Tales

Overview

Hans Christian Andersen published 156 tales in Danish between 1835 and 1872, most of them written in small pamphlets sold cheaply and aimed, at least initially, at children, though his readership quickly expanded to adults who recognized something in his voice that folklore collections did not usually offer. Editions vary enormously in selection; the Harvard Classics volume, one common reference point, includes about twenty of the most famous, and this entry covers Andersen’s fairy tale corpus as generally assigned.

What distinguishes Andersen from the two great folklore collectors who preceded him closely in time, the Brothers Grimm in Germany, is that most of Andersen’s stories are original inventions rather than transcriptions of existing oral tradition. Some, like The Princess and the Pea and The Tinderbox, do draw on folk material he reshaped; but many of the most famous, The Little Mermaid, The Little Match Girl, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Snow Queen, The Nightingale, were composed by Andersen himself, which makes him one of the first major writers of literary fairy tales as opposed to a collector and editor of traditional ones.

Andersen’s life shaped the tales unmistakably. Born in 1805 in Odense to a poor shoemaker and an illiterate washerwoman, he was awkward, unusually tall and thin, possessed an extraordinary singing voice as a boy that briefly won him patronage, and spent much of his life feeling like an outsider even after he achieved enormous literary fame and moved in the highest social and intellectual circles of Europe, friends with royalty, Dickens and Heine among his acquaintances. That combination, genuine acceptance at the top alongside a persistent, never fully resolved sense of not belonging, runs through the tales far more consistently than through most fairy tale collections.

What happens

The Little Mermaid. A mermaid princess, youngest of six sisters, longs for a human soul and for the world above the sea, and falls in love with a prince she saves from drowning. A sea witch grants her human legs in exchange for her tongue, on the condition that every step will feel like walking on knives, and that if the prince marries another, the mermaid will dissolve into sea foam the following dawn. The prince, unaware she is the one who saved him, marries a princess he mistakes for his rescuer. The mermaid’s sisters offer her a knife: kill the prince before dawn and her mermaid form will be restored. She cannot bring herself to do it, and throws herself into the sea instead, where she dissolves into foam but is granted a chance, over three hundred years of good deeds, to earn an immortal soul after all. Andersen’s original ending is considerably less triumphant than most adaptations suggest; the story is fundamentally one of loss and self-sacrifice rather than romantic victory.

The Emperor’s New Clothes. Two swindlers convince a vain emperor that they can weave cloth so fine, and with the special property that it is invisible to anyone unfit for their position or stupid, that nobody in the court will admit to seeing nothing at all, for fear of confirming their own unfitness. The emperor parades through the streets in the nonexistent garment, and the entire crowd praises it until a child, having no stake in appearing fit for office, simply says what he sees: that the emperor has nothing on at all. The adults, once the truth is spoken aloud, admit it too, though the emperor continues the procession anyway, unwilling to break stride.

The Ugly Duckling. A duckling hatched among ordinary ducklings looks wrong from birth, larger, grayer, awkward, and is mocked and attacked by the other birds and the farmyard animals throughout a hard winter of wandering and rejection. In spring, preparing to let a group of beautiful swans kill him rather than endure more scorn, he sees his own reflection and discovers he has become, or always was, a swan himself, simply hatched among the wrong species.

The Princess and the Pea. A prince seeking a genuine princess to marry tests a bedraggled young woman who claims royal birth by having her sleep on a stack of twenty mattresses and twenty featherbeds with a single pea placed beneath the bottom mattress. She reports a terrible night’s sleep, bruised all over, proving through her extraordinary sensitivity that she is, indeed, a true princess.

The Snow Queen. A long, seven-part tale. A troll’s mirror, which distorts everything good and beautiful and magnifies everything ugly, shatters, and splinters lodge in a boy named Kai’s eye and heart, turning him cold and cruel. The Snow Queen carries him away to her palace of ice. His friend Gerda undertakes an arduous journey through enchanted gardens, robber camps and Lapland cold to find him, and her tears, falling on his frozen heart when she finally reaches him, melt the splinter and restore his warmth and his old self.

The Little Match Girl. A poor barefoot girl, sent out on a freezing New Year’s Eve to sell matches and afraid to go home empty-handed, lights the matches one by one to warm herself, and in their brief flames sees visions: a warm stove, a roast goose, a Christmas tree, and finally her dead grandmother, the only person who was ever kind to her. She lights her whole remaining bundle at once to keep the vision of her grandmother from vanishing, and the two of them, in the vision, fly up together. She is found frozen to death the next morning, a faint smile on her face, and the passersby, not knowing what warmth she had seen, only remark on how she must have tried to keep warm.

The Steadfast Tin Soldier. A one-legged toy soldier, made from the last scrap of tin and therefore incomplete, falls in love from across a room with a paper ballerina on a toy stage, and endures a journey through gutters, a fish’s belly and a house fire, all with wordless, unwavering steadfastness, before ending up, along with the ballerina who has blown into the same fire, melted together in the grate, his tin heart become a small tin heart-shaped lump.

The Nightingale. An emperor of China learns that the most beautiful sound in his kingdom belongs not to any treasure but to a plain, gray nightingale in the forest, and has it brought to court, where it delights everyone until a jeweled mechanical nightingale, a gift from the Japanese emperor, arrives and is preferred for its perfect reliability and dazzling appearance. The real nightingale, unappreciated, flies back to the forest. Years later, when the emperor is dying and the mechanical bird, worn out and never designed for endless use, cannot sing for him, the real nightingale returns unbidden and sings so movingly that death itself is persuaded to leave, restoring the emperor to health.

How to read it

Read a modern translation from the Danish rather than an old Victorian one. Andersen’s original prose is plain, colloquial and often wry, closer to spoken storytelling than to formal literary language, and many older English translations, working from earlier German versions rather than the Danish, smoothed that voice into something more conventionally poetic and lost the irony along with it.

Do not expect uniformly happy endings, and notice how often the endings that are happy are happy in a complicated or costly way. The mermaid gets a chance at a soul only after losing everything else; the ugly duckling’s transformation does not undo the cruelty he suffered; the tin soldier and the ballerina end united only in the fire that destroys them both.

Read The Little Match Girl and The Emperor’s New Clothes together, since between them they show the two poles of Andersen’s social vision: unbearable, unremarked poverty on one side, and the willful collective blindness of the powerful and those who flatter them on the other.

Watch for objects that come alive and struggle to be seen accurately: a tin soldier missing a leg, a plain gray bird outshone by a glittering mechanical copy, a shadow that detaches from its owner in one of Andersen’s stranger and darker tales. The theme of authentic but unglamorous worth losing out to superficial appeal, and sometimes eventually being vindicated, recurs constantly.

Read a biography or a substantial introduction alongside the tales if you can. Andersen’s own outsider status, his poverty, his physical awkwardness, his unrequited loves, his uneasy position among aristocratic patrons who befriended him without ever quite treating him as an equal, is not incidental background; it is worked directly and repeatedly into the material of the stories themselves.

Questions it raises

• Why does Andersen withhold the conventional happy ending so often, and what does the genre gain or lose when he does?
• The Little Mermaid gives up her voice, her home and eventually her life for a love that is never returned. Is the story a tragedy, a story of noble sacrifice, or both at once?
• What does the child’s plain honesty in The Emperor’s New Clothes suggest about who is capable of seeing the truth in a society organized around flattery and status?
• Several tales feature outsiders, the ugly duckling, the one-legged soldier, the plain nightingale, eventually vindicated. Does that vindication redeem the suffering that came before it?
• The Little Match Girl offers no rescue, only a death softened by a final vision. What is the story asking its reader, especially a child reader, to do with that ending?
• How much of the bleakness and irony in these tales comes from Andersen’s own life, and does knowing his biography change how the stories should be read?