Hans Christian Andersen

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Hans Christian Andersen

Born April 2, 1805(1805-04-02)
Odense, Denmark
Died August 4, 1875 (aged 70)
Copenhagen, Denmark
Occupation Novelist, short story writer, fairy tales writer
Nationality Danish
Genres Children’s literature, travelogue
Signature

Hans Christian Andersen (Danish pronunciation: [ˈhanˀs ˈkʰʁæʂd̥jan ˈɑnɐsn̩], referred to using the initials H. C. Andersen in Denmark; April 2, 1805 – August 4, 1875) was a Danish author and poet noted for his children’s stories. These include “The Steadfast Tin Soldier“, “The Snow Queen“, “The Little Mermaid“, “Thumbelina“, “The Little Match Girl“, and “The Ugly Duckling“.

During his lifetime he was acclaimed for having delighted children worldwide, and was feted by royalty. His poetry and stories have been translated into more than 150 languages. They have inspired motion pictures, plays, ballets, and animated films.[1]

Contents

Biography

Childhood

Hans Christian Andersen was born in the town of Odense, Denmark, on Tuesday, April 2, 1805. “Hans” and “Christian” are traditional Danish names.

Andersen’s father considered himself related to nobility. According to scholars at the Hans Christian Andersen Center,[citation needed] his paternal grandmother had told his father that their family had in the past belonged to a higher social class, but investigations prove these stories unfounded. The family apparently was affiliated with Danish royalty, but through employment or trade. Today, speculation persists that Andersen may have been an illegitimate son of the royal family. Whatever the reason, King Frederick VI took a personal interest in him as a youth and paid for a part of his education.[citation needed] According to writer Rolf Dorset, Andersen’s ancestry remains indeterminate. Hans Christian was forced to support himself. He worked as a weaver’s apprentice and, later, for a tailor. At 14, he moved to Copenhagen to seek employment as an actor. Having an excellent soprano voice, he was accepted into the Royal Danish Theatre, but his voice soon changed. A colleague at the theatre told him that he considered Andersen a poet. Taking the suggestion seriously, he began to focus on writing.

Andersen’s modest childhood home in Odense

On a rather more serious note Andersen had a half-sister, Karen Marie, with whom he managed to speak on only a few occasions before her death.[citation needed]

Jonas Collin, who, following a chance encounter with Andersen, immediately felt a great affection for him, sent him to a grammar school in Slagelse, covering all his expenses.[2] Andersen had already published his first story, The Ghost at Palnatoke’s Grave, in 1822. Though not a keen student, he also attended school at Elsinore until 1827.[3]

He later said his years in school were the darkest and most bitter of his life. At one school, he lived at his schoolmaster’s home. There he was abused in order “to improve his character”, he was told. He felt alienated from his classmates, being older than most of them. Considered unattractive, he suffered also from dyslexia[citation needed]. He later said the faculty had discouraged him from writing in general, causing him to enter a state of depression.

Early works

In 1829, Andersen enjoyed considerable success with a short story titled “A Journey on Foot from Holmen’s Canal to the East Point of Amager”. He also published a comedy and a collection of poems that season. Though he made little progress writing and publishing immediately thereafter, in 1833 he received a small traveling grant from the King, enabling him to set out on the first of his many journeys through Europe. At Jura, near Le Locle, Switzerland, he wrote the story, “Agnete and the Merman”. He spent an evening in the Italian seaside village of Sestri Levante the same year, inspiring the name, The Bay of Fables. (See Voyagefever.com — an annual festival celebrates it). In October, 1834, he arrived in Rome. Andersen’s first novel, “The Improvisatore“, was published at the beginning of 1835, becoming an instant success. During these traveling years, Hans Christian Andersen lived in an apartment at number 20, Nyhavn, Copenhagen. There, a memorial plaque was unveiled on May 8, 1835, a gift by Peter Schannong.[4]

Fairy tales

Paper chimney sweep cut by Andersen

It was during 1835 that Andersen published the first installment of his immortal Fairy Tales (Danish: Eventyr). More stories, completing the first volume, were published in 1836 and 1837. The quality of these stories was not immediately recognized, and they sold poorly. At the same time, Andersen enjoyed more success with two novels: O.T. (1836) and Only a Fiddler. His Specialty book that is still known today was the Ugly Duckling (1837).

Jeg er en Skandinav

After a visit to Sweden in 1837, Andersen became inspired by Scandinavism and committed himself to writing a poem to convey his feeling of relatedness between the Swedes, the Danes and the Norwegians.[5] It was in July 1839 during a visit to the island of Funen that Andersen first wrote the text of his poem Jeg er en Skandinav (I am a Scandinavian).[5] Andersen designed the poem to capture “the beauty of the Nordic spirit, the way the three sister nations have gradually grown together” as part of a Scandinavian national anthem.[5] Composer Otto Lindblad set the poem to music and the composition was published in January 1840. Its popularity peaked in 1845, after which it was seldom sung.[5]

Travelogues

In 1851, he published to wide acclaim In Sweden, a volume of travel sketches. A keen traveler, Andersen published several other long travelogues: Shadow Pictures of a Journey to the Harz, Swiss Saxony, etc. etc. in the Summer of 1831 (A Poet’s Bazaar (560), In Spain , and A Visit to Portugal in 1866 (The latter describes his visit with his Portuguese friends Jorge and Jose O’Neill, who were his fellows in the mid 1820s while living in Copenhagen.) In his travelogues, Andersen took heed of some of the contemporary conventions about travel writing; but always developed the genre to suit his own purposes. Each of his travelogues combines documentary and descriptive accounts of the sights he saw with more philosophical excurses on topics such as being an author, immortality, and the nature of fiction in the literary travel report. Some of the travelogues, such as In Sweden, even contain fairy-tales.

Painting of Andersen, 1836, by Christian Albrecht Jensen

In the 1840s Andersen’s attention returned to the stage, however with no great success at all. His true genius was however proved in the miscellany the Picture-Book without Pictures (1840). The fame of his Fairy Tales had grown steadily; a second series began in 1838 and a third in 1845. Andersen was now celebrated throughout Europe, although his native Denmark still showed some resistance to his pretensions. Between 1845 and 1864, H. C. Andersen lived in 67, Nyhavn, Copenhagen, where a memorial plaque is placed.[4]

Meetings with Dickens

In June 1847, Andersen paid his first visit to England and enjoyed a triumphal social success during the summer. The Countess of Blessington invited him to her parties where intellectual and famous people could meet, and it was at one party that he met Charles Dickens for the first time. They shook hands and walked to the veranda which was of much joy to Andersen. He wrote in his diary, “We had come to the veranda, I was so happy to see and speak to England’s now living writer, whom I love the most.”[6]

Ten years later, Andersen visited England again, primarily to visit Dickens. He stayed at Dickens’ home for five weeks.[6] Shortly after Andersen left, Dickens published David Copperfield, featuring the obsequious Uriah Heep, who is said to have been modeled on Andersen.[citation needed]

Love life

Andersen often fell in love with unattainable women and many of his stories are interpreted as references to his sexual grief.[7] The most famous of these was the opera soprano Jenny Lind. One of his stories, “The Nightingale“, was a written expression of his passion for Lind, and became the inspiration for her nickname, the “Swedish Nightingale”. Andersen was often shy around women and had extreme difficulty in proposing to Lind. When Lind was boarding a train to take her to an opera concert, Andersen gave Lind a letter of proposal. Her feelings towards him were not the same; she saw him as a brother, writing to him in 1844 “farewell… God bless and protect my brother is the sincere wish of his affectionate sister, Jenny.”[8] A girl named Riborg Voigt was the unrequited love of Andersen’s youth. A small pouch containing a long letter from Riborg was found on Andersen’s chest when he died. At one point he wrote in his diary: “Almighty God, thee only have I; thou steerest my fate, I must give myself up to thee! Give me a livelihood! Give me a bride! My blood wants love, as my heart does!”[9] Other disappointments in love included Sophie Ørsted, the daughter of the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, and Louise Collin, the youngest daughter of his benefactor Jonas Collin.

Just as with his interest in women, Andersen would become attracted to nonreciprocating men. For example, Andersen wrote to Edvard Collin:[10] “I languish for you as for a pretty Calabrian wench… my sentiments for you are those of a woman. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery.” Collin, who did not prefer men, wrote in his own memoir: “I found myself unable to respond to this love, and this caused the author much suffering.” Likewise, the infatuations of the author for the Danish dancer Harald Scharff[11] and Carl Alexander, the young hereditary duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach,[12] did not result in any relationships.

The Hanfstaengl portrait of Andersen dated July 1860

In recent times some literary studies have speculated about the homoerotic camouflage in Andersen’s works.[13]

In Andersen’s early life, his private journal records his refusal to have sexual relations.[14][15]

Death

In the spring of 1872, Andersen fell out of bed and was severely hurt. He never fully recovered, but he lived until August 4, 1875, dying of insidious causes in a house called Rolighed (literally: calmness), near Copenhagen, the home of his close friends Moritz Melchior, a banker, and his wife.[16] Shortly before his death, he had consulted a composer about the music for his funeral, saying: “Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with little steps.”[16] His body was interred in the Assistens Kirkegård in the Nørrebro area of Copenhagen.

At the time of his death, he was an internationally renowned and treasured artist. He received a stipend from the Danish Government as a “national treasure”. Before his death, steps were already underway to erect the large statue in his honor, which was completed and is prominently placed at the town hall square in Copenhagen.[1]

Legacy

Postage stamp, Denmark, 1935

In the English-speaking world, stories such as “Thumbelina“, “The Snow Queen“, “The Ugly Duckling“, “The Little Mermaid“, “The Emperor’s New Clothes“, and “The Princess and the Pea” remain popular and are widely read. “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “The Ugly Duckling” have both passed into the English language as well-known expressions.

In the Copenhagen harbor there is a statue of The Little Mermaid, placed in honor of Hans Christian Andersen. April 2, Andersen’s birthday, is celebrated as International Children’s Book Day. The year 2005 was the bicentenary of Andersen’s birth and his life and work was celebrated around the world.

Hans Christian Andersen and “The Ugly Duckling” in Central Park, New York

In the United States, statues of Hans Christian Andersen may be found in Central Park, New York, and in Solvang, California. The Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds a unique collection of Andersen materials bequeathed by the Danish-American actor Jean Hersholt.[17] Of particular note is an original scrapbook Andersen prepared for the young Jonas Drewsen.[18]

The city of Bratislava, Slovakia features a statue of Hans Christian Andersen in memory of his visit in 1841.[19]

In the city of Lublin, Poland is the Puppet & Actor Theatre of Hans Christian Andersen.[20]

A $13-million theme park based on Andersen’s tales and life opened in Shanghai at the end of 2006. Multi-media games as well as all kinds of cultural contests related to the fairy tales are available to visitors. He was chosen as the star of the park because he is a “nice, hardworking person who was not afraid of poverty”, Shanghai Gujin Investment general manager Zhai Shiqiang was quoted by the AFP news agency as saying.[21]

Famous fairy tales

Some of his most famous fairy tales include:

External links

Brothers Grimm

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Jacob and Wilhelm
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Wilhelm (left) and Jacob Grimm from an 1855 painting by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann

1000 Deutsche Mark (1992)

The Brothers Grimm (German: Die Brüder Grimm or Die Gebrüder Grimm), Jacob (4 January 1785 – 20 September 1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (24 February 1786 – 16 December 1859), were German academics best known for publishing collections of folk tales and fairy tales, which became popular.[1] Jacob also did academic work in linguistics, related to how the sounds in words shift over time (Grimm’s law), and together they wrote a German dictionary.

They are among the best-known story tellers of folk tales from Europe, and their work popularized such tales as “Rumpelstiltskin“, “Snow White“, “Rapunzel“, “Cinderella“, “Hansel and Gretel“, “Little Red Riding Hood“, and “The Frog Prince“.

Contents

Lives

Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (also Carl) and Wilhelm Karl Grimm[a] were born on 4 January 1785, and 24 February 1786, respectively, in the Wolfgang section of Hanau, Germany near Frankfurt in Hessen. They were among a family of nine children, six of whom survived infancy.[2] Their early childhood was spent in the countryside in what has been described as an “idyllic” state. The Grimm family lived near the magistrate’s house between 1790 and 1796 while the father was employed by the Prince of Hessen.

Graves of the Brothers Grimm in the St Matthaus Kirchhof Cemetery in Schöneberg, Berlin.

Berlin memorial plaque, Brüder Grimm, Alte Potsdamer Straße 5, Berlin-Tiergarten, Germany

Sculpture of brothers Grimm in Hanau

When the eldest brother Jacob was fifteen years old, their father, Philip Wilhelm, died and the family moved into a cramped urban residence.[2] Two years later, the children’s grandfather also died, leaving their mother to struggle to support them in reduced circumstances. It has been argued that this is the reason behind the Brothers’ tendency to idealize and excuse fathers, leaving a predominance of female villains in the tales—the infamous wicked stepmothers, for example, the evil stepmother and stepsisters in “Cinderella”.[3] However this opinion ignores the fact that the brothers were collectors of folk tales, not their authors:

“They urged fidelity to the spoken text, without embellishments, and though it has been shown that they did not always practice what they preached, the idealized ‘orality’ of their style was much closer to reality than the literary retellings previously thought necessary.”[4]
“Scholars and psychiatrists have thrown a camouflaging net over the stories with their relentless, albeit fascinating, question of ‘What does it mean?'”[5]

Another influence is perhaps shown in the brothers’ selection of stories such as The Twelve Brothers, which show one girl and several brothers’ (their own family structure) overcoming opposition.[6]

The two brothers were educated at the Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Kassel and later both studied law at the University of Marburg. There they were inspired by their professor Friedrich von Savigny, who awakened an interest in the past. They were in their early twenties when they began the linguistic and philological studies that would culminate in both Grimm’s Law and their collected editions of fairy and folk tales. Though their collections of tales became immensely popular, they were essentially a by-product of the linguistic research, which was the Brothers’ primary goal.

In 1808, Jacob was named court librarian to the King of Westphalia. In 1812 the Grimm brothers published their first volume of fairy tales, Tales of Children and the Home. They had collected the stories from peasants and villagers, and, controversially, from other sources such as published works from other cultures and languages (e.g. Charles Perrault). In their collaboration, Jacob did more of the research, while Wilhelm, more fragile, put it into literary form and provided the childlike style. They were also interested in folklore and primitive literature. In 1816 Jacob became librarian in Kassel, where Wilhelm was also employed. Between 1816 and 1818 they published two volumes of German legends and a volume of early literary history.

In time the brothers became interested in older languages and their relation to German. Jacob began to specialize in the history and structure of the German language. The relationships between words became known as Grimm’s Law. They gathered immense amounts of data. In 1830, they formed a household in Göttingen, where both brothers secured positions at the University of Göttingen.[7] Jacob was named professor and head librarian in 1830; Wilhelm became a professor in 1835.

In 1837, the Brothers Grimm joined five of their colleague professors at the University of Göttingen to protest against the abolition of the liberal constitution of the state of Hanover by King Ernest Augustus I, a reactionary son of King George III. This group came to be known in the German states as Die Göttinger Sieben (The Göttingen Seven). The two, along with the five others, protested against the abrogation. The professors were fired from their university posts and three were deported, including Jacob. Jacob settled in Kassel, outside Ernest’s realm, and Wilhelm joined him there; they both stayed with their brother Ludwig. However, the next year, the two were invited to Berlin by the King of Prussia, and both settled there.[8]

Their last years were spent in writing a definitive dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the first volume being published in 1854. The work was carried on by future generations.

Marriage and family

Jacob remained a bachelor. On 15 May 1825, Wilhelm married Henriette Dorothea Wild (also known as Dortchen). She was a pharmacist’s daughter and a childhood friend who had told the brothers the story of “Little Red Riding Hood“. Wilhelm and Henriette had four children, of whom three survived infancy: Herman, Jacob, and Auguste. Even after Wilhelm’s marriage, the brothers stayed close. They lived as an extended family under one roof with little conflict.

Wilhelm died in Berlin on 16 December 1859. Jacob continued work on the dictionary and related projects until his death in Berlin on 20 September 1863. The brothers were buried in the St. Matthäus Kirchhof Cemetery in Schöneberg, Berlin. The Grimms helped foment a nationwide democratic public opinion in Germany and are cherished as the progenitors of the German democratic movement.[citation needed] Its revolution of 1848/1849 was crushed by the Kingdom of Prussia, which established a constitutional monarchy.

The Tales

Main article: Grimm’s Fairy Tales

The Brothers Grimm began collecting folk tales[9] around 1807, in response to a wave of awakened interest in German folklore that followed the publication of Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano‘s folksong collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”), 1805-08. By 1810 the Grimms produced a manuscript collection of several dozen tales, which they had recorded by inviting storytellers to their home and transcribing what they heard. Although they were said to have collected tales from peasants, many of their informants were middle-class or aristocratic, recounting tales they had heard from their servants. Several of the informants were of Huguenot ancestry and told tales that were French in origin.[10] Some scholars have theorized that certain elements of the stories were “purified” for the brothers, who were devout Christians.[11]

In 1812, the Brothers published a collection of 86 German fairy tales in a volume titled Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). They published a second volume of 70 fairy tales in 1814 (“1815” on the title page), which together make up the first edition of the collection, containing 156 stories. They wrote a two-volume work titled Deutsche Sagen, which included 585 German legends; these were published in 1816 and 1818.[12] The legends are organized in the chronological order of historical events to which they were related.[13] The brothers arranged the regional legends thematically for each folktale creature, such as dwarfs, giants, monsters, etc. not in any historical order.[13] These legends were not as popular as the fairytales.[12]

A second edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen followed in 1819-22, expanded to 170 tales. Five more editions were issued during the Grimms’ lifetimes,[14] in which stories were added or subtracted. The seventh edition of 1857 contained 211 tales. Many of the changes were made in light of unfavorable reviews, particularly those that objected that not all the tales were suitable for children, despite the title.[15] The tales were also criticized for being insufficiently German; this not only influenced the tales the brothers included, but their language. They changed “fee” (fairy) to an enchantress or wise woman, every prince to a king’s son, every princess to a king’s daughter.[16] (It has long been recognized that some of these later-added stories were derived from printed rather than oral sources.) [17] These editions, equipped with scholarly notes, were intended as serious works of folklore. The Brothers also published the Kleine Ausgabe or “small edition,” containing a selection of 50 stories expressly designed for children (as opposed to the more formal Große Ausgabe or “large edition”). Ten printings of the “small edition” were issued between 1825 and 1858.

The Grimms were not the first to publish collections of folktales. There were others, including a German collection by Johann Karl August Musäus published in 1782-87. The earlier collections, however, made little pretence to strict fidelity to sources. The Brothers Grimm were the first workers in this genre to present their stories as faithful renditions of the kind of direct folkloric materials that underlay the sophistication of an adapter like Perrault. In so doing, the Grimms took a basic and essential step toward modern folklore studies, leading to the work of folklorists like Peter and Iona Opie[18] and others.

The Grimms’ method was common in their historical era. Arnim and Brentano edited and adapted the folksongs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn; in the early 1800s Brentano collected folktales in much the same way as the Grimms.[19] The early researchers were working before academic practices for such collections had been codified.

Linguistics

In the very early 19th century, the time in which the Brothers Grimm lived, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation had recently dissolved, and the modern nation of Germany did not exist. In its place was a confederacy of 39 small- to medium-size German states, many of which had been newly created by Napoleon as client states. The major unifying factor for the German people of the time was a common language. Part of what motivated the Brothers in their writings and in their lives was the desire to help create a German identity.

Less well known to the general public outside of Germany is the Brothers’ work on a German dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch. It was extensive, having 33 volumes and weighing 84 kg (185 lbs). It is still considered the standard reference for German etymology. Work began in 1838, but by the end of their lifetime, only sections from the letter ‘A’ to part of the letter ‘F’ were completed. The work was not considered complete until 1960.[20]

Jacob is recognized for enunciating Grimm’s law, the Germanic Sound Shift, that was first observed by the Danish philologist Rasmus Christian Rask. Grimm’s law was the first non-trivial systematic sound change to be discovered.

Books and film

In 1962, the United States movie The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was released, with a cast including Barbara Eden, Russ Tamblyn, Yvette Mimieux and other high-profile stars of the time. Directed by Henry Levin, the movie intertwined a fictionalised version of the Grimm brothers’ lives as young men with fantasy productions of some of their fairy tales (directed by George Pal). It went on to win the 1963 Oscar for costume design and was nominated in several other categories.

In 1977, a made-for-TV musical called “Once Upon A Brothers Grimm” aired in the United States. It starred Dean Jones as Jakob and Paul Sand as Wilhelm. The basic plot presented the brothers’ traveling and getting lost in a forest, and encountering various characters from the tales that made them famous.

In 1998, in the movie Ever After, the Grimm Brothers visit an elderly woman, the Grande Dame of France, who questions their version of the Cinderella story. The Brothers Grimm reply that there was no way for them to verify the authenticity of their story as there were so many different versions. She proceeds to tell the story of “Danielle De Barbarac”.

In 2001, a Grimme Prize-nominated German TV crime thriller entitled A Murderous Fairytale (Ein Moerderisches Maerchen) used elements of Brothers Grimm fairytales. In the film directed by Manuel Siebenmann and written by Daniel Martin Eckhart, the elderly killer challenges the detectives with a series of Brothers Grimm fairytale riddles.

In 2002, comic book writer Bill Willingham created the comic book Fables, which includes characters from “fables” as the main characters. Many of these characters are among those collected by the Grimm brothers.

In 2005, a movie based roughly on the Grimm brothers and their tales was made called The Brothers Grimm, starring Heath Ledger as Jacob Grimm and Matt Damon as Wilhelm Grimm. The film, directed by Terry Gilliam, resembles the contents of the sagas from the brothers’ collections, much more than the academic nature of their lives.

In 2005, author Michael Buckley began a popular young reader’s series (geared for age 7-12) titled The Sisters Grimm in which the two characters, sisters, are the direct descendants of the Brothers Grimm. They discover the family secret in which the fairy tales told in their ancestor’s stories are not fictional, but instead all exist in a fairy tale realm. The sisters are brought into that realm to solve mysteries that sometimes spill into their world.

In 2005, Zenescope Comics begin releasing a monthly on-going comic series entitled Grimm Fairy tales. Grimm Fairy Tales is a horror comic book that presents classic fairy tales, albeit with modern twists or expanded plots.

In 2006, the crime novel Brother Grimm, by Craig Russell (British author), was published. A serial killer stalks Hamburg and uses themes of Brothers Grimm fairytales to pose his victims and to write riddles about the next one. Chief Detective Jan Fabel has to hunt down the Fairytale Killer, as the press soon calls him. In 2010, the novel was adapted for German Television, directed by Urs Egger and written by Daniel Martin Eckhart under the title Wolfsfährte, the German title of Craig Russell’s novel. Actor Peter Lohmeyer took on the role of Chief Detective Jan Fabel.

Some of the Grimms’ stories (including Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and The Princess and the Frog) were adapted as animated feature films by Walt Disney Animation Studios. Another fairy-tale popularized by the brothers, Rapunzel, is in pre-production. A live action adaptation of Snow White, tentatively titled Snow and the Seven, is in development at the Disney Studios, with Francis Lawrence, the director of I Am Legend, at the helm.[21]