The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen (review)

In the past decade, particularly in small European nations like Denmark, Norway, and Austria, the anniversaries of artistic and literary icons have become a major occasion for public celebrations, some for mere cultural purposes, some with commercial gains in mind, and some with both. Hans Christian Andersen’s 2005 bicentenary celebration was no exception. There was a birthday bash at Parken in Copenhagen with thirty-eight thousand guests and six hundred performing artists, including international stars like Tina Turner and Jean-Michel Jarre. There were scholarly conferences, public readings of Andersen’s fairy tales, a ballet at the Royal Theater, and many other celebrations in every corner of Denmark. However, the really exciting thing is that after all the fanfare and hoopla have faded away, we are able to enjoy the lasting effects of the Andersen bicentenary—in this particular case, a new translation of some of Andersen’s most celebrated fairy tales and stories as well as a number of lesser-known stories.

Diana Crone Frank and Jeffrey Frank, respectively a linguist working for ABC News and a senior editor at the New Yorker, have selected twenty-two tales that span the scope of Andersen’s fairy tales from the sentimental and devout to the humorous and clever. Their selection also spans Andersen’s career from his first collection of traditional fairy tales in 1835, Eventyr, fortalte for Børn (Fairy Tales, Told for Children) to the modernist narrative “Auntie Toothache,” which was included in his last collection, published in 1872. Most of the selected tales, however, were written in the 1830s and 1840s, when Andersen’s fairy-tale production was at its peak. Many of his stories—for example, “Little Claus and Big Claus,” “The Swineherd,” “Hopeless Hans,” and “The Wild Swans”—are based directly on folktales; others, like “Thumbelisa” and “The Little Mermaid,” have various literary antecedents. (The stories’ titles in this review appear as they are translated and spelled in The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen; for example, “Thumbelisa” instead of “Thumbelina”; “Hopeless Hans” instead of “Numbskull Jack”; “Clod-poll,” or “Clod-Hans.”) In addition to these stories, The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen includes canonical fairy tales like “The Princess on the Pea,” “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Nightingale,” “The Sweethearts,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Red Shoes,” “The Little Match Girl,” and “Father’s Always Right.” This reviewer misses the bittersweet love stories “The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep” and “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” and the unequalled tearjerker “The Story of a Mother,” but, to be fair, the Franks have selected a representative range of stories. The lesser-known stories include “The Happy Family,” “Kids’ Talk,” “By the Outermost Sea,” “The Shadow,” and “The Gardener and the Aristocrats.” The last two of these less popular stories have received considerable scholarly attention in recent years. Aside from its remarkable noir aspect, “The Shadow” has interesting biographical implications regarding Andersen’s often-strained relationship with Edvard Collin, the son of his benefactor Jonas Collin. “The Gardener and the Aristocrats,” on the other hand, is a realistic story set in a recognizable world, as the Andersen biographer Elias Bredsdorff points out; it can be read in several ways—as a critique of the class system, or as a bitter satire aimed at the Danish aristocracy, or even as evidence of “Andersen’s fawning servility to the upper classes” (Jack Zipes, When Dreams Come True 83).

The embedded psychological and political discourse of these stories confirms a remark made by one of Andersen’s contemporaries, the Norwegian author and poet Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, in a letter to Jonas Collin in 1861: “It is quite wrong to speak of what Andersen is writing now as ‘fairy tales’” for children. Andersen’s stories, even the early ones, obviously go beyond the nursery, but because the fairy-tale genre traditionally was (and is) associated with cultural constructs of...