THE RAGS (LASERNE, 1869)
Andersen wrote this tale, composed some eight or ten years before its publication in Folkekalender, as a satire on young Norwegian writers who were criticizing better-established Danish writers. It was originally based on his observations at a paper factory, where he saw large piles of rags that were eventually made into paper. As Norwegian writers gained a higher profile, Andersen thought that the satire no longer held true. Nevertheless, the comic situation retained its appeal. Andersen had earlier used the contrast between Norwegians and Danes in “The Hill of the Elves.”
LEGENDS
HOLGER THE DANE (HOLGER DANSKE, 1845)
This tale, based on a piece of Danish folklore about a legendary king who will rise to save Denmark, is similar to the German legend of the twelfth-century German king and Holy Roman Empire Fredrick Barbarossa, who is said to be buried in Kyffhauser Mountain and will return one day to bring glory to Germany. Andersen based the old man in this tale on his grandfather and on the father of Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, who were both wood carvers. During the nineteenth century there were numerous adaptations of Christian Pedersen’s adaptation of a French medieval romance, Ogier le Danois, which was related to the legend. While Andersen knew the legend from his school days, a new edition of Pedersen’s work was published in 1842. Andersen also would have known Just Mathias Thiele’s poem about Holger the Dane (1830).
BIRD PHOENIX (FUGL PHØNIX, 1850)
This symbolical tale about the rise of poetry was first published in Den Nye Børneven, an illustrated magazine for children. Beginning in the medieval period, in European literature the phoenix was a common figure representing resurrection and immortality. The origin of the myth is considered to be Oriental and Egyptian. The Egyptians believed that the bird lived about 500 years and toward the end of its life built a nest of spice branches and set it on fire, dying in the flames. From the ashes, a new phoenix would arise and fly to the city of the sun.
THE FAMILY OF HEN-GRETHE (HØNSE-GRETHES FAMILIE, 1869)
This tale was first published in English in The Riverside Magazine for Young People. Andersen based the story on a newspaper article about Marie Grubbe, a young aristocrat, who had been married three times, first to the half-brother of Christian V, Ulrich Frederick Gyldenløve, then to a nobleman from Jutland, and later to a seaman. Andersen uses the history of a castle as his frame for telling a fascinating legend about Marie Grubbe; he transforms her into a proud and willful woman, and has the famous Danish writer Ludvig Holberg meet her while he was escaping a plague that had spread to Copenhagen.
EVERYTHING IN ITS PROPER PLACE (ALT PAA SIN RETTE, 1853)
This inventive tale by Andersen demonstrates his ability to create his own “original” legends. Inspired by the poet Just Mathias Thiele, it is a satirical representation of class conflict in Denmark. A common motif in European folklore, the magical flute is generally used to expose lies and hypocrisy.
Inspired by Andersen’s
Fairy Tales
LITERATURE
Hans Christian Andersen is a unique figure in the history of the fairy tale. As a young boy, he was influenced by the wondrous tales of the Brothers Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and other German Romantic writers, as well as by Danish folklore, and his tales cannot be fully appreciated without understanding his interest in these works. But Andersen went his own way: He was the first European writer to appeal both to children and to adults with stunning and provocative tales. Indeed, he developed an inimitable style and tone that transformed fairy tales into passionate and ironic stories that recorded the bitter struggles of artists and marginalized people to discover a modicum of joy in their lives. Throughout his life Andersen experimented with idiomatic language and popular art forms, endowing the fairy tale with novel motifs and characters that anticipated modernism. Andersen was always on a quest for something new. He traveled widely in Europe and based his tales on his personal experiences and encounters with the leading European artists of his time.
In his extensive travels Andersen made the acquaintance of many eminent writers, including Ludwig Tieck, Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, the Brothers Grimm, Honoré de Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Henry James, Heinrich Heine, and Charles Dickens (to whom Andersen dedicated A Poet’s Day Dreams, 1853). Andersen was also a close friend of poets Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Once, when visiting the Brownings in Rome, he read aloud “The Ugly Duckling” as Robert Browning clownishly acted it out for a group of children. Elizabeth Browning dedicated her final poem— “North and South”—to Andersen; in it “North” refers to Andersen’s native Denmark, while the city of Rome, a popular vacation spot, is the “South.” The poem’s final stanza reads:The North sent therefore a man of men
As a grace to the South;
And thus to Rome came Andersen.
—“Alas, but must you take him again?”
Said the South to the North.
Andersen influenced and was influenced by numerous writers during his lifetime, but it was after his death that his works became significant referential points for many European and American writers of fairy tales, short stories, and novels. In England, the fairy tales of Oscar Wilde and Andrew Lang were marked by Andersen. At the beginning of the twentieth century Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann noted that they were influenced by Andersen’s tales when they were young. Indeed, throughout the twentieth century, writers of fairy tales around the world, along with illustrators, demonstrated time and again in their works that the fairy tale as a genre had to reckon with Andersen’s presence.
FILM
Between the 1930s and the 1950s the Walt Disney Company distinguished itself as the most enterprising animation studio and produced a string of critically acclaimed feature-length cartoons, including Snow White (1937) and Bambi (1942). But as the cost of producing animation rose, Disney’s commitment to major animation efforts waned, and after releasing Sleeping Beauty (1959), the company failed to produce a remarkable animated picture for nearly thirty years. In 1989 The Little Mermaid, based on Andersen’s fairy tale, put Disney back on the map. Written and directed by John Musker and Ron Clements, The Little Mermaid showcases bright, fluid animation in a palette based on the sea—coral colors like fuchsia and butter yellow alongside shades of aquamarine. The film is buoyed by the witty songwriting of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken (Little Shop of Horrors).
What makes The Little Mermaid a classic equal to the movies of Disney’s golden age is the clever, rebellious, and winsome character Ariel. The crux of the story is Ariel’s defiance of her father, King Triton, ruler of the sea, who forbids her from venturing above water into the human realm. But when she falls in love with a handsome prince and swaps her trademark voice (supplied by Jodi Benson) for a pair of human legs with the help of Ursula, a cunning sea-witch octopus, Ariel must rely on her friends Flounder and Sebastian, a calypso crab. Together the three wend their way toward romantic happiness and a state of harmony among creatures of the land and sea—in a departure from Andersen’s original, in which the main character is transmuted into sea-foam.
The trend of using computer-generated imagery to supplement animation began, albeit to a limited degree, with The Little Mermaid. The Oscar category Best Animated Picture was not instituted until the 2001 Academy Awards, well into the age of CGI animation. Nonetheless, The Little Mermaid held its own at the 1990 Oscars. Menken and Ashman were nominated for their song “Kiss the Girl,” which was beat out by another, even catchier number from the film: Sebastian’s “Under the Sea.” Alan Menken earned an award for his score.
After regaining its status as an animator with a spate of releases during the 1990s, Disney again turned to Andersen as source material for The Emperor’s New Groove (2000). Written by David Reynolds and directed by Mark Dindal, the film takes Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as a loose premise and plays upon it most creatively. The result is a fun-filled romp, with the Peruvian emperor Kuzco, played with sarcastic relish
by David Spade, changed into a Ilama by his embittered adviser Yzma (Eartha Kitt). The Emperor’s New Groove is an episodic journey filled with gags and spectacle, plus musical offerings such as the occasional buddy song sung by Kuzco and John Goodman’s Pacha (a peasant whom Kuzco had earlier threatened to banish) and Tom Jones’s crooning contribution, “Perfect World.” The Emperor’s New Groove earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Song, for “My Funny Friend and Me,” composed by Sting and David Hartley, and performed by Sting.
Disney is not the only film studio to have produced remarkable films based on Andersen’s fairy tales. Paul Grimault and Jacques Prévert produced one of the finest animation films, Le Roi et l’Osieau (The King and the Bird, 1979), based on “The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep.” In addition, film studios in Russia, the United Kingdom, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Germany, and Canada have produced more than thirty films based on such popular tales as “The Princess on the Pea,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” and “The Little Mermaid.”
Music
It is fitting that many composers have paid tribute to Andersen with their music, as his remarkable singing voice inspired the childhood nickname “Nightingale” and he later became an accomplished librettist. He counted among his friends composers Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, Franz Liszt, and many others.
Charting Andersen’s influence in Scandinavia alone, Danish author Gustav Hetsch, in H. C. Andersen and Music (1930), listed twenty-nine Nordic composers who had set music to Andersen’s tales and poems or who had written music inspired by Andersen’s life. Christoph Weyse, a Danish composer who was known mainly for his sacred music and songs, and in 1819 was appointed court composer, became Andersen’s first benefactor. Along with Danish poet and dramatist Adam Oehlenschläger, Andersen wrote five cantatas (singspiels) and one light opera for Weyse. And Andersen wrote operatic libretti to two works by Sir Walter Scott, both produced in 1832: Weyse’s Kenilworth and I. Bredal’s The Bride of Lammermoor. Andersen’s close friend Schumann based his “Five Songs” (1840) on five pieces from Andersen’s oeuvre of more than a thousand poems. For another collaborator, J. P. E. Hartmann, Andersen wrote the libretto to Little Kirsten (1846), which remains one of the most popular Danish operas.
By this time, Andersen was seen as a literary giant and a national hero. At the relatively young age of forty-five, he completed an epic homage to his homeland, In Denmark I Was Born, that was rendered into music by Henrik Rung (1850); in 1926 Poul Schierbeck premiered his own version, which pays tribute to Andersen and Rung. In 1865 Andersen met Norway’s preeminent composer, Edvard Grieg, in Copenhagen. Their resulting friendship led to Grieg’s collection “The Heart’s Melodies,” which features songs inspired by Andersen, including two for piano and soprano: the teasing, playful “Two Brown Eyes” and “I Love You,” which sounds like a cross between a jazz ballad and a Danish show tune.
After Andersen’s death, musical compositions inspired by his writings multiplied and today show no sign of abating. A list of these, by no means comprehensive, includes Johan Bartoldy’s operetta The Swineherd (1886); Igor Stravinsky’s brief opera The Nightingale (1914); Finn Høffding’s It’s Perfectly True (1943); Frank Loesser’s musical film Hans Christian Andersen (1952); the symphonic works The Most Incredible Thing (1997), by Sven Erik Werner, and The Woman with the Eggs (1998), by the Danish composer known only as Fuzzy; and Svend Hvidtfelt Nielsen’s chamber opera The Little Mermaid (1999-2000).
Comments
Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the texts, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the works, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the works’ history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of these enduring works.
COMMENTS
Søren Kierkegaard [H. C. Andersen] cannot separate the poetic from himself, because, so to speak, he cannot get rid of it, but as soon as a poetic mood has acquired freedom to act, this is immediately overwhelmed, with or without his will, by the prosaic—precisely therefore it is impossible to obtain a total impression.... Andersen totally lacks a life-view.
—as translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, from From the Papers of One Still Living: Published Against His Will (1838)
Charles Dickens
Whatever you do, do not stop writing, because we cannot bear to lose a single one of your thoughts. They are too true and simply beautiful to be kept safe only in your own head.
—from an undated letter (most likely 1847)
L. Frank Baum
The winged fairies of Grimm and Andersen have brought more happiness to childish hearts than all other human creations.
—from his introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900)
Hilaire Belloc
What a great thing it is in this perplexed, confused, and, if not unhappy at least unrestful time, to come across a thing which is cleanly itself! What a pleasure it is amid our entwining controversies to find straightness, and among our confused noises a chord. Hans Christian Andersen is a good type of that simplicity; and his own generation recognised him at once; now, when those contemporaries who knew him best are for the most part dead, their recognition is justified. Of men for whom so much and more is said by their contemporaries, how many can stand the test which his good work now stands, and stands with a sort of sober triumph? Contemporary praise has a way of gathering dross. We all know why. There is the fear of this, the respect for that; there is the genuine unconscious attachment to a hundred unworthy and ephemeral things; there is the chance philosophy of the moment overweighing the praise-giver. In a word, perhaps not half a dozen of the great men who wrote in the generation before our own would properly stand this test of a neat and unfringed tradition....
Andersen could not only tell the truth but tell it in twenty different ways, and of a hundred different things. Now this character has been much exaggerated among literary men in importance, because literary men, perceiving it to be the differentiation which marks out the great writer from the little, think it to be the main criterion of letters. It is not the main criterion; but it is a permanent necessity in great writing. There is no great writing without this multiplicity, which is sometimes called imagination, sometimes experience, and sometimes judgment, but which is in its essence a proper survey of the innumerable world. This quality it is which makes the great writers create what are called “characters”; and whether we recognise those “characters” as portraits drawn from the real world (they are such in Balzac), or as figments (they are such in Dickens), or as heroines and heroes (they are such in Shakespeare and in Homer, if you will excuse me), yet that they exist and live in the pages of the writer means that he had in him that quality of contemplation which corresponds in our limited human nature to the creative power.
—from On Anything (1910)
William Dean Howells
Never has a beautiful talent needed an introduction less than Hans Christian Andersen from the sort of glibness which is asked to officiate in that way at lectures and public meetings and in the forefront of books. Every one knows who this gentle Dane was, and almost every one knows what he did.... I suppose there never were stories with so little harm in them, so much good. Each of them has a moral, but so neatly tucked away that it does not stick out at the end as morals usually do, particularly in stories meant for children, but [it] is mostly imparted with the sort of gay wisdom which a friendly grown-up uses with the children when they do not know whether he is funning or not. The great beauty of them is the homely tenderness which they are full of, the kind of hospitality which welcomes all sorts and conditions of children to the same intimacy. They are of a simplicity always so refined t
hat there is no touch of coarseness in them; with their perfect naturalness they are of a delicate artistry which will take the young children unaware of its perfection, and will only steal into their consciousness perhaps when they are very old children. Some may never live to feel the art, but they will feel the naturalness at once.
How wholesome, how good, how true, how lovely! That is what I think, when I think of any of Andersen’s stories, but perhaps I think it most when I read “The Ugly Ducking,” which is the allegory of his own life, finding its way to fame and honor through many kinds of difficulty and discouragement from others and from the consequences of his own defects and foibles. Nobody could have written those benignant fables, those loving parables, who had not suffered from impatience and misunderstanding such as Andersen exaggerates in his autobiography and travesties in that story; and his rise to good will above the snubs and hurts which he somewhat too plaintively records is as touching a thing as I know in literary history. His sole revenge takes in that sweet satire, and it is no great excess after owning himself an ugly duckling if he comes at last to see himself a swan. He was indeed a swan as compared with most ducklings that grow up to ordinary proportions of ducks from their humble origin, but I do not care if in his own nature and evolution he did not always get beyond a goose. There are many ducklings who do not get as far as being geese, and I mean what I say for high praise of our poet. Swans are magnificent birds, and as long as they keep in the water or the sky they are superbly graceful, with necks that curve beyond anything, but they are of no more use in the world than eagles; they have very bad tempers, and they bite abominably, and strike with their wings with force to break a man’s bones, so that I would have ugly ducklings mostly stop short of becoming swans.
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