Hans Christian Andersen in the Original

Happy Groundhog Day, everybody! This post is a continuation of my recent thoughts about adapting H. C. Andersen to film and video. Today I’m taking the opposite view, exploring the virtues of reading Andersen in his original language (or at least the English translation thereof).

I can think of numerous reasons to read Andersen in the original, but I’ll limit myself to just a few. Before doing so, though, I should mention that last year I read the Wordsworth Classics version by an anonymous translator. Within a week of finishing it I was visiting a friend’s apartment and saw the Literary Classics deluxe edition.

I immediately grew jealous because the deluxe edition had stories I hadn’t read, and it was handsome and hefty, both desirable qualities for bibliophiles. That said, its large size and weight would not really lend it to reading on the subway, at the park, or in Starbucks, so I while I still recommend it as a coffee table item, or for your child’s stay-at-home library, for reading convenience on the go one of those pocket-sized editions is the way to go, and much cheaper.

But the difference in size actually highlights the first reason to read Andersen in the original, and that is his incredible prolificness. He wrote at least 159 children’s fairy tales, in addition to his many travelogues and works for adults. Of those perhaps two-dozen are in the standard repertoire of picture book, television, theater, and film adaptations, leaving a vast array of tales available only by reading Andersen himself. A corpus that large will admittedly contain its lows along with its highs, but the latter are surprisingly frequent.

Some tales seem surprisingly potent for adaptation but, to my knowledge, have not been frequently remade. Top among these are “Great Claus and Little Claus” (one of my favorites, although there’s some violence not appropriate for the youngest youngsters), “The Snow Queen,” “The Bronze Boar,” “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf,” “The Tinder Box,” “Psyche,” “The Wild Swans,” and, frankly, many others. On the other hand, there are many stories have apparently not been adapted precisely because they would be impossible to adapt—it’s the comparative advantage argument again, this time in favor of literature. There are, for instance, a surprising number of stories about the inner lives of inanimate objects: how would one visually depict “The Bottle Neck” (about the adventures of . . . a bottle neck) or the second episode in “Olé Lukoié, the Sandman,” in which the furniture has the following conversation:

“They all talked about themselves except the spittoon, which was silent and much annoyed that they were all so vain, as only to talk about themselves, and to pay no attention to him, standing so modestly in the corner and allowing himself to be spat upon.”

The filmmaker who dares attempt this scene with no narration has a steep hill to climb.

Similar difficulties arise in other stories featuring a great amount of interior monologue or narrative editorializing, such as in “The Snail and the Rose-bush,” a polemical dialogue between the titular characters that contrasts the egotistical hubris of the former with the generous humility of the latter. There are also pictorial tableaus, like “A Picture from the Ramparts” and “What the Moon Saw,” that have very little narrative but a great deal of poetic descriptions which are quite beautiful to read.

And that, in fact, brings me to the second, much more important, reason to read Hans Christian Andersen, which is that he is a world-class writer. This, in fact, essentially encompasses all the other reasons to read him.

The plain simple fact is that while most people are familiar with at least some of Andersen’s tales this familiarity has come entirely through retellings and adaptations. They simply never have read the originals. The attitude is akin to how we also encounter Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Rumplestiltskin, or other fairy tales of the Grimm/Perrault variety. Cinderella, the most-told fairy tale in the world, has so many distinct versions that it would be insane to try to recount them all, particularly to your child (I suppose librarians and folklorists have their own motivations). You can, however, delve into many of them and come up with a rich and rewarding experience. If the Grimms tell the tale one way, Perrault another, Russian folklore another, and Rocky and Bullwinkle yet another, then we come away the wiser and happier for it. These myths and legends are ancient, have no definitive original version, and therefore have an inherent mutability that makes them ideal for retellings and adjustments—that, after all, is how they have lasted and flourished through the ages.

Not so Andersen. He first published a collection of children’s stories in 1835. To put that in perspective, it is the same year in which Tocqueville published Democracy in America, in which Melbourne was founded, in which Darwin journeyed on the HMS Beagle, in which Texas declared independence from Mexico, and in which the first railroad was laid in continental Europe. Andrew Jackson was President of the United States. This is not ancient history; it is over 130 years after Perrault published Tales of Mother Goose and even a full generation after the Grimms. This is the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the modern era. If we deem it proper to still read Charles Dickens, the Brontes, Victor Hugo, William Wordsworth, Lewis Carroll, Henry David Thoreau, Mark Twain, or a legion of other contemporaries in their original prose, then surely we can afford the same respect to Andersen, even though his stories were for children. Ironically, it is precisely because his tales have proven so universal that his writing has been so little read and enjoyed. His stories, while timeless, occasionally do benefit from being grounded in his own historical period.

If “The Little Match Girl,” “The Ugly Duckling,” and “The Little Mermaid” therefore are beautiful in their retellings and adaptations, they are equally so in their original forms. To partake of them exclusively through adaptations would be equivalent to listening to Beethoven, Brahms, or Schumann always through re-orchestrations—or ring tones—rather than in their original forms. Andersen’s language is piquant or beautiful, depending on the topic at hand, and deserves a similar hearing.

Take for example this, from the aforementioned “Olé Lukoié.” Olé, the Sandman, has put a little boy to sleep, and the boy begins to dream about his crooked letters in his copybook. The capital letters admonish the little boy’s small, squiggled letters to better imitate them:

“‘See, this is how you ought to hold yourselves!’ said the headlines, ‘so-to one side with a brisk flourish!’

“‘Oh, we should like nothing better,’ said Hialmar’s letters, ‘but we can’t, we are so crooked!’

“‘Then you shall have a dose of medicine,’ said Olé Lukoié.

“‘Oh, no!’ they cried, and then they stood up as stiffly as possible.”

Adaptations of “The Ugly Duckling” are generally sentimental, which is appropriate (admittedly, Andersen’s unbridled sentimentality is on full view in this piece), but in doing so they lose some of Andersen’s biting wit. Midway through, the duckling reaches “a poor little cottage; it was such a miserable hovel that it could not make up its mind which way to fall even, and so it remained standing.” There he takes up residence with a chicken, a cat, and an old lady hoping for duck eggs from the newcomer. The hen can lay eggs, and the cat can arch his back, purr, and emit sparks when his fur is stroked the wrong way. Andersen has a wonderful time with them as self-righteous simpletons:

“The cat was the master of the house and the hen the mistress, and they always spoke of ‘we and the world’, for they thought that they represented the half of the world, and that quite the better half.

“The duckling thought there might be two opinions on the subject, but the hen would not hear of it.

“‘Can you lay eggs?’ she asked.

“‘No!’

“‘Will you have the goodness to hold your tongue then!’

“And the cat said, ‘Can you arch your back, purr, or give off sparks?’

“‘No.’

“‘Then you had better keep your opinions to yourself when people of sense are speaking!’”

Later the duckling wants to go float on the water and is told to “lay some eggs or take to purring, and you will get over it.”


There is not only humor but frequent irony in Andersen’s work, often where you would not expect it if you’ve only seen or read adaptations. “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” for instance, is incredibly comic in its treatment of the soldier’s equanimity and stamina (he is, after all, made of tin). The running gag throughout the story is that the soldier never moves, never speaks, never does anything. The complete antithesis of the Aristotelean/Hollywood hero, the soldier is used by Andersen precisely as a send-up of traditional narrative forms, something easy to do when your protagonist is inanimate. The result is often hilarious, as when the soldier is knocked out of the window:

“It was a terrific descent, and he landed at last, with his leg in the air, and rested on his cap, with his bayonet fixed between two paving stones. The maidservant and the little boy ran down at once to look for him; but although they almost trod on him, they could not see him. Had the soldier only called out ‘here I am,’ they would easily have found him, but he did not think it proper to shout when he was in uniform.”

And so it goes, steadfast and immovable even until the moment he is melting in the fire. Stoic, maybe, but ironic certainly.

Probably the biggest--and most welcome--surprise for me in reading through Andersen’s works was “The Princess and the Pea,” and it came precisely in the same vein as “The Steadfast Tin Soldier.” Far from being another fairy tale itself, the entire piece is a satire of the fairy tale genre. In one short and biting story Andersen is holding the mirror up to Perrault, the Grimms, and even his own life’s work. Only a true princess, after all, would be so soft and delicate as to be bruised black and blue from a pea under twenty mattresses and twenty feather pillows. Anyone with tougher skin does not qualify for inclusion in the make-believe land of Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and all the others.

There are, of course, good adaptations of this story as well: the Faerie Tale Theatre version with Liza Minnelli and a glorious pop-up book by Chris Demarest and Sarah Aronson spring to mind. They are variations on a theme, but they cannot take the place of the original. Part of their strength, of course, stems from the fact that they are not trying to.

In fact, having read Hans Christian Andersen’s original stories, we can return to multiple versions and adaptations such as these to see strengths and weaknesses, like revisiting an old recipe or jazz standard covered by artists as divergent as Billy Holiday and Ornette Coleman. In concert, such an extended diet of Andersen can do wonders for both adults and kids.