The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [143]
We then return to little Gerda, who is very unhappy at her friend's disappearance. The winter goes by, spring comes, still he has not returned. Some say he must be dead, but Gerda cannot believe it and she sets out to look for him. We now pass into the familiar territory of a Quest, as she embarks on her long journey into distant lands, with alternating episodes of ordeal and respite. For a time she passes into the power of an enchantress herself, who like Odysseus's Calypso tries to lull her into forgetfulness of her Quest. She meets helpers, a raven and a robbermaiden, who eventually sends her on the last part of her journey, on a reindeer. Then at last we see what has happened to Kay. Far to the north, in the land of everlasting cold, he is imprisoned in the vast ice palace of the Snow Queen. He sits most of the time all alone, doing `Chinese puzzles' with splinters of ice. `Kay could form the most curious and complete figures - this was the ice puzzle of reason - and in his eyes these figures were of the utmost importance ... but there was one word he could never succeed in forming. It was "Eternity."' The Snow Queen had told him that if ever he can put that word together, he will become his own master and `I will give thee the whole world'.
At last Gerda finds Kay, in the `great empty hall of ice'. As he sits, `cold, silent, motionless', he does not recognise her. She is so overcome by love and pity that she embraces him with hot tears, which wash the splinter of mirror from his heart. He then weeps too, which floats the splinter from his eye. At last he can feel and see straight again. `Gerda, my dear little Gerda' he exclaims, as if waking from a long sleep, `where have you been all this time? And where have I been?' They are both so filled with joy that even the ice fragments around them dance, and form the word `Eternity by themselves. Gerda and Kay set out on their long return journey, the world around them becoming ever warmer and more spring-like as they travel south. At last they arrive back in their old familiar streets, and as they come home the only alteration they can find is in themselves, for `they saw that they were now fully grown up'. They gaze on each other happily, `while all around them glowed warm, glorious Summer'.
From earlier stages of our journey through storytelling we have no difficulty in recognising what is happening to Kay in the course of this story. When the splinters of the mirror enter his eye and his heart, two things happen: he can no longer see straight and whole, and he can no longer feel for others. He becomes blind, heartless and egocentric. He has become `dark' in exactly the same way in which we saw figures being possessed by darkness in earlier types of story, above all in Tragedy. And when Gerda finally finds her way to his lonely prison to liberate him, the transformation which takes place in him is precisely that which we saw in earlier types of story where a dark figure goes through a change of heart and becomes `light. As the splinters are washed from Kay's eye and heart, he regains both the powers he has lost: to see whole and to feel. He is once again able to love. He is restored to his true self. United with his `other half' Gerda, he is complete. And, as the closing lines of the story make clear, he has `fully grown up'.
But still the darkness which possesses Kay is personified outwardly, in the two dominant dark figures of the story who are ultimately