This article proposes a comparative reading of the glacial imagery in Hans Christian Andersen’s tale The Ice Maiden (1862) and Caspar David Friedrich’s painting The Sea of Ice (1823). In both, ice is given a sublime quality as an image of measures and processes in nature far beyond the human scale. Friedrich depicts an icy nature destructive to human life and captures mighty forces of break-down and upheaval in his painted ice floes. Andersen’s personification of the ice is a sublime, feminine creature associated with the death drive. Without wanting to dismiss the dimension of transcendence in Andersen’s and Friedrich’s works, the article focuses on their materialist dimension, not least their textual/textural materiality. It is argued that both works do not only represent ice, but are also inspired by glacial and geological form principles. The article concludes that by their glacial imagery, both Andersen and Friedrich give us non-vitalist images of matter.