The Little Mermaid on Copenhagen’s Langelinie promenade is barely over four feet tall and weighs around 385 pounds, yet this quiet bronze has been decapitated twice, lost an arm, been blown off her rock with explosives, and served as a billboard for causes from Faroe Islands whaling to Hong Kong to the war in Ukraine. This episode traces her origins in 1909, when Carlsberg heir Carl Jacobsen saw a ballet of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale and commissioned sculptor Edvard Eriksen, and debunks the myth that ballerina Ellen Price’s face sits on the body of the sculptor’s wife.

We then follow the violence: the 1964 decapitation by Situationist artists whose stolen head was never recovered, the 1998 head that turned up at a television station, and the 2003 bombing. Meanwhile, the Eriksen heirs police the statue’s copyright, valid until January 1, 2030, with lawsuits against a small Michigan town, a Danish village whose mermaid they wanted destroyed, and a newspaper cartoon that reached the Danish Supreme Court.

• Why her human scale and lack of a pedestal make her both beloved and defenseless
• The 2010 trip to the Shanghai Expo and the copy stranded in a Tivoli Gardens lake
• Red paint for whales, Free Abdul, racist fish, and the burka and football jerseys she has been dressed in
• Why activists target an innocent fairy tale figure: hijacking a built-in global audience
• The 13 authorized replicas, Vancouver’s Girl in a Wetsuit workaround, and what may happen when the copyright expires