Hans Christian Andersen and The Literary Fairy Tale

Fantasy stories often lean on folk tales, fairy tales, myths, legends, fables, and other pieces of traditional literature for both content and structure. By traditional literature I mean literature that first existed in an oral form. These stories were told long before any one ever committed them to paper. We begin our look at fantasy with the literary fairy tale. The literary fairy tale resembles a folk tale, but the difference is that it has an identifiable author. As you might expect, the emergence of literary fairy tales comes in the wake of the development of the printing press, but only in Romanticism (1790s -1830s) do they reach a recognizably "modern" form.

Fairy tales, both literary and traditional folk tales, flourished in the nineteenth century. The nineteenth century was when the Brothers Grimm collected German folk tales that would become known as Grimm's Fairy Tales. Scholars throughout Europe were writing down the stories told by peasants who had heard them told when they were young. There were also storytellers who were writing new, original stories. One such storyteller was Hans Christian Andersen who wrote stories like "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Little Mermaid." Some scholars call Andersen the father of modern fantasy. Though we will focus on his work this week, you should be aware, as Hunt points out, that there are many other writers of literary fairy tales, some among whom were writing before and concurrently with Andersen. Some of the other most popular nineteenth and twentieth century literary fairy tale authors are George MacDonald, Oscar Wilde, and Jane Yolen.

What must be said for Andersen is that he certainly exceeded his contemporaries in reputation. His stories continue to resonate with readers today; hardly a publishing season passes without a new picture version of an Andersen tale hitting the stacks. For example, recent years saw the publication of three illustrated versions of "The Ugly Duckling": by Robert Ingpen in 2005, by Roberta Angaramo in 2006, and by Maria Tatar with Henri Galeron also in 2006.

Modern adults who read Andersen are often surprised by what they find in his stories. Andersen was a melancholy man who wrote deeply melancholy stories. He probably was clinically depressed-a malady that often torments artists and writers. Because Andersen's stories are not gentle, adults often wonder if they truly are for children, forgetting that they were children when they first encountered them.

Andersen has also been popularized through animated cartoons of his stories and romantic renditions of his life story. However, the Andersen on the page is not the Andersen of Disney's Little Mermaid where stories always end happily ever after. Similarly, the old Danny Kaye bio-picture where Kaye played Andersen as light and whimsical clearly differed from the real-life Andersen.