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daughter to live at the castle (or, in some versions, the first person he sees when he arrives home - inevitably the loving Beauty, who rushes to welcome her father). Beauty comes to the castle, full of dread, and although she is splendidly looked after and even comes to like the friendly and kindly Beast, she cannot possibly accept his proposal that she should marry him. She feels terribly trapped; but eventually the Beast allows her to return home for a while to tend her father who has fallen sick, and she breaks her promise to come back. Then, in a dream, she sees the Beast dying of grief. She rushes contritely back to the castle, just in time to find him lying in the darkness in the garden, apparently dead. She is so overcome by the love which has been secretly growing in her that she flings herself down to embrace him. He stirs back to life, and says that he only wanted to see her once more: he can now die happy. She says that he must not die, she cannot live without him. At these words, the dark castle is suddenly filled with light, music plays and she sees standing before her a handsome Prince - who tells her that he had been turned into a monster by a wicked enchantress, and that he could only win his release if a beautiful virgin would freely consent to marry him. Beauty and the Beast have redeemed each other by the power of her love - although obviously he had only been a monster in outward form. Inwardly his true self had been there all along, waiting for the right woman to bring about the moment when all his outward deformations would fall away and he could at last emerge in his perfect, princely state, united with her forever.

The Snow Queen

In all these examples of the Rebirth story based on folk tales and familiar from childhood, the central imprisoned figures have only become trapped in the state of living death through the agency of some dark figure outside them. But eventually we come across another children's story which takes the pattern of this plot a stage further. In Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen we see a hero who initially passes under the spell of darkness through the action of an enchanter. But the consequence is that he becomes not just outwardly but inwardly infected by the power of darkness himself. It is this which draws him in turn into the power of another dark figure, the Snow Queen, and it is she who imprisons him in the state of living death.

The story begins with a prologue, which tells how a wicked Magician once constructed a most curious mirror. `Everything good and beautiful, when reflected in it, shrank up almost to nothing, whilst those things which were ugly and useless were magnified and made to appear ten times worse than before. 'The Magician's followers carried the distorting mirror up into the sky, where it fell from their grasp and shattered into millions of tiny fragments. Splinters of the mirror fell to earth all over the world. Some entered people's eyes, which caused them `to view everything the wrong way. Others entered people's hearts, which was even worse, for `the heart became cold and hard, like a lump of ice'.

The story proper begins when we meet a little boy Kay and a little girl Gerda who live next door to each other in a big city. They play together and love each other. Both are innocent and sweet-natured. But one day, towards the end of summer, Kay feels shooting pains in his eye and heart. They have been entered by splinters of the magic mirror. The pain fades, but Kay's character begins to change. He begins to see the roses outside their windows as ugly, and tears them down. He scorns Gerda's tears, and starts to imitate people cruelly behind their backs. He now likes `rational' games, such as looking at snowflakes through a magnifying glass, to delight in their cold, hard, crystalline perfection.

Winter has come and one day Kay takes his little sledge out into the square where he sees a large and handsome sledge passing by, driven by a mysterious figure all dressed in white. He attaches his own sledge behind the larger one, hoping for a ride,