I get a similar tick when some people claim that The Little Mermaid takes place in Denmark because it was written by HC Andersen. No, it literally doesn’t. We don’t have palm trees and mountains like the ones in the movie. And even in the original fairytale from the 1800s, it is very heavily implied that the prince lives in a fairytale country that borrows from the Mediterranean, Middle East and India. Even in the original illustrations for the story, there are palm trees and a arab looking palace in the background of one of the illustrations.
HC wanted to put the reader in the mermaids place. Give them the same longing for another world that she had. If he had set thr story in Copenhagen it wouldn’t have captured the imagination of 1800s Dane the same way. He managed to make these gorgeous descriptions of the strange and beautiful country the prince is from. There is a reason why Edmund Dulac designed the prince the way he did in his illustration work for the story in the early 1900s.
I get a similar tick when some people claim that The Little Mermaid takes place in Denmark because it was written by HC Andersen. No, it literally doesn’t. We don’t have palm trees and mountains like the ones in the movie. And even in the original fairytale from the 1800s, it is very heavily implied that the prince lives in a fairytale country that borrows from the Mediterranean, Middle East and India. Even in the original illustrations for the story, there are palm trees and a arab looking palace in the background of one of the illustrations.
HC wanted to put the reader in the mermaids place. Give them the same longing for another world that she had. If he had set thr story in Copenhagen it wouldn’t have captured the imagination of 1800s Dane the same way. He managed to make these gorgeous descriptions of the strange and beautiful country the prince is from. There is a reason why Edmund Dulac designed the prince the way he did in his illustration work for the story in the early 1900s.