Twisted Fairy Tales and Spin Poetics

Scary Similarities and Horrible Agonies in Hans Christian Andersen’s “Pigen, som traadte paa Brødet” and Sid Sharp’s Bog Myrtle

Abstract

This essay offers a comparative, intermedial reading of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale “Pigen, som traadte paa Brødet” (1859; “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf of Bread”) and Sid Sharp’s graphic novel Bog Myrtle (2024), following the missteps and punishments of the main protagonists, Inger and Magnolia. In “Pigen, som traadte paa Brødet,” Inger tortures insects, treads on bread, and is gradually petrified. Sid Sharp spins the cruelty further in the portrayal of Magnolia. After she is given a magic sweater, made by her sister Beatrice and the house spiders, she forces both to produce more of them, systematically exploiting them. Framing Bog Myrtle within debates on sustainability and capitalism, the essay develops an ecocritically inspired approach in which spiders play a pivotal role. The second part focuses on the function of spiders in relation to intermediality and materiality, placing them in dialogue with Andersen’s papercut and the accompanying poem about a spider’s crabwise steps. To capture the coupling of the techniques of cutting and writing, the term ‘psaligraphy’ is proposed. Across both works, spinning, weaving, sewing, and webbing foreground the production processes, proposing ‘spin poetics’ as a transferable framework for reading textile/textual entanglements across media.