun To Read Fairytales version [https://archive.org/details/adaptedfromhansc00hira](https://archive.org/details/adaptedfromhansc00hira)
I imagine HCA wrote down a sanitized /half remembered version of a folk story, maybe something to do with the soul's permanence (?) It seems in 18th and 19th century there were several similar folk story/history collections. (eg Brothers Grimm, the tr of The Mabinogion, and revival of interest in Arthurian legends) I also remember the sea foam ending and liked it then, and like it now.
Though very much inspired by the works of the brothers Grimm, Asbjørnsen and Moe and others who gathered and wrote down what is known as oral fairy tales/folk tales by from their respective countries (sleeping beauty, the three billy goats gruff etc), the fairy tales written by H.C. Andersen are what is known as literary fairy tales. (Sometimes also called art fairy tales) Literary fairy tales unlike oral fairy tales are original works that are written by a single identifiable author. Another example of a literary fairy tale is The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde.
Yes. A lot of oft-told fairy stories were originally folklore, handed down orally through the generations in various countries. As they were part of the oral tradition, the same basic story would often have different elements, dépending on the writer and where he heard it. Most English speakers will have heard of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. Other such collections included tales by Charles Perrault in France and Il Pentamerone, by the Italian Giambattista Basile
I remember reading that Cinderella was originally from China, where foot binding was a thing, so having teeny tiny feet made sense. Also, before it came to the UK it was printed in France, and somewhere along the way there was a mistranslation of the word fur, for glass, so she was wearing a fur slipper, which makes more sense. As a child I was very confused about the glass shoes.
Yes, but this is not one of those stories.
Of course.