1835-1837: Fairy Tales Told for Children
Two hundred and twenty-one years ago, in a city called Odense, on the island of Funen, in a kingdom named Danmark, there was born a child who was to grow up into a very remarkable man: he wrote fairy stories.
The boy's father's name was Hans Andersen, and on 15th April 1805, the boy was christened Hans Christian Andersen.
He was gay. He was shy. He wasn't good-looking. He wanted to be a novelist. He wrote in Danish, a language which at the time of his birth had less than two million speakers (and today has only about six million).
But you know him.
The book of nine fairy stories that made him famous across the world - from New York to St Petersburg, and translated all across Europe - was criticised by adult reviewers after the first two installments came out: the stories didn't educate children, they weren't moral stories, they were chatty and informal and altogether inappropriate for their target market.
Children read them anyway. So did their parents.
The first installment, published 8th May 1835, told four stories:
"The Tinderbox" is about a soldier who murders a witch and steals her magic tinderbox. The tinderbox brings him huge demon-dogs who obey his every command: so he uses the dogs to kidnap a princess, and then, when the king of the country orders him executed for his crimes, the soldier summons the demon-dogs, they kill the king and his court, the people declare the soldier shall be king, and he marries the princess.
"Little Claus and Big Claus" is about a wealthy man and a poor man, who live in the same village and are both named Claus. The story begins when the rich man kills the poor man's horse: and ends with the rich man is drowned in a sack at the bottom of the river, and the poor man has become rich by his own quick-wittedness and dishonesty, while the rich man is destroyed by his greed and gullibility.
"The Princess and the Pea" You all know how this ends:
Nobody but a real princess could be as sensitive as that. So the prince took her for his wife, for now he knew that he had a real princess; and the pea was put in the museum, where it may still be seen, if no one has stolen it. There, that is a true story.
The fourth story is a tale Hans Christian Andersen wrote for Ida, the five-year-old daughter of his benefactor Just Mathias Thiele (1795 – 1874), Danish scholar and librarian and publisher of Danish folklore.
"Little Ida's Flowers" is a story about a little girl who wonders why her flowers are dying, and is told a story about how flowers die because they dance all night at a ball. That night she dreams of her doll Sophy dancing with her flowers, and in the morning her flowers are dead, so she buries them in a little cardboard box in the garden, and her cousins shoot their crossbows over the grave.
On 16th December 1835, the second installment was published with three stories:
"The Naughty Boy", which describes Anacreon as "an old poet, a thoroughly kind old poet" and retells his poem about Eros,
The naughty boy, to shoot the old poet in that way; he who had taken him into his warm room, who had treated him so kindly, and who had given him warm wine and the very best apples!
At the play, he sits in the great chandelier and burns in bright flames, so that people think it is really a flame, but they soon discover it is something else. He roves about in the garden of the palace and upon the ramparts: yes, once he even shot your father and mother right in the heart. Ask them only and you will hear what they'll tell you.
This is not Tanglewood Tales.
He is forever running after everybody. Only think, he shot an arrow once at your old grandmother! But that is a long time ago, and it is all past now; however, a thing of that sort she never forgets.
"The Traveling Companion" is, in a way, a ghost story. Andersen wrote an early version of it in 1830. It's a story that is almost the reversal of the Tinderbox story that ends up in the same place: the narrator steals nothing, harms no one, goes through life in a state of joy about how beautiful the world is, and ends up making a witch who is also a princess fall in love with him and marry him.
The last story is "Thumbelina" or "Little Tiny":
There was once a woman who wished very much to have a little child, but she could not obtain her wish. At last she went to a fairy, and said, "I should so very much like to have a little child; can you tell me where I can find one?"
And she got a little child; "She was scarcely half as long as a thumb, and they gave her the name of "Thumbelina," or Tiny, because she was so small." - "A walnut-shell, elegantly polished, served her for a cradle; her bed was formed of blue violet-leaves, with a rose-leaf for a counterpane." It's such a cute story about a pretty little girl who's very, very tiny!
And then the story goes forward with a girl too small to escape, kidnapped and threatened with forced marriage - twice - and escaping to live with people her own size in a better country.
The last installment of the nine stories was published on 7th April 1837:
"The Little Mermaid"
You know the story. Disney took it and flattened out all of the hopelessness and death, but the story that caught children by the imagination is a story of a mermaid who traded her voice to walk on land for love of a handsome prince who loved someone else: a mermaid who became a woman whose every step on dry land cut her feet like knives.
There is a statue of the Little Mermaid in the harbour of Copenhagen - a statue of a girl who has legs, who is sitting on a rock staring at the sea to which she cannot return. Land hurts her, sea drowns her, she gave up her life under the sea for love and she will die voiceless because he loves someone else.
And the last story of the nine: "The Emperor's New Clothes".
Andersen retold a medieval Spanish fable about swindlers who sold the Emperor the idea they could make him a suit of a cloth which
possessed the wonderful quality of being invisible to any man who was unfit for his office or unpardonably stupid.
Thus, none of the Emperor's court will admit to not being able to see the cloth as the swindlers pretend to make the suit, and when the Emperor thinks his entire court can see the material he pretends to be able to see it too, and so - the whole city having heard the story - when the Emperor walks in procession wearing this new suit of nothing, the whole city is silent, each adult thinking they had better not admit they see nothing.
Until a child calls out into the silence - and this was Andersen's crucial addition to the fable he retold - "But he has nothing on at all."
You can read these nine stories - and all of the other fairy-stories Hans Christian Andersen wrote, having found his metier - on Gutenberg.
Fairy stories. Told to children. Hans Christian Andersen. Mythmaker.
