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The Little Mermaid Undine
Fairy tale text by Undine & Jens [2025]
Interpretation by Undine & Jens in green [2025]
Today we would like to present a fairy tale that is not from the Brothers Grimm collection. It is our free-spirited retelling of the 2013 fairy tale film “The Little Mermaid”, which touched us deeply. Not only because Undine plays the main role, but because this film presents Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale in such a wonderful way that it manages to survive without the “utter evil” that many other fairy tale films rely on and can only resolve with difficulty and doubt in the end. Thank you, and here we go.
Once upon a time, there were three beautiful sisters who were born and grew up in the depths of the sea. Their father was the king of the sea, with the wave crown on his head and a trident in his hand. Sometimes he complained about his youngest daughter, Undine, because she was different from her older sisters. She had an irrepressible longing to leave the deep sea and go out into the wide world. So, Undine often sat on a small rock in the moonlight and sang a longing song from the bottom of her heart:
Wave dance and moonlight,
Golden hair and mermaid’s tail,
Sound of the sea, mermaid’s song,
The sound is tempting in the depths.
Wave dance and moonlight,
Golden hair and mermaid’s tail,
Magic tunes are luring softly,
Set out for a long journey!
From her rock, she loved observing the human world: the busy fishermen at sea, the children playing on the beach, and in the distance, a royal castle at the edge of the forest. One day, a young prince came to the shore and wanted to swim in the moonlight. But a sudden swirl pulled him into the depths, and Undine knew that people drown and die in the sea. She swam after him, seized the sinking body, and carried him back up to the beach. The prince lay unconscious, and in the moonlight, she gazed lovingly at the beautiful human body, which had two legs and feet with which to walk across the wide earth.
The little Mermaid, Illustration around 1870
With the first rays of sunlight, her loving contemplation was disturbed. A carriage thundered by, Undine retreated into the sea, and a human girl, who had discovered the unconscious youth on the beach, appeared in a state of excitement. The prince awoke when she touched him, and her beautiful face with her dark doe eyes and black hair left a deep impression on him. So, the prince returned to his castle, and the king rebuked him for his carelessness, for his wedding was to be in two days, to a princess from a neighboring kingdom whom he had never seen, but whom the king had already invited to his summer palace. The prince wasn’t particularly happy about this, especially since he had seen the black-haired girl on the beach, whom he considered his savior.
Undine, too, could not forget the prince; her longing for the human world grew ever greater, and she sought the help of Hydra, whom all water creatures avoided because she was considered omniscient and therefore unpredictable, and had already caused many dangerous swirls. From her, however, she hoped to learn the secret of how a water creature could become a human. And truly, Hydra was well-disposed toward her and offered her a magic potion to give her human feet, but under three conditions: The feet would be a painful experience because she lacked the habit of walking on solid earth. She must sacrifice her speech, so she cannot tell anything about her previous world or herself. And if her beloved married another, she would dissolve into the foam of the waves, could never return to the sea, and could never acquire a human soul. She gladly accepted these three conditions as a sacrifice, for her great love weighed far more. And so, she went to her little rock in the sea in the moonlight, sang her song longingly and drank the magic potion.
Wave dance and moonlight,
Golden hair and mermaid’s tail,
Magic tunes are luring softly,
Set out for a long journey!
As the sun rose fiery red on the horizon, the prince and his friends went to the sea to begin the last day before his royal wedding with a swim on the very beach where he had seen the beautiful maiden with black hair the previous day. To his great astonishment, he found another, strange girl with shining pearly eyes and long golden hair lying unconscious on a small rock in the sea. He brought her to the shore, where Undine awoke and saw the face of her beloved prince. He looked at her in amazement, for she was naked, dumb, and could barely stand. He gave her some of his clothes and carried her in his arms to the castle. A strange spell surrounded the girl, which the prince felt deep in his heart. Even in the castle, she could only walk with difficulty, and everything around her was new and unfamiliar. So, the prince spent the last day before his wedding with this strange girl, whose name he did not even know, and Undine also soon learned that she only had one day left to win her beloved.
Undine now tried everything to become a worthy princess, wore beautiful human clothes, adorned her golden hair, sat obediently at the royal table and ate human food, practiced dancing and everything she admired in the other women in the castle. The king and his scholars would have preferred to teach her the sciences of geography and astronomy, and the prince and his friends would have preferred to teach her riding and fencing. But for the prince, none of this was new, and the unknown that he felt in Undine and that magically attracted him could not be expressed in words. Thus, they came close, but could not reach each other.
Thus, the prince’s wedding day arrived. Everything was decorated, and everyone awaited the bride. Then the carriage arrived, and the prince closed his eyes expectantly as the bride stepped out. And when he opened his eyes again, he was overcome with blissful love, for before him stood the beautiful black-haired girl he had seen on the beach after being rescued from the sea. And the princess, too, was amazed when she recognized the handsome youth, she had found unconscious on the seashore. Now both knew that fate had chosen them for each other. The king and everyone present were greatly relieved when the newlyweds greeted each other so happily, and the wedding was held.
Undine quietly slipped away, returned sadly to the sea, walked wistfully into the water, sat down on her little rock, and sang her longing song within herself:
Wave dance and moonlight,
Golden hair and mermaid’s tail,
Sound of the sea, mermaid’s song,
The sound is tempting in the depths.
So, she awaited her end as the foam of the sea, as Hydra had predicted. But when the moon rose, her two sisters, who did not want to lose Undine, appeared and handed her a sharp knife that Hydra had given them. She only recognized her sisters at second glance, with whom she had grown up in the water, for they had sacrificed their long golden hair to Hydra in order to obtain the deadly knife. With it, she would kill the prince on their wedding night, and with his heart’s blood, she could become a mermaid again. At first, she was frightened by this suggestion, but finally allowed herself to be persuaded by her two sisters to secretly return to the palace during the night. There, she stood unnoticed by the wedding bed of the sleeping human couple, raised the deadly dagger, and hesitated. She saw the handsome prince before her, the black-haired princess, and also her sisters, her father, and Hydra in the sea. She loved them all, and had taken them all into her heart. So, she lowered the sharp knife, kissed first the sleeping prince and then the princess tenderly on the forehead, blessed the wedding couple, returned to the shore of the sea and threw the deadly blade into the depths.
At this point, Hydra emerged from the waves, strode to her on the shore, and spoke: “Yes, true love must be able to let go! You have passed the test. The prince’s death would never have redeemed you. Only, who truly loves, has a soul, and everything else must vanish like the foam of the waves. Now come with me into the new and vast! Your journey begins here and now, and I will accompany you part of the way.” Then her voice returned, and Undine asked: “Did you already know all this?” Hydra grinned and whispered softly: “Perhaps, perhaps not.” Now the pain in her feet also disappeared. Her father, the Sea King, smiled contentedly in the waves, and her sisters waved at her.
The morning sun rose brightly on the horizon. The young couple awoke in the castle. They kissed lovingly and found a beautiful shell lying next to them, which they held to each other’s ears. And from deep within it, a longing song sounded:
Wave dance and moonlight,
Golden hair and mermaid’s tail,
Sound of the sea, mermaid’s song,
The sound is tempting in the depths.
Wave dance and moonlight,
Golden hair and mermaid’s tail,
Magic tunes are luring softly,
Set out for a long journey!
A wonderful symbolism that we will now examine more closely from a spiritual perspective. The fairy tale begins with three sisters, who remind us of the triangle of the three usual forces of nature, just as every river needs two banks to flow in one direction. And here, the direction or development is Undine, a maiden of the sea, who longingly wishes to rise from her source to become a river through space and time in the world. Thus, the sea reminds us of the great ocean of causes or possibilities, from which everything flows and into which everything returns, arises and passes away again. The sea king, as the water father of the three sisters, would then be the witnessing spirit, the water spirit, whose famous trident again reminds us of the three forces or sisters, one of which stands out in particular. We also find this symbolic trident in the Indian Shiva, the god of dissolution, in the Greek sea god Poseidon, and, with a little imagination, in the Christian cross. And Hydra, as the water mother, would then be the birthing nature of this sea, the water nature. “Hydra” actually just means “water”, which in Greek mythology became a feared water snake that rules the water element.
With this symbolism, the wonderful story is now told of how pure and formless consciousness, full of longing, strives from the sea of causes for forms it can grasp and in which it can recognize itself. And this “longing,” or rather, the longing vision, is also expressed in the song that runs through the entire fairy tale:
Wave dance, moonlight, golden hair and mermaid’s tail
The wave dance of external forms, which dance like waves with and against each other on the sea of causes, just as light, radiation, and all elementary particles of our matter are merely waves on a sea of energy. The radiance of the moon as the reflected light of knowledge. The golden hair of true thoughts, which emerge as intuition from the silent depths. And the mermaid’s tail as a symbol of our hybrid being of human and animal, reason and intellect, spirit and nature.
Sound of the sea, mermaid’s song, the sound is tempting in the depths.
The mysterious murmur of the spirit and the song of nature, chance and fate, lure with their sound from the depths of this sea out into an external world of diversity and also back into the depths of unity.
Magic tunes are luring softly, set out for a long journey!
From a formless source, a formful river magically seeks to emerge, flowing far into time and space. And far here means unimaginably far, for we know from modern science how unimaginably old and vast our universe is. And this river is far from ebbing away. It only seemingly ends in “sea foam,” as Hydra, the Water Mother, predicts, when we recognize ourselves as a separate ego, which must then ultimately dissolve like bubbles of illusion on the ocean waves.
But as long as we remain in the holistic power of love, our soul, which then consists of love and lives, does not perish. Thus, like Undine, we flow again and again from the pure source into the world of forms: bright, pearly eyes become dark doe eyes, golden hair becomes black hair, one source becomes many rivers, one soul becomes many living beings, one light becomes many images, unity becomes diversity and yet always remains a whole. Water nature and water spirit share as water mother and water father part of this journey, until we ourselves become mother and give birth to forms, become father and bear witness to forms, and finally, nature and spirit, as river and source, become one again, formful and formless consciousness united.
What, then, does the prince’s rescue mean? Here, we can see in the role of Undine the power of creation, which draws and therefore creates everything from the sea of causes, to which everything must return. And one can ponder whether the “creatures” truly left the sea in the flow through space and time, or only seemingly. And if Undine is the natural power of creation, then her two sisters would be the power of preservation in the flow through space and time and the power of dissolution or redemption in the sea of causes and possibilities. Thus, one again finds a triangle of creation, preservation, and dissolution, which also plays a major role in Indian philosophy and is symbolized by the three great gods Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva with their goddesses Saraswati, Lakshmi, and Parvati. Saraswati would then be the goddess of learning, just as Undine, in the human world, seeks to learn much, which we today also call “information,” a natural force of inner formative power, a magical tune from the depths.
And what does the Water Mother’s “magic potion” mean, which can transform everything and even make human feet grow? Our modern science speaks of genes in cells, long chains of billions of molecules, like a giant manual for the construction of a living being. And if one delves deeper into this, the mystical concept of “information” appears again, a force of inner formative power. But what this force exactly is, no one can say. It’s like a language that speaks to us in this form, but which we ourselves cannot speak. Or can we? At least we try to tinker with genes, which, however, is again the typical approach of our time: We try to solve problems physically that we should actually be solving mentally. Just as we drive over the earth in tin boxes, fly through the air, and even let ourselves be shot into space to explore and discover the wide world. We would also rather kill the obstacles that stand in our way physically than solve them mentally. Just think of the many poisons in our fields or the wars between people. Yes, so too must we sacrifice our long golden hair or profoundly true thoughts for the material world in order to receive the deadly knife of discrimination and separation, instead of entering into the true spiritual expanse of wholeness.
So, it goes in the fairy tale: “Set out for a long journey!” And by that is probably meant: Set out, open yourself from the narrow ego-mind into the broad consciousness of holistic reason! And how this “long journey” essentially unfolds is symbolically reflected in this wonderful fairy tale. Yes, such a long journey often begins painfully, which is usually the impetus for it. The best, of course, is the pain one undertakes out of love. For the paths that begin painfully and become happier are better than the paths that begin happily and become increasingly painful, as anyone in the world can experience who makes pain an enemy and transforms it into suffering with hatred, while love can transform it into happiness because its cause disappears. And that we emerge numb from this sea of causes and cannot tell much is also understandable, for one can only tell something about forms and not about the formless. And yet, of course, the sea of causes already knows everything that will happen, for nothing happens without a cause. Nevertheless, this journey also leads again and again into the “new,” as long as our consciousness is free to take on any form and does not cling to the “old”. For whoever clings only to a certain form, wants to hold on to it, and regards other forms as enemies, must naturally vanish like the foam of a wave.
Then comes the great test that Hydra, the water mother in the realm of nature, speaks of: Is it true love or passionate desire? Is consciousness narrowing or expanding? Is egoism increasing or decreasing? Are we walking into light or darkness, into heaven or hell, into life or death? Undine can pass this test, and that is you yourself, the magical miracle of this wonderful spirit-nature of our world, a happy ending in itself.
Admittedly, this isn’t a simple happy ending like we’re used to from Grimm’s fairy tales. But therein lies the great message and also the challenge: that it’s essentially more about a “happy beginning”, just as truth can be found in the origin, in what was, so to speak, before something came into being. So, for those who are still sad because Undine couldn’t marry her beloved and become queen, even though she had rescued him from the sea, let them remember: We were all brought from the sea into this earthly world by this Undine force to develop together. We should only be sad because we are no longer aware of it, but believe we were born only of earthly parents, because they were the first images imprinted on us when we opened our eyes on the earthly shores of this world. Instead of being married to just one person, Undine is now united with everyone, for she has found true love, which is not attached to anything and can become everything without having to keep anything. That means: “Only, who truly loves, has a soul.” And perhaps even an eternal one…
(The 2013 fairy tale film “The Little Mermaid” („Die kleine Meerjungfrau“) is available in German until February 16, 2030, in the ARD Mediathek / Kika.)
• ... Table of contents of all fairy tale interpretations ...
• King Thrushbeard - (topic: holy and healthy marriage)
• Saint Solicitous - (topic: beard and violin)
• The old witch - (topic: true Love and Reason)
• The Jew among Thorns - (topic: Reason and Mind)
• The Princess and the blind Blacksmith - (topic: Christmas)
• The Hare and the Hedgehog - (topic: I’m already here)
• Hans my Hedgehog - (topic: Reason and Nature)
• The Simpleton - (topic: Nature of the sea)
• The Water-Nix - (topic: Source and River)
• The Nix of the Mill-Pond - (topic: Water-being)
• The Little Mermaid Undine (topic: Wave dance)
 |
Sayings and text inspiration: Die kleine Meerjungfrau, 2013, ARD/Kika |