Lewis - Hans Andersens Fairy Tales, Retold

I wish to express particular gratitude to the late Marianne Helweg for her valuable help and advice on points of Danish, and to Kaye Webb, who originated this book and continually encouraged it on its course. And appreciation and thanks to Doreen Scott for her calm and unfailing patience, and her inspired eye for seemingly vanished manuscripts.

What is genius? Where does it come from? Nobody knows. But it is the nearest thing to magic that any human creature can possess. The young Hans Christian Andersen possessed it, no doubt about that. A penniless boy, growing up in a small far northern land, whose language was scarcely known outside its borders, he was to become the best-known, best-loved Dane in all the world, and so he has remained. In this book are some of the tales that made him so.

Hans Andersen (180575) was born in a very poor home in Odense, Denmark. He was later to speak of his life as a fairy tale, but this did not mean that success came soon, or easily, or in the way he hoped. Every wish has its price: thats the rule, in fairy tale as in life. Andersen, on his road to fame, had to face as many forests of thorn, steep glass mountains and fearsome trials as any hero of legend.

Still, he was not without a few grains of luck at the start. For one thing, he was an only child. This gave him more chance of not being pushed out into some harsh trade, and of having his parents attention, his fathers especially. These parents were totally unalike except in their love for their son. But both were to influence him, though differently, for the rest of his life.

The mother was a peasant woman, simple and superstitious. Like many of the poor, she could not read. She was terrified of questioning the Church or the Bible or the rights of her wealthy feudal superiors. The father, by contrast, was a natural student and thinker, a man of ideas, a reader of literature. By trade he was a shoemaker. He had no great taste or talent for the job, but then, he had never been given any choice. His free-thinking views on religion and social matters (which today would not be thought odd at all) alarmed and shocked his wife; but she always respected his wish that Hans Christian, unlike himself, should never be forced into work of the wrong kind. Meanwhile, he would take the boy into the woods and point out the grass and flowers and insects, each with a life of its own. He read to him, plays and stories; he made him toys, and the best of these was a toy theatre. The whole world seen in miniature was to be the special mark of Andersens work.

When Hans Christian was eleven his father died, still a young man, but worn out by hardship and failure. His imagination, his restlessness, his dreams all lived on in his son. So did his mothers superstition, her belief in magic and her sturdy peasant endurance. An odd mixture! But all were part of his nature and his tales.

Odense, where he grew up, was a town like a small story-book kingdom. It contained a royal castle, and many old buildings which live again in the stories. There was also a theatre which attracted the boy irresistibly. As for the people of Odense, they stayed in their rigid stations nobility, gentry, those in professions, in trade, and last, the labouring poor. No one presumed to step out of place except the washerwomans crazy boy (as he was now considered). Against all the unspoken rules he was drawn to the thinking and well-spoken, to writers and painters, actors and scholars; some of them lent him books and helped him in small ways.

Yet dreaming, reading and working at his toy theatre could not earn him a living. And so, at fourteen, he set out to seek his improbable fortune in the capital city of Copenhagen. There he was, half-starved, in outgrown clothes, knocking at the doors of likely people, pleading, singing, clowning his way into their attention, into the Royal Theatre and out of it still seeing himself as an actor, singer or dancer. Oddity though he was, he continued to catch the puzzled aid of patron after patron, scholars, singers, councillors, even royalty itself. Something had to be done with him, that they all agreed. And so, at seventeen, he was sent away to school to make up the education he had missed, Latin, Greek, mathematics and the rest, a great tall scarecrow among the little eleven-year-olds. Worse still (though unknown to his guardians), he lived in dreadful conditions, starved and tormented. It was the darkest period of his life.