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

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.

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.