By Don & Nancy Harrison

COPENHAGEN, Denmark—There is an enchanting fairy tale quality about the Little Mermaid's neighborhood—a small park and boat marina where legends and reality co-mingle. 

Sometimes the tourists aboard the big buses don't even notice this neighborhood, so quickly do they pile out to photograph the Little Mermaid statue on its rock in the harbor and then pile back in to ride to the next sight.

But thanks to Chris and Cecily Castenskjold of Rancho Santa Fe, California, we had the opportunity to stay in Copenhagen with their friend, whose mythically named apartment house building is just a short walk over a musically inspired railroad bridge from the park where kings built their bunkers and rode their horses and the marina where mermaids, polar bears, explorers and mariners have been immortalized by sculptors.

The statue of the Little Mermaid depicts her at that point in the Hans Christian Andersen tale when she had risen from the sea to be transformed into a human being. The statue's legs and feet are fully formed but around them are still a few vestiges of her fishtail.

On the outboard side of the marina, the Little Mermaid is looking out to the harbor—remembering the companionship of the family whose underwater home shall be off-limits to her forevermore.

How she already had suffered in her effort to win the love of the prince whom she once had saved from drowning—and how she would suffer still! A sea witch had taken her tongue and voice in exchange for the potion which gave the Little Mermaid her human form, and told her that if the prince should take someone else for a wife, the Little Mermaid would die the following morning.

The prince did grow to lover her—but, alas, as a sister, not as a potential wife. When he became engaged to marry another young woman, the mermaid's sisters made a last ditch bargain to try to save her life. They gave the with their beautiful hair, for which the witch said the Little Mermaid could live on—but only if she killed the prince on his wedding night. Of course, our little heroine would have none of that—for which she was rewarded eternally by higher powers than the witch.

Sometimes swans from the Kastellet walk over the narrow band of land separating their lake from the harbor, and float majestically past the Little Mermaid statue, perhaps to remind her that one of their ancestors also was the subject of a famous Hans Christian Andersen story—the ancestor who erroneously had been thought to be "An Ugly Duckling."

The Kastellet was built in 1629 by King Christian IV. It is located in a depression behind a palisades that overlooks the harbor.  It was in this fortification that the royal family was to hide in the event of an invasion by the neighboring Swedes.

Three centuries later another king, Christian X, often rode in the mornings from his palace to the Kastellet, as Danes trooped behind him in a demonstration of nationalism in face of the World War II occupation of their country by the Germans.

Around Christian X has grown a legend from that dark period that he wore a yellow star of David to demonstrate his solidarity with the Danish Jews whose lives were put in jeopardy by the Nazi Germans. The story gained considerable currency with the publication of Exodus by the novelist Leon Uris, but the story was not a true one.

In fact, through most of the German occupation, Denmark's government was permitted to run the country's internal affairs. Although the Germans suggested that anti-Jewish measures be enacted by the Danes—including the requirement that Jews wear the yellow stars—the Danes steadfastly refused. Therefore, Danish Jews never wore the yellow star and there was never any reason for Christian X to do so either.

Walking around the Little Mermaid's little marina, adjacent to the Kastellet, one can understand how such a story got started. In modern version, it is a reiteration of countless European folk tales about brave kings disguising themselves as commoners in order to see for themselves what dangers their subjects faced, and then vanquishing the enemy.

But while the yellow star story is only legend, it is completely true that the Danes, almost alone among the occupied nations, rose up as one to protect the Jews from the Nazi Holocaust.

When word leaked out late in 1943 that the Germans planned mass arrests of the Jews, Danes hid their countrymen in homes, barns and hospitals, then smuggled them aboard fishing boats which took them across the channel to neutral Sweden.

About their national bravery in protecting the Jews, the Danes are characteristically modest.  "It was something we had to do," is the typical response of a Dane when asked about this distinguished historic episode.

Among the sculptures around Little Mermaid's marina are those in memory of sailors who were sent to watery graves by German torpedoes during the First World War.  And there is a striking bas relief sculpture of a Danish dogsled expedition to Greenland which ended in tragedy in 1908 after the explorers ran out of food, and strength, and detailed their lonely dying agony in a diary found by a search party.

Here too is a sculpture of a large polar bear standing on her hind legs, ready to protect two tiny cubs from anyone so foolish as to test her resolve. As you can imagine, as popular as Little Mermaid is with children, she gets some pretty stiff competition from those bear cubs.

Other animals are featured in one of Copenhagen's favorite fountains a few blocks from Little Mermaid's marina.  The fountain depicts a winged woman driving four oxen, whose mighty efforts churn the waters. The woman is the Norse goddess Gefion who, according to legend, turned her four sons into oxen in order to transport a piece of Sweden to the area of Denmark where Copenhagen now sits.

The legend seeks to explain why the shape of the Danish isle of Zealand is strikingly similar to Lake Vanern in Sweden.

"Gefion" also is the name of the apartment house where our Danish hostess, Mimi Fruergaard, resides on a street across the tracks of the Danish National Railroad from the Kastellet and the Little Mermaid marina.

Recently, the aging bridge spanning those tracks was replaced by a modernistic structure shaped like a series of great triangles such as those used by percussionists in an orchestra.

In an area as enchanted as this, it is not too difficult to imagine that in the wee hours, after the people in their apartments have fallen asleep, that the triangles play merry tunes to the trains as they pass underneath the bridge.

The evening before we left "Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen"—as Danny Kaye used to sing in that great old movie about Hans Christian Andersen—we asked Mimi about some of the other statues that can be found in Little Mermaid's neighborhood.

One depicted a young person toweling off after a bath.  But we wondered who was the person who stood nearby with arms folded across his chest.

"That would be Frederik IX, the king who was father to our current queen, Margrethe II," Mimi replied. "I am pretty certain that he is the one with the folded arms."

We didn't like to contradict our wonderful hostess, but somehow that just didn't seem right.

"But," we said, "this man is half naked."

"Naked?" Mimi repeated in alarm.  "Then it cannot be the king.  We Danes are very informal with our royal family, it is true, but we do not make naked statues of them. We are not that informal."

Early the next morning, we walked briskly over the triangle bridge to the marina so Mimi could see this statue for herself before we caught our cab to the airport and an SAS flight back to Los Angeles (and later a shuttle flight to San Diego.)

"Oh," Mimi laughed when she saw the statue with the folded arms.  "You are right.  This one is not Frederik. It is called "The Swimmer" The one of Frederik is farther into town."

A good thing that was too.  Otherwise, we would have had to report that, like a certain emperor in another Hans Christian Andersen tale, the king had no clothes!