The Bottle Neck

The Bottle Neck is a fairy tale written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen in 1857 and included in the Andersen's Fairy Tales series. The narrator is the glass neck of a bottle, hung upside down outside a broken birdcage to serve as a water cup. In an interior monologue, it recounts its life to a little siskin in the cage: it was blown into shape in the factory furnace, lined up with the "brothers and sisters" from the oven to leave the works; it was filled with fine wine and opened at the engagement picnic of a fur merchant's daughter, where it witnessed a young sailor and a girl meet and part; afterward it was discarded, passed through various hands as a medicine bottle and carried on a long voyage, and when a shipwreck struck, the sailor stuffed a note to his fiancee into the bottle, making it a token drifting on the sea. The bottle lay silent for years in a foreign cabinet and attic; the writing on the note faded, and it could no longer understand the strangers' language. Later it was scrubbed clean, filled with seeds and shipped far away, then shattered at a balloon-flying celebration, and the surviving neck was finally picked up by an old unmarried lady and became a water cup in a birdcage. The story uses the life of an object to string together the meetings and partings, the vicissitudes of the human world, and beneath its light fairy-tale telling it writes out waiting, missing, and making peace with what comes. Andersen noted in his diary that the idea came from a joke by his friend, the Danish poet J. M. Thiele: "You ought to write a story about a bottle, from its beginning until it is nothing but a bottle neck for a bird to drink from."