Sandman

The proof turns up every morning, crusted in the corners of the eyes. A few grains of grit, dry and pale, easy to rub away with a knuckle before breakfast. Children across northern Europe were once told exactly where it came from. A small man had climbed the stairs in the dark, crossed to the bed in stocking feet, and thrown a pinch of fine sand into their sleeping eyes. That was why they had slept so well. That was why the sand was there in the morning.

He has almost no biography, which is part of why he has lasted. The Sandman began not as a story but as a figure of speech. Eighteenth-century German dictionaries record the phrase der Sandmann kommt, the sandman is coming, said of a child who is knuckling its eyes and drooping over the supper table. From that idiom a person slowly assembled himself. Whoever put the grit there must have hands, and feet, and a reason for coming, and the reason was kindness. He came to settle tired children into sleep, and he carried the means to do it in a small sack, the way a farmer carries seed.

For most of his existence he had no fixed shape at all. Folklore never pinned down his height or his coat or the look of his face, because it never needed to. The sand was the point, not the man behind it. He was a soft footstep on the landing, a coolness at the back of the neck, a heaviness settling over the eyelids that could not be argued with. Then two writers, working a generation apart, each gave him a body, and the two bodies could not have been less alike.

In 1816 the German writer E.T.A. Hoffmann took the nursery comfort and turned it inside out. In his story Der Sandmann a child’s nurse explains the visitor in the worst possible terms. He throws sand into the eyes of children who refuse to sleep, she says, until the eyes swell and fall bleeding from their heads, and he scoops them into a sack and carries them up to a nest on the moon, where his own hook-beaked children are waiting to feed. The boy who hears this never recovers from it. He fastens the terror onto a real and sinister man of his father’s acquaintance, and the confusion between the bedtime bogey and the flesh-and-blood stranger eventually destroys him. Hoffmann understood that the gentlest figures make the best monsters, because the betrayal cuts deeper.

Twenty-five years later Hans Christian Andersen answered with the opposite. His Sandman is called Ole Lukøje, which is only Danish for Ole Shut-Eye, and he is entirely tender. He comes up the stairs in his socks so as not to wake anyone, throws a little very fine dust into the children’s eyes just enough to keep them from staying open, and blows softly on the backs of their necks until their heads begin to nod. His coat is silk of no describable color, sliding from green to red to blue as he turns. Under each arm he carries an umbrella. Over the good children he opens the one painted on the inside with pictures, and they dream beautiful stories all night long. Over the naughty ones he opens the plain umbrella, and they sleep like stones and wake having dreamed nothing at all. For a week he visits a boy named Hjalmar and tells him a different tale each night, and on the last night he speaks almost fondly of his brother, who bears the same name and knows only one story. That brother is Death, who takes people up onto his horse and tells them that single tale as they ride. It is the quietest possible way to say that sleep and dying are neighbors.

Under his other names he keeps the same work. In Norway and Sweden he is Jon Blund, from a word that means both to shut the eyes and to fall asleep. In the Netherlands, in Flanders, and in parts of southern Africa he is Klaas Vaak. In Romania a similar elder called Moș Ene comes for drowsy children, and the French speak of the marchand de sable, the sand merchant, passing at the end of the day. Since 1959 an East German stop-motion Sandmännchen has closed out children’s television every evening, a little bearded man who arrives, scatters his sand, and leaves. The figure survives translation because the thing he explains never changes.

His power is small and absolute. He carries sleep in a handful of sand and spends it a few grains at a time, and no one he visits can hold out against it. He does not only close the eyes but furnishes what happens behind them, choosing which child gets the painted umbrella and which the blank one, so that he governs not just sleep but the quality of a night’s dreaming. The sand, at least, is real. Everyone wakes with a little of it.

His limits are the limits of a bedtime. He works only after dark and only on the already drowsy, and a genuinely wakeful child can keep him at bay simply by refusing to shut its eyes, which is exactly why weary parents call his name in the first place. He has no myth cycle of his own, no birth, no death, no war to fight. He is a household spirit the size of a single recurring moment, and when Hoffmann tried to make him larger and crueler the folk figure did not follow him there. The nursery kept its gentle version, sack of sand and stocking feet, and let the horror belong to literature.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the Sandman?

The Sandman is a folkloric sleep spirit from Germanic and Scandinavian tradition who visits children at nightfall and sprinkles fine magical sand into their eyes to make them sleep and dream. He began as a German figure of speech, der Sandmann kommt, used of a child growing drowsy, and gradually developed into an imagined person. He is usually benevolent, a nursery figure invoked by parents at bedtime.

What does the Sandman put in your eyes?

The Sandman sprinkles a pinch of fine sand or dust into sleeping children’s eyes to bring on sleep and dreams. The tradition explains the grit found crusted in the corners of the eyes on waking as the leftover residue of his nightly work. In the gentler versions he also decides what the child will dream.

Is the Sandman good or evil?

In traditional folklore the Sandman is kind, a helper who settles tired children into peaceful sleep. The evil version comes almost entirely from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s 1816 story Der Sandmann, in which he tears out the eyes of children who will not sleep and feeds them to his own young on the moon. Hans Christian Andersen’s 1841 tale restored the tender figure as Ole Lukøje, a silk-coated dream-giver.

What is Ole Lukøje?

Ole Lukøje is the Scandinavian name for the Sandman, meaning “Ole Shut-Eye” in Danish, made famous by Hans Christian Andersen’s 1841 story. In the tale he creeps upstairs in his socks, blows children gently to sleep, and carries two umbrellas: a picture-painted one that gives good children beautiful dreams, and a plain one that gives naughty children a blank, dreamless night. Andersen also names a grimmer brother who shares the name and is revealed to be Death.

What are the Sandman’s other names?

The same sleep spirit appears across Europe under many names: der Sandmann in Germany, Ole Lukøje in Denmark, Jon Blund in Norway and Sweden, and Klaas Vaak in the Netherlands, Flanders, and parts of southern Africa. The Romanian Moș Ene and the French marchand de sable fill a similar role. All of them come at nightfall to bring sleep to children.

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