The Snow Queen
by Hans Christian Andersen
Illustrated by Vladyslav Yerko
The Snow Queen, adapted by Nicky Raven, is one of Templar's new Collector's Classics editions and is just as sumptuous as you might expect. Others are Beowulf, also adapted by Raven and illustrated by John Howe (he of the Lord of the Rings films) and an unabridged The Wind in the Willows with pictures by Robert Ingpen.
A pretty diverse list - an Anglo-Saxon poem just converted into a film with Ray Winstone in all his motion-capture six-pack glory, a centenary edition of a tale of the riverbank and a Danish fairy tale that has entered Western European sensibility so completely that it underpins much fantasy thereafter, from Narnia to His Dark Materials.
That glittering icy beauty who captures Kay because of the splinters of sorceror's mirror in his eye and heart is behind the White Witch who feeds Edmund Turkish Delight and even contributes something to Mrs Coulter. Surely it is because she is a combination of ravishing female beauty but complete absence of warmth? When she pulls Kay under her fur cloak, he feels no heat coming from her body; when he stops shivering it is because she has made him as cold as her, not because he has become warm.
This mythic figure has been brilliantly captured by Ukrainian artist Vladyslav Yerko, particularly in the painting reproduced on the cover, which shows that archetypal scene on the sledge. The Snow Queen's icy blue eyes stare out at the reader under an elaborate head-dress which seems to be made of the frozen breath of babies. Kay peers out from the fur lined cloak, sleepy but already paralysed into his transformed, unfeeling, self.
The illustrations are so intricately detailed that Templar have added a final page with a sort of I-Spy game, to find everything from thirteen horses to a snail and two mice reading books!
This surely sets the standard for the series and promises much for the future. In the pipeline are a collection of trickster tales and a new Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.