THE WILL-O’-THE-WISPS ARE IN TOWN (LYGTEMAENDENE EER I BYEN, SAGDE MOSEKONEN, 1865)
For this story, written a year after Denmark had fought a bitter war with Prussia and lost the region of Schleswig-Holstein, Andersen had to overcome a writer’s block. The tale reflects his dark mood during this period in his life. The search for the fairy tale parallels his own search for a means to overcome his depression. Ultimately, the story ends on an optimistic note, evidence of the power of the fairy tale to provide hope.
THE PIXIE AND THE GARDENER’S WIFE (NISSEN OG MADAMEN, 1868)
This tale, first published in Folkekalender forDanmark, was based on a Danish folk tale about a pixie that teases a chained dog. Andersen transformed this tale into a more significant commentary on the pretentiousness of minor writers, flattery, and the fickleness of audiences.
THE PUPPETEER (MARIONETSPILLEREN, 1851)
Andersen published a version of this tale in his travel book In Sweden (1851). The tale reflects his concerns about controlling characters in his plays or stories. What happens to the theater manager when his puppets come to life is a dilemma for the writer or author, who must know how to handle his characters. E. T. A. Hoffmann’s tale “Seltsame Leiden eines Theater-Direktors” (“Strange Sufferings of a Theater Director,” 1819), which deals with the difficulties of a director, may have influenced Andersen in his writing of this tale.
“SOMETHING” (NOGET, 1858)
Andersen stated that this legendary tale was based on a real incident in Schleswig, where an old woman burned her house to warn people out on nearby ice that a spring flood was coming. He also employed motifs from the folk tradition in which five brothers are sent out into the world to acquire skills that bring them fortune. A major element of this tale is Andersen’s parody of critics. In particular, Andersen drew a caricature of Danish critic Christian Molbech, who often attacked Andersen’s plays and writings. Molbech died in 1857.
WHAT ONE CAN THINK UP (HVAD MAN KAN HITTE PAA, 1869)
Originally published in English as “What One Can Invent” in The Riverside Magazine for Young People, the tale was published several months later in the book Tre Nye Eventyr og Historier (Three New Fairy Tales and Stories). Andersen detested any sort of criticism of his works, and in this tale he gets his revenge by depicting critics as writers who lack imagination. At the same time, he also voiced his optimism about the progress of technology.
THE MOST INCREDIBLE THING (DET UTROLIGSTE, 1870)
This story first appeared in English in The Riverside Magazine for Young People under the title “The Most Extraordinary Thing” and was published in Danish the same year in Nyt Dansk Maanedsskrift (New Danish Monthly Magazine). Although Andersen was not political, he was disturbed by the looming threat of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), just as he had been upset by earlier wars between Denmark and Prussia. Since he admired Prussia but regarded himself as a loyal Danish patriot, despite his feelings of alienation it was difficult for him to accept the Prussian aggression. Although the tale was written before the eruption of the war, there are clear references to the dispute. But the tale is more than a political commentary. It is a manifesto about the power of art and poetry, which will always triumph over brutality and violence. For Andersen, especially in his old age, it was important to proclaim the integrity and immortality of art.
AUNTIE TOOTHACHE (TANTE TANDPINE, 1872)
Though Andersen had begun this story in June 1870, he did not finish it until July 1872, and it is generally considered to be among the last tales he wrote. It is thus perhaps no surprise that it is a cynical commentary on the role of writing. Andersen wondered toward the end of his life whether all the pains he took to write would be worth the effort, and he worried about his stature as a writer. It seemed to him that his works might end up in a waste barrel. Some scholars consider the character Aunt Mille to be based on Andersen’s friend Henriette Wulff, who greatly admired his works.
THE CRIPPLE (KRØBLINGEN, 1872)
Written between July 12 and July 18, this tale, along with “The Story Old Johanna Told,” was dedicated to the Melchior family in gratitude for the care and hospitality they had given the author. He was inspired to write this tale, which reflects Andersen’s belief in the healing power of fairy tales, after thinking about the old tale “The Woodchopper and His Wife.” When he sent it to Horace Scudder, the American editor of his works, in New York, it had the title “The Fairy Tale Book.” The plot is based on an anecdote that J. T. Kragh told Andersen: A poor couple had a mentally handicapped son who told them a story about a king who could regain his health only if he found the shirt of the happiest man on earth.
FOLK TALES
THE TINDERBOX (FYRTØJET, 1835)
“The Tinderbox” has deep roots in the Oriental and European oral traditions. There are clear similarities to the medieval Arabic tale “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,” which was part of the Antoine Galland’s French collection of The Thousand and One Nights, translated into Danish in 1757 and 1758. Andersen is said to have heard this story as a child. In addition, the Brothers Grimm published “The Blue Light” (1812) in the first edition of their Children’s and Household Tales, and Andersen may have been familiar with this tale, which is very close to Andersen’s narrative. Finally, Bengt Holbek, the great Danish scholar, points out that Andersen may have known the Danish folk tale “The Spirit of the Candle,” of which there are many variants, as well as Adam Oehlenschläger’s play Aladdin (1805). The tale may have had a personal significance for Andersen because his father had served as a common soldier during the Napoleonic Wars and returned to Odense a broken man in 1814; he died two years later.
LITTLE CLAUS AND BIG CLAUS (LILLE CLAUS OG STORE CLAUS, 1835)
This type of tale, generally referred to in German as a Schwank (a farcical tale or comic anecdote), was widespread throughout the medieval period. A Latin poem, “Versus de Unibove,” which was published in the Netherlands in the eleventh century, describes how a farmer, mocked by his neighbors, makes fools out of them, a plot that became common in Italian and French stories of the Renaissance. Elements of the tale can be found in the fourteenth-century Latin collection of tales and anecdotes entitled Gesta Romanorum (Deeds of the Romans) as well as in Giovanni Boccaccio’s the Decameron (1348-1353) and Poggio Bracciolini’s Liber facetiarum (The Fracetiae, 1438-1452) , a collection of jests and anecdotes. The theme of the clever swindler who does not respect the norms of society is related to many other ancient tales that depict a small clever hero who uses his wits to outsmart a giant, ogre, or monster, or a group of threatening people. These tales, which tend to be realistic portrayals of peasant life, convey a social critique of the injustices suffered by poor peasants. In these farcical tales, the peasants are portrayed for the most part carrying out menial tasks, such as chopping or gathering wood, spinning, weaving, or tending herds of sheep, goats, or geese. The exaggeration of their circumstances serves to highlight their desperate plight; the ending is often a wish-fulfillment in which the clever peasant has plenty of money and plenty to eat. In the early 1550s Giovan Francesco Straparola published a hilarious Italian version “The Priest Scarpacifico,” and in 1812 the Brothers Grimm included in their Children’s and Household Tales the story “The Little Farmer,” which is similar to Andersen’s tale. There were also earlier Danish versions of the tale.
THE PRINCESS ON THE PEA (PRINSESSEN PAA ÆRTEN, 1835)
Andersen probably became acquainted with this tale as a young man; it was very popular in Sweden. Known as the bed test or test of sensitivity, it has deep and ancient roots in the oral traditions of Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. Generally speaking, the princess who is being tested has an animal adviser who tells her to complain about something that prevents her from having a good night’s sleep. In many stories the objects placed in her bed are beans, pins, stones, and knitting needles. It was—and still is—commonly assumed that aristocratic people were more sensitive than common people, and that the only way t
o determine whether a princess was truly of noble heritage was to place a small object under many mattresses and see whether she felt it. One of the oldest versions of the tale can be found in Katha Sarit Sagara (The Ocean of Story or Ocean of Streams of Story, a collection of Indian tales written in Sanskrit about 1070 by the poet Somadeva. The Brothers Grimm printed a version in 1845 but retracted it after they discovered that Andersen had already published his tale.
THE TRAVELING COMPANION (REISEKAMMERATEN, 1835)
Throughout Europe the commonly known tale type of the “grateful dead” depicts a young man who has set out into the world and comes upon men who are mistreating a corpse and refusing to bury it. The protagonist either pays the dead man’s debts or gives him a decent burial, then proceeds on his journey. Shortly thereafter the dead man appears—sometimes in human form, sometimes in the shape of an animal, such as a fox or a horse—in order to help him. After enabling the protagonist to acquire a fortune or marry a princess, the dead man reveals his true identity to the young hero and often disappears. Andersen adapted a Fyn folk tale, “The Dead Man’s Help,” and published it as “The Ghost: A Fairy Tale from Fyn” in 1829. When he rewrote it in 1835 for his second pamphlet of fairy tales, he transformed it into a Christian tale that spells out his religious beliefs and that reveals his misogynist traits, which also appear in other tales, including “The Little Mermaid” and “The Red Shoes.” The folk tale was very well known in the European tradition, as Bent Holbek points out in his essay “Hans Christian Andersen’s Use of Folktales” (see “For Further Reading”). The Brothers Grimm also published a variant, “The Grateful Dead Man and the Princess Rescued from Slavery,” in their annotations of 1856; they had received a dialect version from the Haxthausen family some time between 1814 and 1816. The motif concerning the Princess Turandot, who would marry only the man who could guess her thoughts, has its origins in The Thousand and One Nights; it served as the basis for eighteenth-century plays about Turandot by Carlo Gozzi and Friedrich Schiller. Simon Meisling, Andersen’s headmaster, translated the Gozzi play in 1825, and Andersen undoubtedly knew his version.
THE WILD SWANS (DE VILDE SVANER, 1838)
One of the most popular motifs in the European oral and literary tradition is the innocent sister who seeks to become acquainted with and/or rescue her brothers, who were banished from her family upon her birth. Andersen probably knew a Danish folk variant and may have known one of the Grimms’ versions. The Grimms were familiar with the Italian Giambattista Basile’s “The Seven Doves” (1634) and published three tales in Children’s and Household Tales that dealt with this theme—“The Six Swans,” “The Twelve Brothers,” and “The Seven Ravens”; they retained the pattern of Basile’s tale and a German oral tale they heard while preparing their collection. Wilhelm Grimm’s reworking of the narrative emphasizes two elements: the dedication of the sister and brothers to one another, and the establishment of a common, orderly household in the forest, where they live peacefully together. It is not clear whether Andersen knew the different German versions. He may have been more familiar with Mathias Winther’s “The Eleven Swans,” published in Danske Folkeventyr (Danish Folk Tales, 1823). After Andersen and the Brothers Grimm made this tale popular, the well-known German writer Ludwig Bechstein included versions of “The Seven Ravens” and “The Seven Swans” in his German Fairy Tale Book (1845).
The underlying social issue in these tales concerns the legacy of a family and the right of succession and inheritance. If such rights were based on ultimogeniture (inheritance by the youngest) rather than primogeniture (inheritance by the oldest child), the older children might be sent away so that the youngest could inherit the family property. It is also possible that the tale arose in societies that were based on matrilineal rites.
THE SWINEHERD (SVINEDRENGEN, 1842)
The taming of a proud princess or aristocratic woman who thinks she is too good to marry any man—especially one who is or appears to be beneath her in social rank, such as a gardener, a fool, a lower-class man, or a prince disguised as a beggar or peasant—became an important didactic motif in the medieval oral and literary tradition. In a thirteenth-century erotic tale written in middle high German verse, “Diu halbe Bir” or “Die halbe Birne” (“Half a Pear”), a mighty king offers his daughter in marriage to a knight who shows his valor and wins a tournament. When a knight named Arnold wins the tournament, he is invited to a feast where pears are served, one for every two people. He cuts a pear in half without peeling it. After he eats his half, he offers the princess the other half, and she is so insulted because he has not peeled it for her that she berates him before all the guests. Enraged, Arnold departs, swearing revenge. He returns later as a court jester and is allowed to enter the salon of the princess to entertain her and her ladies. She becomes so aroused by his antics that she yields to his amorous advances. When Arnold leaves and returns to the court as a knight, the princess begins to mock him as the one who had offered her half a pear. He responds with a retort that makes her aware that he was the one she had been with the night before. Consequently, he compels her to become his wife.
A similar version can be found in the fourteenth-century Icelandic saga “Clárus,” attributed to Jón Halldórsson. Shakespeare used the motif in The Taming of the Shrew (early 1590s), and Luigi Allemanni’s novella Bianca, Daughter of the Count of Tolouse (1531) had a direct influence on Giambattista Basile’s “Pride Punished” (1634) and the Grimms’ “King Thrush-beard” (1812). The popularity of literary tales had a strong influence on the oral tradition, and the development of different versions led to Andersen’s “The Swineherd” (1842) and Ludwig Bechstein’s “Vom Zornbraten” (“About the Angry Roast,” 1857). For the most part, tales about so-called shrews represented a patriarchal viewpoint of how women, particularly courtly women, were to order their lives according to the dictates and demands of their fathers or husbands. In addition, the women fulfill the wish-dreams of men’s imaginations. The sadism of such tales is often concealed by the humorous manner in which a haughty woman learns “humility.”
MOTHER ELDERBERRY (HYLDEMOER, 1844)
Andersen based this tale on Danish folklore. According to folk belief, there was an “elder woman” who made her home in the elder tree, and if anyone harmed the tree she would take revenge. Andersen heard a tale about a man who chopped down an elder tree and died soon after the event; it was probably based on a legend that appeared in volume 2 of Just Mathias Thiele’s Danmarks Folkesagen II (Danish Legends II, 1818-1823). Andersen’s version was first published in the magazine Gaea.
THE HILL OF THE ELVES (ELVERHØR I, 1845)
This tale is based on an old Danish folk tale. Like many writers of his time, including J. L. Heiberg, Andersen had a strong interest in elves; in 1830 he had written a poem that dealt with them. He was also influenced by the poet Just Mathias Thiele (see the note directly above).
CLOD HANS (KLODS-HANS, 1855)
The naive and innocent hero who competes with his two older brothers for the hand of a princess is a common character in European folklore, and this tale type was widespread in the late Middle Ages. Andersen’s humorous version is intended to poke fun at the marriage rituals of the upper classes.
WHAT FATHER DOES IS ALWAYS RIGHT (HVAD FATTER GØR, DET ER ALTID DET RIGTIGE, 1861)
Andersen heard a folk version of this tale as a child. The story of two peasants who manage to make their way through life despite their stupidity was a common tale type in European folklore. The characters are appealing because they are so good-natured, and because of their good hearts, fortune inevitably shines on them.
ORIGINAL FAIRY TALES
THE SHADOW (SKYGGEN, 1847)
The major source for this tale is Adelbert Chamisso’s fairy-tale novella Peter Schlemihl (1813), about a young man who sells his shadow to the devil and wanders the world in search of salvation. E. T. A. Hoffmann also dealt with the Doppelgänger motif in his remarkable stories “Die Abenteuer der Sylvester
Nacht” (“The New Year’s Adventure,” 1819) and “Die Doppeltgänger” (“The Doubles,” 1821). Andersen was familiar with these stories; he even makes reference to Chamisso’s story at the beginning of his tale, which he wrote in Naples in June 1846. Perhaps one of Andersen’s most personal and most profound psychological tales, it is a symbolic representation of his relationship with Edvard Collin, the son of his patron, whom he admired and loved most of his life. Andersen was frustrated because Collin never allowed the two to become intimate. Collin never even permitted Andersen to use the informal word for “you” (du in Danish) in addressing him; instead, Andersen had to use the formal you (de, which translates as “thou”). This situation disturbed Andersen, who felt humiliated by it. The more famous he became, the more he wished Collin would recognize him and speak and write to him on equal terms. “The Shadow” can thus be regarded as a tale of bitter revenge. However, more than just a personal vendetta, it can also be viewed as a psychological exploration of the master/slave relationship and a philosophical exposition on the nature of identity. It is also related to Andersen’s works about art, for a learned man who produces works of art can wind up being obfuscated by the shadow they cast.