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The Soul and the Sole: Bread Wastage as Sin in Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf'

Introduction

Excepting water, the most common consumable food detail in fairy tales is ‘bread’.1 Crusts of stale bread, trails of crumbs, and everyday whole loaves are all parts of familiar fairy-tale tropes that today evoke a sense of rustic austerity and simple pleasures. In their contemporary settings, these bread references were allusions to ordinary life, a reality which relied heavily on those loaves of bread for survival. This article will explore the use of bread in a literary fairy tale as representative of the realistic dependence on bread in the Western European diet and as a food for which the waste of it in a tale demonstrates the moral value of the characters themselves. Condemnation for wasting bread is doled out in a variety of different tales. Through literal examples of bread being thrown away, literary fairy tales instruct children and lower classes, both in positions of low power, not to waste their own bread. To illustrate this, I will explore how Hans Christian Andersen’s literary fairy tale, ‘The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf’, focuses on the religious sin of a child who wastes bread. 

Bread in tales may represent nothing more than a material item that sustains us, and, thus, we should first see bread as material before looking at it as metaphorical. Yet, the very practice of baking bread is as wonderful as it is mundane. At different points in history, baking bread has been both habitual and ritualistic, not to mention physical, spiritual, and mechanical. Bread's role as a staple food has paradoxically made it both sacred and banal, holding a place in our myths, folklore, and fairy tales as securely as it holds a place on our tables. It is holy, and yet humble. The 'magic' of bread — that is, the leavening of it — has been part of its elevation to godly status. An important part of the makeup of the cultural meaning of bread arises in this period, and that is, of course, that Jesus Christ is bread to his followers. 

Bread and religion are not a new combination. Certainly, the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans had multiple gods each related to the process of bread, and the Hebrews had a relationship with their one god which intertwined with bread. A portion of the punishment of Adam and Eve for eating from the Tree of Knowledge was that wheat and bread would take toil and hard work.2 Yet, the prevailing practice which combines bread and worship in the Western world comes from Christianity and the act of making their bread—the Eucharistic sacrament — into the holy representation of their god. The division between human and god, or what is Earthly and what is Heavenly, is merged within both Christ and bread. Even as the various sects of Christianity diverged, Christians remained concerned about the nature of the link between the Eucharistic bread and Christ and began to argue about whether the process could be understood as  transubstantiation (the bread and wine is transformed into the actual blood and body of Jesus Christ), consubstantiation (Christ is spiritually entwined with bread and wine which remain physically bread and wine), or ubiquitarianism (Christ is present everywhere, including bread and wine). Yet, despite these differing views, bread would always remain a practical physical metaphor for consuming Christ's words. Jesus declares "I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst."3 Therefore, even practising Christians who do not take the Eucharist may still associate the symbol of bread with the spirituality of their religion. With the spread of Christianity, and the development of folklore and fairy tales within predominantly Christian cultures, it is difficult to separate the grasp of that symbolic consumption and wondrous uses of bread in otherwise seemingly secular tales. And folklore about bread integrates Christianity into otherwise supernatural beliefs; for example, bread and hot-cross buns baked on Good Friday were thought to cure illnesses if kept throughout the year and nibbled on when needed.4

It is difficult to divorce cultural meaning and symbolism from bread. Food details found in literature are inextricably bound up with society's epistemological structures; that is, they are embedded with immaterial and symbolic cultural constructions that rely on sociohistorical usage. Such usages are sometimes difficult to discern after they are removed from their variant contexts as bread has been inscribed with a host of religious associations and traditional beliefs, prior to its inclusion within any literary fairy tales. One important epistemological structure to mention is the metonymic use of bread as a stand-in for all foods, and for 'the daily bread', or wages and earnings (in some cases, these wages and earnings are actual bread as opposed to the means of obtaining bread). This is in common usage across fairy tales from many places and eras: the phrase or notion of 'earning daily bread' appears, for example, in ten stories from the Brothers Grimm: 'Mary's Child', 'The Story of a Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear', 'The Three Snake Leaves', 'Cinderella', 'The Bremen Town Musicians', 'The Gold Children', 'The Spirit in the Glass Bottle', 'The Jew in the Thorns', 'The Three Black Princesses', and 'The Giant and the Tailor'.5 It also appears as a phrase repeatedly in 'The Story of Catherine and Her Fate' (contained in Thomas Crane's Italian Popular Tales), and in a variety of stories found in the collections of Giovanni Francesco Straparola, Giambattista Basile, and Hans Christian Andersen.6 The variety of usage shows that this notion of bread as earnings or as all food is cross-cultural. Bread as the literal loaf of bread, as a metonym for all food, and as a part of the idiom for earnings is the crux for understanding the majority of the uses of bread in these tales. Through these three uses, bread becomes the sign of sustenance in its most basic form. As emphasized in the introduction, cereals constitute the bulk of the daily Western-European diet and have done since humankind learned to cultivate grain.7 Bread, in all its regional variations, is the most common method of consuming grain, and so bread and the lack of it in tales is an excellent indicator of those who have enough and those who do not.

Using Hans Christian Andersen's 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf', I show below how the religious and everyday significance of bread makes it a tangible 'good' thing, the waste of which brings about punishment.8 Andersen was a Danish fairy-tale adaptor and inventor who created dichotomies of what was good and what was sinful using everyday objects. The overt didacticism of many of Andersen’s tales leave the reader with a sense of moral direction, deriving particularly from his frequent references to immortal souls and the complicated Christian messages embedded in his works. The principles his tales exemplify extend also to his representations of food details and stories where food plays a primary role. Andersen animated all sorts of items, anthropomorphising toys from the nursery and domestic objects like pins and candles. This use of everyday things allowed him to explore complex ideas such as moralism and immortal souls in his writing. As H. Joseph Schwarcz put it in terms of "machine animism", "whatever [Andersen's] fantasy touched upon became for him the bearer of a destiny, the symbol of the pervading sadness and happiness he saw all around him, and the vehicle for his intensely human message."9 These tiny things are effective and imaginative fairy-tale characters with immense power to communicate analogous human experiences. Naomi Wood aptly juxtaposes the minute lives of Andersen's objects against the "macrocosmic" effects of Andersen's depictions of "Nature": "Andersen's objects, like people, may wish to establish their meaningfulness in the grand scheme of things, but their efforts have only individual, microcosmic effects."10

Andersen's use of anthropomorphised material objects and things within tales only occasionally forayed into food: most obviously, the ambitious, dreamy, and lazy five tiny peas in 'Five Peas from a Pod', the allegorical gingerbread man with the bitter almond heart in love with the gingerbread woman (sweet as the honey cake she was made from) in 'Under the Willow-Tree', and the haughty buckwheat stalk that refuses to bend in the wind like all the other grains and flowers and is punished with a quick stroke of lightning ('The Buckwheat').11 Items from the kitchen also make appearances, such as the teapot full of boiling water that shatters and finds new life as a flower pot ('The Teapot') and the tallow candle in 'The Candles' who learns to appreciate and find joy in the simple meal of a poor family.12 Other notable food appearances are less anthropomorphised, but still fantastical: the match-girl's fantasy of a plump goose with a fork in its back   ('The Little Match Girl'), the carriage gifted to Gerda filled with plates of fruit and gingerbread in 'The Snow Queen', and a tiny child's birth from a barleycorn in 'Thumbelina’.'[13

It is noticeable that Andersen's tales are less reliant on the fairy-tale tropes of hunger, and while there is the occasional mention of eating throughout, bread and other mundane foods are much less common than in collections such as the Grimms. However, 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf' does indeed explore the everyday importance of bread in Andersen's own style. It is a complement to prudent messages about food which Andersen constructs in other tales, such as 'The Candles', mentioned above, which extols appreciation for what one has (as meagre as it may be). Messages against food wastage also appear in 'The Snow Queen', when the Finn woman that Gerda meets at the end of her journey "never liked to waste anything", and tosses the dried cod which has had a message written on it into her kettle of soup.14 And, quite unambiguously, 'Soup from a Sausage Peg' takes a proverb about making something out of nothing and expands it into a moralistic tale about the search for the recipe that makes soup from the nub end of a sausage – not even that small, barely edible piece of food will go to waste.15 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf' may be the most explicit tale against food wastage in Andersen's corpus, but it resides in good company with other tales of 'good' food behaviour.

Bread's role as a staple food has paradoxically made it both sacred and banal, holding a place in our myths, folklore, and fairy tales as securely as it holds a place on our tables. It is holy, and yet humble. 

Background

Before exploring the food detail in this tale, some background about its origins will be useful. Andersen's command of the fairy-tale style allowed his versions and adaptations of older or previously-known tales sometimes to supplant other variants in popularity. 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf' is one of these. This tale was published in one of Andersen's later fairy-tale collections, following a time in the 1850s in which "he had wrestled with issues of faith and immortality".16 These themes resonate in this tale regarding the question of what happens when immortality is enshrined in infamy and wickedness instead of talent or good works. The story opens by self-referentially reminding the audience that there are other variants which they might know: "You have probably heard about the tribulations of the girl who trod on a loaf of bread to keep from soiling her shoes. The story has been written down and put into print as well."17

A short summary of the 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf' is as follows: Beautiful Inger was a poor but wicked child. She entered the service of a family of gentry, who treated her kindly and dressed her well, causing her to become ashamed of her mother's rags. Her mistress finally tells her to go home, giving Inger a loaf of bread for her mother. On her way home, Inger encountered some marshy ground, and she threw the loaf into the mud to step on so that she might cross without dirtying her new shoes. When she stepped on the loaf, the ground opened, and she was dragged into the home of the Marsh Woman.18 The loaf was fixed to Inger's feet and she could not move — the devil's great-grandmother soon claimed her for a statue to decorate the devil's entrance hall. Inger heard her mother lament her daughter's vanity and she heard her master and mistress regret her sin, and her heart hardened. Her story served as warning to other children, until one little girl pitied her. Eventually, the little girl grew up, and on her death, her tears for Inger's pain made Inger, too, feel humility, which caused her to turn into a mute bird. At Christmastime, the bird gathered crumbs and gave them to other birds, until the weight of the crumbs was equal to the weight of the loaf that had stuck to Inger's feet. Then, the bird turned white, flew into the sun, and disappeared. 

'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf' has no number in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folktales (usually abbreviated as 'ATU'), a database which groups folktales by type and narratives.19 This is perhaps due to its singularity in Danish folklore and its absence from in other cultures (at least, until Andersen was translated into other languages), as well as its predominance in folk ballads as opposed to prose tales.20 As mentioned above, this tale merged a known cautionary folktale with Andersen's inventive storytelling, which extended the tale to include an ending that offered the antiheroine salvation. In his own notes, translated by Erik Haugaard, Andersen wrote that "I had long known the story of THE GIRL WHO STEPPED ON BREAD [Haugaard's translation of the title]: of how the bread had turned to stone and dragged her down with it into the bog, where she disappeared. I set myself the task of lifting her out of the swamp psychologically, so that she could be redeemed; and from it the story developed."21 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf' existed in folk culture in a ballad form (aside from Andersen's, there does not seem to be any surviving print version of the tale).22 Andersen knew how to be playful with stories familiar to his audience, adding twists to keep the readers interested. 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf' adds Andersen's new ending, and is peppered with proverbs (both Danish and biblical), subtle repetitions of motifs which recall Andersen's previous stories, and creatures from Scandinavian folklore. All these things serve as references to the story's cultural framework, with the outcome of holy salvation at the end working in parallel with (and not against) the traditional beliefs of elves, the legend of the Marsh Woman, and Andersen's use of fairy-tale tropes.

The tale does call to mind tales of 'Kind and Unkind Girls' (ATU-480) in which a kind girl is rewarded and an unkind girl, seeking the same reward, cannot overcome her selfish nature and is instead punished. The key difference between that and 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf' is that Inger initially acts badly of her own wicked volition, without seeking reward. Although Inger is positioned against the 'kind', pitying child who becomes an angel weeping over Inger's circumstances, the order of these actions does not reflect the ATU-480 plot (in which the kind girl is first rewarded and the unkind girl attempts to follow suit). However, the Mosekonen, or Marsh Woman, mirrors figures like Frau Holle and other older fairy-tale women who possess the dual qualities of benevolence and malevolence depending on the actions of the girl. The hag character is tripled by the addition of the devil's great-grandmother and the pitying child who grows up and, upon death from old age, becomes an angel. The former continues Inger's suffering by bringing her from the folk-world of the Marsh Woman into the Christian Hell. With regard to the latter, Inger has no 'kind' sister or doppelganger to reward, so the power of Inger's own penitence brings reward — it is spurred on by the gift of pity given to her by the angel. Maria Tatar comments on the domination of the "underground space" by women, "rather than by the devil himself".23 Andersen held the belief that Satan had a prominent role in the purification of people, "a necessary and, in his own way, admirable opponent to mankind" (from Tatar's interpretation in a footnote in The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen) – putting struggles in front of people was "merely fulfilling his duty". Inger has succumbed to these duties until her redemption at the end. The aboveground space, too, is populated by a prominent female figure with the addition of the pitying child/angel character. Christ and the Devil make no explicit, tangible appearances in this tale.

Within many of Andersen's tales can be found direct and purposeful parallels to and interpretations of his own life and the lives of those around him. There were characters that represented the author himself and his struggles and triumphs with love, success, and fame, but additionally there were tales of others Andersen knew and admired or despised. One of his best-known tales carrying such an underlying history is that of 'The Red Shoes'. 'The Red Shoes' tells a tale of Karen, who continually commits the sin of vanity by choosing the inappropriately-coloured red shoes over black ones, defying her community's concepts of religious propriety and virtuous behaviour. Even when her heart and head concede and she is ready to repent, her feet (which she begged the executioner to chop off) dance away in the shoes, disembodied and eerie with their perpetual movement. The ending, in which the girl repents and her soul is carried off to heaven after lengthy suffering, reflects a common theme in Andersen that is reiterated in other tales such as 'The Little Mermaid', 'The Marsh King's Daughter', 'The Little Match Girl', and, also, 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf'.

The similarities between 'The Red Shoes' and 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf' are not limited to the ending. The clearest parallels concern Andersen's condemnation of (particularly female) vanity and the similarity between both girls' preoccupation with material parts of their appearance; in both cases, shoes are prioritised, although Inger is also aware that she was "dressed so smartly" in comparison to her mother's rags and, on her second trip back, she also protects the hem of her dress, not just her shoes.24 The upward socioeconomic movement of the girls in both tales is another parallel, as both move from impoverishment to better home situations where their domestic services are rewarded with clothes. Furthermore, the concrete motif of the magical and relentless attachment of a physical embodiment of sin to the feet makes the latter tale of 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf' feel as if it were a re-imagining of Andersen’s own earlier work combined with the known folk ballad. Finally, both tales contain a curious mixture of Christian and traditional motifs, an intermingling commonly found in Andersen's tales, and echoed in the endings in which both girls ascend to Heaven through the means of sunshine.25

Maria Tatar comments on the domination of the "underground space" by women... The aboveground space, too, is populated by a prominent female figure with the addition of the pitying child/angel character.

Food details

What 'The Red Shoes' does not contain are any prominent food details.26 The tale is focused on clothing and outward appearance for its didactic message. 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf', by comparison, is focused on bread as a literal grounding of good behaviour (literal as it sticks the feet of Inger and pulls her through the ground), combining the message against vanity with a practical reprimand against wasting the most vital food, bread. We first see the loaf when it is given to Inger to take to her family by her mistress. The use of a "big loaf of white bread" in Tatar's translation immediately reinforces the wealth of Inger's employers for most audiences who subscribe to the European preference for white bread.27 The original Danish calls it hvedebrød, from hvede (wheat) and brød (bread). Although specifically white bread is franksbrød in Danish, as in 'French bread', hvedebrød is often used for white bread. In particular, the use of hvedebrød distinguishes it from rugbrød, or rye bread, a coarser, denser loaf (which is significantly darker, too). In part, this was due to the difficulty of growing wheat across Scandinavia, where rye thrives better.28 In the nineteenth century, millers in all of Scandinavia struggled to keep up with demand for wheat flour from internal sources, and were compelled to look elsewhere to import it.29 However, contemporary and regional preference here is open to speculation despite the demand for wheat in the nineteenth century. Opposing the usual inclination in Western Europe to ascribe higher value to wheat bread, the ubiquitous nature of rye in Nordic countries stretched across the classes.30 Nevertheless, the use of wheat might be marked as special due to its rarity, and that, in the context of Inger's employers being called 'gentry' (Tatar’s translation; the original Danish is fornemme, which means prestigious or distinguished), would have given the loaf of hvedebrøt great import for Inger's mother had she received it. 

The meaning of the story is quite clear. When Inger wastes the bread, choosing vanity over sustenance, she is immediately punished for her wickedness. The cause and effect in 'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf' is explicit, happening within moments of her putting the loaf into the mud: "she flung the loaf down on the ground as a stepping-stone so that she could make her way across with dry shoes. Just as she put one foot on the bread and lifted the other, the loaf began to sink, carrying her down deeper and deeper until she disappeared altogether and there was nothing to see but a black, bubbling swamp!"31 Touching the wasted loaf with her feet, dirtying it with the soles of her shoes and not just the mud on the ground, is the catalyst for the earth to swallow Inger. In Scandinavia, this abhorrence of bread touching the earth was documented by Paul B. Du Chaillu in his 1888 book of travels through Sweden and Norway, and encompassed even any bread that was spare: "As I was going along I saw a woman put carefully on a stone a piece of bread which she had been eating; the Swede or the Norwegian never throws bread on the ground, but, when on the road, after they have satisfied their hunger, they lay the remainder carefully on a spot where the passer-by, if hungry, may find and eat it. They think it is sinful to east [sic] away the gift of God. I have even seen persons when a piece of bread fell down pick it up and kiss it."32 Although it is not explicitly a tradition from Denmark, nor would I want to suggest that all Scandinavian countries share the same traditions, this kind of contemporaneous text demonstrates that Northern Europeans sometimes associated bread with God to the extent that it made the wasting of bread more sinful than other food waste. The belief in the sacramental union (in which the bread and wine is present alongside the body and blood of Christ, remaining physically bread and wine — this would align with the beliefs of Andersen as a Lutheran) may also indicate a belief that Christ exists in the bread, even when the bread is not consecrated for communion. Hence the reverence for bread might be a reverence for Christ, as well as the ability for bread to feed the hungry.

Thus, the didacticism extends to two messages: firstly, a message similar to that of 'The Red Shoes', which focuses on the sin of vanity and preference for the material (over the spiritual, if bread is to be read as a symbol of godly nourishment) and, secondly, the religious and secular sin of food wastage, which is first punished by Inger's going to Hell and then emphasised again in Inger's retributory act of collecting crumbs at the end. The wasting of the bread is not out of ignorance, stupidity, or failure to see the consequences of dropping edible material. It is Inger's cruel nature and selfish outlook that prompts her to throw the bread to t­he ground, traits which have been outlined from the start by Andersen to paint a picture of a girl who knows better and yet still acts badly.33 If the punishment of being trapped in the underworld for years upon years seems severe, it is because Inger had wasted an entire loaf of bread, not just crumbs or bran like the characters in 'Hansel and Gretel' and other tales of the ATU-327 type. The repercussions must be serious, something which is reflected in other folktales about wasting loaves of bread. 

For Inger, however, there is not just the withdrawal of her voice and movement (which up to this point have always been her methods of behaving wickedly), but also her imprisonment underground and eventually in Hell: "People can't always go straight down there, but if they have a little talent, they can get there in a roundabout way."34 To make things worse for her, she is confronted with all her sins as the flies whose wings she tore off as a child crawl on her body and "[w]orst of all" she cannot move to nibble a piece of the wasted bread to abate her unrelenting hunger.35 Tatar relates this hunger not only to the physical, but also to the spiritual, which I am inclined to agree with considering that the subsequent actions of the tale take Inger from her damnation to her salvation.36

Inger is eventually rewarded, after lengthy suffering and conscious atonement. Inger's metamorphosis into a bird gives her meaningful thoughts of contrition an opportunity to transform into good works, taking her to heaven (in the final paragraphs, she turns from grey to white, and flies "straight into the sun").37 She is mute until she conceives of generosity for others; she is earthbound until she completes that mission. The mission, of course, is her collection of breadcrumbs and grains until she collected so many that they "equaled [sic] in weight the loaf" that she had trod upon. The idea comes to her after seeing a farmer who "had put a pole up near the wall and had tied an unthreshed bundle of oats to it, so that creatures of the air might also have a merry Christmas and a cheerful meal in this season of the Savior."38 This is a common practice in Scandinavia, in Denmark called juleneg, and another example of Andersen's deft weaving of culture and folk-tradition into his literature.39 In Du Chaillu's travelogue, he describes the farmers bundling the oats, like Andersen's farmer in the tale, and observes how they would often go and sell them in the villages and towns: "Every poor man, and every head of a family had saved a penny or two, or even one farthing, to buy a bunch of oats for the birds to have their Christmas feast… …It is a beautiful custom, and speaks well for the natural goodness of heart of the Scandinavian."40 The timing of Inger's redemption at Christmas reinforces the movement of Inger from Hell to Heaven through her contrition and good deeds — Tatar notes that Andersen, as a Lutheran, would ascribe to the doctrine of salvation, which says that good deeds do not bring salvation (although they are important), but it is faith alone which allows for redemption.41 Crucially for this argument and for Andersen's belief system, Inger must develop faith, which Andersen keenly writes in before the good acts: Inger, as a statue, experiences regret, and then, transformed into a mute bird, she begins to appreciate the earth around her, singing silent songs, called at one point "psalms" and another "hymn[s] of praise".42 Christmas is not the beginning of her redemption, then, but the culmination. "Was the time not ripe?" asks the narrator, cementing a connection between the values of Christianity and the birth of Jesus celebrated at Christmastime with the salvation of Inger.43 Andersen's further development of this cautionary tale through the additional retribution of the wayward girl fittingly juxtaposes a dual use of the food detail. Bread served both to condemn and to save Inger, dependent on whether it was squandered or shared, reiterating a values system which is present in many of Andersen's works and literary fairy tales as a whole. 

Every poor man, and every head of a family had saved a penny or two, or even one farthing, to buy a bunch of oats for the birds to have their Christmas feast… …It is a beautiful custom, and speaks well for the natural goodness of heart of the Scandinavian.

Paul B. Du Chaillu, The Land of the Midnight Sun; Summer and Winter Journeys through Sweden, Norway, Lapland and Northern Finland, 4th edn, 2 vols. London: J. Murray, 1888, ii, 6-7.

Conclusion

'The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf' uses the mundane but extraordinary loaf of bread to illustrate the material transgression of food waste, as well as implying a metaphorical desecration of religious principles. The choice of bread demonstrates that bread – not just in this tale, but as a food detail in many Western European fairy tales – is understood as truly valuable and not to be squandered. The audience is dependent on bread in their own life, and fairy tales reiterate a deep cultural understanding about bread's role in both society and story. The collection of crumbs to feed the hungry for Inger's retribution or the dropping of loaf demonstrate wastefulness and poor judgement; bread as an everyday object in fairy tales is a familiar yet powerful image which can be used to add further emphasis to a tale's morals, both literal and spiritual.

End Notes

Go to footnote reference 1.

This fact is derived from the qualitative data analysis done on a selection of fairy-tale collections coded in the Fairy-Tale Food Detail Database, produced alongside my doctoral work. 

Go to footnote reference 2.

The Jewish custom of serving bread with salt is to remind the eater of the labour it takes to cultivate and grind wheat before baking into an edible loaf; the taste of salt is the taste of sweat, which must occur for the fruitful bounty of harvest to occur. See T. Canaan, 'Superstition and Folklore about Bread', Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research (1962), 36–47 (37); Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk Religion. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012, 160–161.

Go to footnote reference 3.

John Phillips elaborates on this: "The natural physical acts of eating and drinking bread and water are the symbolic vehicles for describing the way we receive Christ into our lives, the one who imparts and sustains our spiritual lives just as bread and water sustain our physical lives."  See John, 6:35, King James Bible; John Phillips, Exploring the Gospel of John: An Expository Commentary. Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2001, 128.

Go to footnote reference 4.

Gabrielle Hatfield, Encyclopedia of Folk Medicine: Old World and New World Traditions. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2004, 45.

Go to footnote reference 5.

This information was derived using the Fairy-Tale Food Detail Database mentioned in note 1.

Go to footnote reference 6.

Indeed, this phrase's use is not limited to these examples. The usage is consistent across multiple vernaculars. For example, in German: 'sie nicht mehr das tägliche Brot hatten' ['they no longer had daily bread'], 'du mußt auch etwas lernen womit du dein Brot verdienst' ['you must learn to earn your daily bread']. In Danish: 'Gifte med hinanden havde de Huset og det daglige Brød ved at luge og grave i Herregaardshaven' ['Married to each other, they had/earned their house and daily bread by weeding and digging in the manor garden.'] In Neapolitan Italian (as translated by Nancy Canepa): 'che stace appiso a lo muro, co lo quale te puoi guadaguare lo pane' ['take that sieve that's hanging on the wall, with which you'll be able to earn your bread']. Translations my own, except where otherwise stated.

Go to footnote reference 7.

Robert W. Allen and Ken Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2003, 21.

Go to footnote reference 8.

There is very little scholarship on this tale from which to begin a discussion. Indeed, the best Andersen translations such as those by Frank and Frank or Nunnally have left this tale out, and so I have relied heavily on the annotated version by Maria Tatar. Other recent interpretations of this tale include a psychoanalytic article by Mariam Cohen and the novel by Kathryn Davis. See Mariam Cohen, 'Little Girls Who Become Angels: The Prohibition of Feminine Narcissism in the Children's Stories of Hans Christian Andersen', Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, 22.1 (1994), 153–166; Kathryn Davis, The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf, Reprint Edition. New York, NY: Back Bay Books, 2003.

Go to footnote reference 9.

H. Joseph Schwarcz, 'Machine Animism in Modern Children's Literature', The Library Quarterly: Information, Community, Policy, 37.1 (1967), 78–95 (78–79).

Go to footnote reference 10.

Naomi Wood, 'The Ugly Duckling's Legacy: Adulteration, Contemporary Fantasy, and the Dark', Marvels & Tales, 20.2 (2007), 193–207 (196).

Go to footnote reference 11.

Hans Christian Andersen, The Complete Stories, trans. By Jean Hersholt. London: British Library, 2005, 175–­176, 370–381.

Go to footnote reference 12.

Andersen, The Complete Stories, 659–61, 786–9 (respectively).

Go to footnote reference 13.

The goose with the fork in its back is reminiscent of the mythical fantasyland of Cockaigne, in which the world is topsy-turvy and food is in carnivalesque excess. Dating back to the Middle Ages, images of and literature about Cockaigne served paradoxically to fulfil dreams of plenty and to didactically enforce modes of behaviour, sometimes in quite a satirical fashion. Cockaigne (sometimes called Luilekkerland or Schlaraffenland) spanned many eras and across Europe, a cross-cultural fantasy that could have very well informed how Andersen constructed the little matchgirl's vision of plenty. See Andersen, The Complete Stories, 275–277, 214–238, 24–32 (respectively); Herman Pleij, Dreaming of Cockaigne: Medieval Fantasies of the Perfect Life. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2001.

Go to footnote reference 14.

Hans Christian Andersen, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007, 58.

Go to footnote reference 15.

Occasionally, this story is interpreted in illustrations with the sausage peg as a skewer or toothpick – I believe it to be the end of the sausage casing where the intestine has been tied. This interpretation also emphasises the message that nothing goes to waste. See Andersen, The Complete Stories, 430–440.

Go to footnote reference 16.

Jackie Wullschlager, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002, 353.

Go to footnote reference 17.

Andersen, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, 316. 

Go to footnote reference 18.

The Marsh Woman, or Mosekonen, is a folkloric figure from a common Danish phrase that the 'Mosekonen brygger', the Marsh Woman is brewing. This is said when the mist or fog seems to rise up from the bogs and marshes and lingers on the surface, creating an eerie atmosphere. Although she is not necessarily a negative figure in Danish folklore, the mist can hide fairies or elves in it and so she inadvertently helps them to do mischief.

Go to footnote reference 19.

Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. Based on the system of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson, 3 vols. FF Communications No. 284­­‑286. Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 2004.

Go to footnote reference 20.

Andersen was first translated into English in 1846, bringing his name and works into libraries of English-language children's literature before this story was published in 1859. This particular tale was translated into English (though American) as early as 1860 in A.S. Bushby's collection of Andersen’'s stories, and was reprinted (and retranslated) in many Victorian-era collections thereafter. See Wullschlager, 286; Hans Christian Andersen, The Sand-Hills of Jutland and 17 Other Tales, trans. by A.S. Bushby. Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1860.

Go to footnote reference 21.

Hans Christian Andersen, The Complete Fairy Tales and Stories, trans. by Erik Haugaard. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 2011, 1083.

Go to footnote reference 22.

Andersen, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, 316, n.1.

Go to footnote reference 23.

ibid, 320 n.10.

Go to footnote reference 24.

ibid, 318.

Go to footnote reference 25.

ibid, 260, 329.

Go to footnote reference 26.

There is one mention of the Sacrament, although Karen only "put the chalice to her lips" – Andersen does not mention the wafer. See Andersen, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, 257.

Go to footnote reference 27.

Andersen, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, 318.

Go to footnote reference 28.

Åsmund Bjørnstad, 'Chapter 44: Wheat -  Its Role in Social and Cultural Life', in The World Wheat Book: A History of Wheat Breeding, 3 vols. Paris: Lavoisier, 2016, iii, 1367–1393 (1387).

Go to footnote reference 29.

ibid, 1387.

Go to footnote reference 30.

This was observed in a travelogue from 1829, written by Derwent Conway. He contradicted a previous visitor to these areas who had wrongly assumed that the 'lower orders' consumed rye-bread due to their class status. Conway said instead that the "lower orders certainly eat black rye-bread, but so do all ranks. Rye-bread is universally preferred to wheaten bread; and over the whole of Norway, and in Denmark also, black rye-bread is the bread generally used."  See Derwent Conway, A Personal Narrative of a Journey through Norway, Part of Sweden, and the Islands and States of Denmark. Edinburgh: Constable & Co., 1829, 155.

Go to footnote reference 31.

Andersen, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, 319.

Go to footnote reference 32.

Paul B. Du Chaillu, The Land of the Midnight Sun; Summer and Winter Journeys through Sweden, Norway, Lapland and Northern Finland, 4th edn, 2 vols. London: J. Murray, 1888, ii, 417.

Go to footnote reference 33.

The beginning of the tale is full of unsavoury depictions of Inger: "She was a poor child, but proud and vain. And people said she had a bad streak"; Andersen details how she would pull the wings off tiny creatures; "As she grew older, she became worse rather than better"; she is foretold to stomp all over her mother's heart. See Andersen, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, 317.

Go to footnote reference 34.

Andersen, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, 321.

Go to footnote reference 35.

ibid, 322-323.

Go to footnote reference 36.

ibid, 323, n. 13.

Go to footnote reference 37.

ibid, 328-329.

Go to footnote reference 38.

ibid, 327.

Go to footnote reference 39.

Gerry Bowler, The World Encyclopedia of Christmas. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2012, n.p.

Go to footnote reference 40.

An association between poverty and oats (as opposed to wheat) is clear here: "A man must be very poor indeed if he cannot spare a farthing to feed the little birds on Christmas-day!" See Du Chaillu, ii, 6–7.

Go to footnote reference 41.

Andersen, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, 328, n.28.

Go to footnote reference 42.

ibid, 327.

Go to footnote reference 43.

ibid, 327.

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Rose Williamson

Dr Rose Williamson recently completed her PhD at the University of Chichester through the Sussex Centre for Folklore, Fairy Tales, and Fantasy. Her research topic investigated food details in literary fairy tales with a particular focus on bread and grain. She is currently working as Campaigns and Education Enhancement Coordinator for Anglia Ruskin University Students' Union, and drafting a fairy-tale novel in her spare time.