Religious motifs : Overview. Search. About religious motifs
See also Devil, Satan
Keywords:
Satan, the devil, evil, death
Description of this motif: Hell isn't as important as Heaven in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales. In his literary universe people aren't going either to hell or to heaven after dying. If you aren't good enough to enter heaven, where an open mind and heart, a childlike innocence, is needed, you won't be condemned to Hell, but will be going through a trial period in a sort of intermediate state, from which you may go to heaven later. Cf. e.g. "On Judgment Day", "Something" og "The Garden of Paradise" and "The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf". Cf. the motif Intermediate state.
Example :
(...) in the glacier crevasse – that cold, strange ice world, where the Swiss peasant believes the souls of the damned are imprisoned till doomsday.
Comment on this quote: The main character Rudy was only one year old, when his father died, and he lost his mother not long after. She fell into a glacier with Rudy. He survived, but the demonic ice maiden wants him...
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