The Little Mermaid in Copenhagen is nowadays the city’s most famous statue and one of Denmark’s landmarks. If you ever received a postcard from Copenhagen (oh, how I loved those times when people still used to send real postcards and not only a picture on Instagram), or if you open any Copenhagen travel guide, you will find it there: the granite and bronze statue looking melancholically to the shore.

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Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale

Hans Christian Andersen wrote The Little Mermaid in 1836. It is the story of a mermaid who saves a beautiful prince from drowning, giving up her voice and her mermaid’s tail for that. The original version of “The Little Mermaid” doesn’t have a happy ending, like the Disney version: the mermaid never gets her prince and instead turns into cold sea foam. 

A fairy tale, a ballerina and a sculptor

In 1909, Carl Jacobsen, son of Carlsberg’s founder, attended “The Little Mermaid” ballet performance based on Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. He fell in love with the story, so he commissioned the sculptor Edvard Eriksen to create a sculpture that would illustrate the mermaid, using the ballerina Ellen Price as a model.

However, since Ellen Price didn’t agree to model nude, the sculptor asked his wife, Eline Eriksen, to pose for the Little Mermaid. Only the statue’s head was sculpted after the famous ballerina. On August 23, 1913, the Little Mermaid statue was unveiled to the public, and ever since, it has remained a symbol of the city.

Little Mermaid facts

• The Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen is actually a replica of the original, which the sculptor’s heritors keep at an unknown location.
• In 2013, the Little Mermaid statue turned 100 years old, and its centenary was celebrated in Copenhagen and all over the world.
• Despite its impressive fame, the statue is relatively small – only 1.25 meters high.
• The statue has become the victim of many vandalism acts over the years. The head was stolen in 1964 and 1998; one of the arms was taken off in 1984. In 2003, it was knocked off with explosives and recovered from the harbor’s waters.
• In 2010, the Little Mermaid statue was moved to Shangai, China, to be exposed at Denmark’s Pavilion at World Expo 2010. While the original statue was overseas, a copy of the Little Mermaid was displayed at Tivoli Gardens.
• Several copies of the statue are located worldwide, including in the United States, Spain, Romania, South Korea, Canada, and Monaco.

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