conradd's Full Review: H. C. Andersen and Virginia Haviland - Hans Christ...
My maternal grandmother was born in Odense Denmark in 1890. As a young child, her older brothers and sisters captivated her with tales of an ugly duckling who grew to be a swan, a mermaid princess who longed for a life on land, and a tin soldier with one leg and a devoted heart. When my mother was a tiny girl in Minnesota, my grandmother repeated the stories she had memorized so many years before. And, each night when my siblings and I settled down, we would fall asleep to the sound of my mother’s voice, repeating the stories that she had heard so many times. When my son was born, I wanted to instill the same love of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales in him.
My mother’s complete book (which she still won’t part with) was out of print in the 1950’s. After looking at many translations; the 1983 edition translated by Eric Hougaard is probably the closest to Andersen’s original intent. It contains 156 tales in the same style and order as in Andersen’s 1874 original Danish edition. A bonus is the inclusion of author’s notes which provide background information on Andersen's impetus for writing the stories. However, this 1,100 page paperback book is not lavishly illustrated and bears little resemblance to a traditional children’s book. Instead, parents will want to read it to their child as a bedtime story or quiet activity . . . and will almost certainly find themselves, caught up in the magic, reading long after the child has fallen asleep. With 156 stories included in this edition, there is no shortage of selection.
Andersen often used the objects in his stories to draw parallels with curious human behavior. In The Darning Needle, the heroine "who was so grand that she imagined she was a sewing needle" warns the fingers, "Don't let me fall! If you drop me on the floor I may never be found again, I'm so fine, you know!" Through a series of misadventures, the needle never stops looking at the world with an air of conceit. When she is inadvertently broken and mended with sealing wax, she imagines herself to have advanced in the world, "Ha! Ha! Now I'm a brooch, said the darning needle. "I always knew I should get on in the world. When one has the makings of something, one always becomes something!"
Some of the tales have autobiographical overtones. The Ugly Duckling tells the tale of a misunderstood misfit who thought he was "so ugly that even the dog won't bother to bite me" and compared himself unfavorably to a dog (he couldn't bark), a cat (he couldn't arch his back or purr), and a hen (he couldn't lay eggs). His only talent, swimming, was scorned by these benchmarks who urged him to "come on, hurry up, see that you lay eggs, and do learn how to purr or to give out sparks!"
While Andersen hoped to become an author respected for his serious fiction, he achieved immortality through his works for children. Written to be read out loud, the everyday speech, unique punctuation, and short phrasing lends itself to dramatic pauses and oratorical emphasis. I repeat: they are to be read out loud. Try it now:
The Tinder Box: “A soldier came marching down the high-road. Left! Right! Left! Right! He had his knapsack on his back and a sword at his side for he had been to the wars and now he was on his way home. As he was marching along, he met an old witch on the high-road. She was the ugliest sight you ever saw – her lower lip hung right down on her chest.”
These tales bear little resemblance to Disney Classics. Even though Andersen meant his stories for children, many of his tales have gruesome details that would raise red flags for modern parents. Instead of finding true love with her handsome prince, the original mermaid watched him wed a princess, danced at his wedding, and then, faced with a Hobson's choice, sacrificed herself to ensure his happiness.
Indeed, an anonymous review written in 1836 cautioned parents that ”Among Mr. Andersen’s tales the first three (The Tinder box, Little Claus and Big Claus and The Princess on the Pea, may well amuse children but they will certainly not have any edifying effect, and your reviewer cannot answer for their being harmless reading. At any rate, no one can possibly contend that a child’s sense of propriety is increased by reading about a princess who goes riding off in her sleep on a dog’s back to visit a soldier who kisses her, after which she herself, wide awake, tells of this incident as a ‘curious dream’; or that a child’s idea of modesty is increased by reading about a farmer’s wife who, while her husband is away, sits down at table alone with the parish clerk, ‘and she kept filling up his glass for him, and he kept helping himself to the fish – he was very fond of fish’; or that a child’s respect for human life is increased by reading about episodes like that of Big Claus killing his grandmother and of Little Claus killing him, told as if it were just a bull being knocked on the head."
There have always been critics. This one ended his review by expressing his hope “that the talented author with a higher mission to follow, will not waste any more of his time writing fairy tales for children.”
Luckily for children all over the world, this hope was not realized. The fame and immortality as an author that Andersen longed for with his serious fiction has been realized in his fairy tales and stories. Translated into over one hundred languages and with millions of copies sold, the fairy tales and stories continue to delight children and adults today.
POSTSCRIPT:
This children’s book write-off is a combined effort of a number of respected Epinions members as part of a celebration of our friend, forkids, posting her 400th Epininions review. Please check out the favorite childhood books of my fellow writers:
forkids,Leah, gracef, caconti, cornelia, stonehousellc, Grouch, auntnono, halfsweet, taurusmoon, DoubleCoog, caravan70, kcfoxy, mshawpyle, sleestakk, kchowell, emlin, CurtisEdmonds, fdknight, WorkingMomof2, expono, kimmiko, Bonies7, pogomom, Redlass, poseidon, jrk, sweetpaulie, ErgoPropterHoc.
Translated by Erik Hougaard, this is the only version available in trade paperback that presents the fairy tales exactly as Andersen collected them in...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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