"Our time is the time of the fairy tale": Hans Christian Andersen between Traditional

Craft and Literary Modernism

Author(s): Johan de Mylius
Source: Marvels & Tales, Vol. 20, No. 2, "Hidden, but not Forgotten": Hans Christian
Andersen's Legacy in the Twentieth Century (2006), pp. 166-178
Published by: Wayne State University Press
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Johan de Mylius

"Our time is the time of the fairy tale":

Hans Christian Andersen

between Traditional Craft and

Literary Modernism

The position held by Hans Christian Andersen in world literature is that of a

children's author. In Scandinavia, and to some extent also in Germany, France,
and Eastern Europe, there is an awareness that Andersen was much more than
that: a poet, first of all, known to some extent as an author of novels, travelogues, and poems, but still unknown as the prolific writer of stage plays, which

he was throughout his professional life.

In general, Andersen's fame is based on ten or twelve stories conceived of

as fairy tales and, to his misfortune, often mixed up with stories by the Brothers

Grimm. Ten or twelve stories, however, is an astonishing number, given the fact

that Andersen was a citizen of a small country, and also considering the number of widely known texts by other so-called immortal poets.
The general view of Andersen as "only" a children's author, together with

the exclusive labeling of his texts as "fairy tales," which they are and are not,
has led to the common conclusion that he was and is in terms of "real" litera-

ture an outdated phenomenon of nineteenth-century Romanticism or

Biedermeier. Already, the famous Danish critic Georg Brandes, in an article on

Andersen as a fairy-tale writer (1869),1 besides offering all due admiration,

labeled Andersen as a person of childish nature who wrote in a childish genre

Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2 (2006), pp. 166-178. Copyright 2007 by
Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Ml 48201.

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THE TIME OF THE FAIRY TALE

and belonged to a childish period in literature - namely, Romanticism.

Unwilling as he was, Brandes recognized no trace of modernity in Andersen.
Let us therefore examine a few main issues concerning Andersen's position
both in the history of literature and in the literary heritage of today. These issues

might be:

To what extent is it justified to label Andersen as a children's

author?

Are his so-called fairy tales really fairy tales or something else?

What was Andersen's position in the development of nineteenthcentury literature?

What was his personal position in the context of his time?

First, let us consider the question of Andersen's being an author of children's literature. We have to face the fact that Andersen never really intended

to make a literary career as a children's author. When he published his first

small volumes of fairy tales in 1835, since 1829 he had already established his
name in Danish literature as a prolific author of poems, stage plays, and opera

librettos, not to mention his first travel book (from a travel in Germany),
Shadow Pictures (1831). And his prose debut in 1829, the fantastic, E. T. A.
Hoffmann-like Fodreise ("Travel on Foot"), was well received by the leading
critic and dramatist of the day, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, and therefore together

with his numerous poems gave Andersen an immediate platform as an important name in young literature.

This, however, appeared to be a fragile position, since his huge number of

publications in these first few years of his professional life soon called on harsh
criticism. When Andersen set out on his educational travel between 1833 and
1834 through Germany, France, and Switzerland to Italy, it was his aim to reestab-

lish his position in Danish literature through a lyrical drama - written partly in
Paris, partly in Switzerland - Agriete og Havmanden ("Agnete and the Merman"),

based on a folk song that had already inspired well-known poems by the antago-

nists Jens Baggesen and Adam Oehlenschlger. Instead, Agnete and the Merman
turned out to be a complete failure and seemed to end his fortune as a poet.

Italy literally came to be a rebirth for Andersen, personally and as an

author, even to the extent that he later noted 18 October, the day he first
arrived in Rome (in 1833), as one of his birthdays, similar to his second "birth-

day," 6 September, the day of his first arrival in Copenhagen 1819. (His true
birthday was 2 April 1805.)
During his stay in Italy he raised his head again, encouraged by the famous

Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, and set out on a new path in his production, deciding to "rebuild his fallen house," as he expressed it,2 by entering the
field of novel writing. The novel was a rather new genre in Danish literature at
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JOHAN DE MYLIUS

that time. Only the Romanticist B. S. Ingemann had achieved a success with
novels, but those were historical novels inspired by the novels by Sir Walter
Scott. Andersen took a different lead, penning a series of novels set in the then-

present day, the first of which, The Improvisatore (1835), having an Italian setting inspired by his stay in Italy. The Improvisatore is a contemporary novel with

Romantic elements, but basically it is social and psychological in scope besides

being about love and art.
At the same time he prepared a small volume titled Fairy Tales, Told for
Children, which was followed the same year by a similar volume of fairy tales.

His reason for entering that field was obviously an economical one. In those
early years Andersen was in desperate need of money, which is one reason for

his then often-criticized overproduction. Children's literature appeared to be

one way of earning money, just as writing novels seemed to be a prosperous

future path in literature.

Andersen very often read his new works aloud to friends before publishing them, which he did with the novel The Improvisatore and the first volume
of Fairy Tales, Told for Children. He read both to his older friend and spiritual

mentor, the physicist Hans Christian 0rsted (famous for having discovered
electromagnetism in 1820). We know about 0rsted's reaction from a letter
Andersen wrote to his female friend Henriette Wulff (16 March 1835). In
Andersen's words, 0rsted has told him that although The Improvisatore will
make him famous, the fairy tales will make him immortal, as they are the most

perfect among his works. But to this Andersen adds: "But I don't think so."3
Andersen saw his novel as his main achievement and the fairy tales just as
what they were intended to be: entertainment, written only for financial reasons. Even shortly before his death, after decades of having to comply with the
fact that he had become world-famous as "the father of all children" or "the king

of fairy tales," he decisively protested against the plans for a statue depicting

him with children hanging and crawling all around him. The sculptor A. V
Saabye visited him twice in order to calm Andersen and obtain his consent.
At his second visit, 4 June 1875, just one month before Andersen's death,
Andersen told him directly - and I quote his diaries: "that I was very dissatisfied with his statue of me, that neither he nor anyone else among the sculptors

knew me or had watched me reading aloud, that I would not accept anyone
behind me, nor having children hanging on my back, on my lap or in my
crutch; that my fairy tales were just as much for the adults as for the children,

who would only understand the surface. Only as matured adults they would be

able to see and understand all; that the nave was only part of my fairy tales,
that humor was in fact their salt."4

This is not a matter of the statue as such. Andersen is eager to defend his
reputation as a poet and will not be confined to being just a children's author 168

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THE TIME OF THE FAIRY TALE

although, or maybe even because, he must have been aware of the fact that the

fairy tales, however unintended, had overshadowed everything else and radi-

cally changed his identity as an author. His world-famous shadow had long
replaced his true self - as he had predicted in his 1847 story "The Shadow"
Only Andersen's first five volumes of fairy tales, from 1835 to 1841, were
titled Fairy Tales , Told for Children. They hold a total of 19 texts - a number that

has to be viewed against the background of the total number of 210 texts writ-

ten by Andersen in his short prose genre.5 In the 1840s he omitted the subti-

tle, calling the collections New Fairy Tales. In the 1850s he changed his titles
again, now calling the volumes Stories (" Historier ") and then again mixing the

titles: New Fairy Tales and Stories. This ongoing change of titles indicates the
expanding range of ambition. The original idea of just writing some stories for

children with the aim of earning money was soon given up as Andersen realized that 0rsted was right. In the fairy tales, more than anywhere else, he could

come close to his old dream of expressing what had never been expressed
before, creating what would come close to his conception of a new kind of literature, "short, clear, rich,"6 as he wanted it to be.
This ambition of his is still alive, and was indeed very much so at the time
when "stories" took the place of "fairy tales," and even when the misconception
of Andersen as "only" a children's author had long followed the rise of his fame
abroad. In his fifth novel, To Be or Not To Be (1857) one finds a dialogue between

the Jewish girl, Esther, and the protagonist, Niels. They both hold the opinion

that a new era makes new demands for poetry. An era of natural science has
begun, and therefore poetry and science, Aladdin and his antagonist, Noureddin
(as they were staged in Adam Oehlenschlger's reading drama of 1805, Aladdin ),
should unite forces. "The poet must be on the peak of his era's development," says

Niels; and Esther predicts that a new demigod of poetry will appear:

I find the fairy tale to be the most expanded realm of poetry [she
says], reaching from the blood-fuming graves of antiquity unto the
picture book of the pious, childish legend, absorbing popular poetry
as well as the poetry of art. I see it as the representative of all poetry,

and given the necessary genius, one would be able to make it include

the tragic, the comical, the nave; the irony, the humor - and one
would here have the lyrical chord - the childlike narrative and the
language of the painter of landscapes at one's service.7
The nave or childlike is part of it. But Andersen himself uses the word "childlike," and we can safely stress the last part of the word, "like," not "childish,"
but having the appearance of being "for children."

The question posed earlier asked to what extent Andersen might be called
a children's author. The answer must be a double one: he is in fact a children's
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JOHAN DE MYLIUS

author - by means of his reception worldwide. And as a children's author he

has had a great impact on the development of children's literature, inspiring
later authors of children's literature in the United Kingdom, in Eastern Europe,

in China, and even inspiring the early Disney productions. But on the other
hand, a closer look at his ambitions as an author and at the role of irony and
satire in his stories, at his aesthetics and at the general view of life in the socalled fairy tales, testifies to the fact that Andersen's solidarity with his devoted

children's audience had its limits. He was more of an author for adults, ironically hiding himself behind the mask of a children's author - a textual gesture
revealing a position within literary modernity rather than a position similar to

that of Biedermeier or inferior Romanticism. Andersen displayed navet, but

was in no way naive, neither as a person nor as an author.
This leads us to the second question - that is, whether Andersen's fairy tales
are actually fairy tales, and if not, what are they? Not only did Andersen change
his titles from Fairy Tales , Told for Children to New Fairy Tales to Stories and finally

into New Fairy Tales and Stories , but all the way through his production in this
short prose genre, the traditional concept of "fairy tale" has been questionable.

This is true for several reasons. Seen from the point of view where
Andersen meets all of his readers, young and old, his so-called fairy tales generally differ from the normal standards of a fairy tale. A true fairy tale has a
happy ending. An often-heard formula in this genre is "and they lived happily
ever after." But in Andersen's stories, life develops as it does in reality, not like

in a wish-dream. There is sorrow, misery, and even tragedy in his tales, and
even the more comforting endings often have a sinister background.
"The Steadfast Tin Soldier" may here serve as an example. In its basic structure it is more of a fairy tale than so many other Andersen stories. First of all, it

concentrates on the plot or the action; there is a real story in it, a story that is
rather easy to retell. Also, the protagonist has a wish, and the plot deals with all
the difficulties and obstructions on the way from the wish to its fulfillment. And

incredible coincidences happen on this journey, for the way from wish to wish

fulfillment is in the true sense of a folktale also a journey - leaving the given
base, traveling through a dangerous world, which leads the protagonist astray.
But finally he is "at home."
But there is in this story a double or even triple deviation from the genuine

fairy tale. The first difference has to do with the hero himself, the tin soldier.

He is not only an outsider like Jack the Dullard ("Klods Hans"), but he is also
disabled, since there was not tin enough to make him whole. He was born with

only one leg. His idea of matching the paper ballerina - because she is standing in a position on one leg stretching the other leg backward high up, hiding
it from the soldier's eyes - is part of the story's irony. The match between them

exists only in his imagination. He is disabled in more than one sense, as he has
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THE TIME OF THE FAIRY TALE

no chance of making himself attractive as a male partner for her; he cannot

move and cannot communicate. Although he dreams about her, his only contact with her is that of a voyeur; in her mind he might just as well never have
been there. And his voyage through a dangerous world, with her picture in his

mind, is a journey completely beyond his will and doing. What happens has
no background in his own acting, he is steadfast and makes a point out of being

what he is, of being unchangeable, being a one-legged tin soldier in an everchanging world. The heroic is not his doing. The heroic is only that he endures,

sticks to presenting his rifle, being unchanged by all that happens, even also
unchanged in his feelings toward the ballerina.
Another difference has to do with the heroine. Is she really worth all the

longing and trouble? She doesn't take any notice of the tin soldier, and the
interesting position of her high stretched leg allows the soldier a sexual fascination, which she is in no way prepared to respond to. Like a number of other
characters in Andersen's stories, she only mirrors herself. Consequently, in the

end she is burned to ashes. Nothing is left of her besides the shining paillette
she wore on her dress, and the paillette is burned completely black. Thus the
story punishes the woman for her vanity and for not having responded to the

silent and never expressed male desire. This is a parallel to the punishment of
the princess in "The Swineherd" and to the denouncement of female characters

like Naomi in the novel Only a Fiddler (1837) or Johanne in the story "Under
the Willow-Tree" (1853).
The most grave of all difference between this fairy tale and the folktale is

the ending itself. Without any explanation at all, the tin soldier - having gone
through all the dangerous events on his journey and having returned safely to
the starting point of it all, and again confronted with the nonresponding heroine - is suddenly and without any reason thrown into the oven by the little boy

to whom he was given, together with his "brothers." By coincidence the window opens, and the draft takes hold of the paper ballerina and makes her fly
the same way into the oven, where they are both burned. The soldier feels an
immense heat - maybe from the flames, maybe due to his burning love. But he
is finally transformed through death into his true and hitherto never outspoken

identity When the maid cleans the oven, she finds a tin heart instead of the tin

soldier. Death has given birth to his hidden self.

This is as far as it can be from the folktale and also from the ancient pat-

tern behind Andersen's story. There is an intertextual relation between "The

Steadfast Tin Soldier" and the Greek myth of Polycrates and his ring, rewritten

in a ballad by Friedrich Schiller - "Der Ring des Polykrates" - which Andersen

is likely to have known. But in Andersen's story coincidence and psychological
patterns play a decisive role, whereas in the original myth fate and the relation

between the humans and the gods is the issue.

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JOHAN DE MYLIUS

Another obvious example of how Andersen's stories differ from standard

fairy tales might be "The Little Mermaid" (1837). This is not a folktale either,
but through Andersen it has achieved a position similar to that of a folktale. The

source of inspiration behind the story is a literary one, a literary fairy tale, or

Kunstmrchen, by the German Romantic Friedrich de la Motte Fouqu called

"Undine" (181 1). 8 Changed completely by Andersen, it was still a literary fairy

tale, dealing with themes of religion, nature, art, desire, death, and resurrection. I will not go into an analysis of this text here but shall only mention the
ending. The self-sacrifice of the mermaid and her suicide are completely out of
line with the standards of fairy tales and of children's literature as well. So, too,

is the whole idea of the mermaid's rise from death, her transformation into a

spiritual body, and her continuous endeavors to deserve salvation or immortality in an ongoing existence on the other side. No wonder that the Disney stu-

dios felt compelled to do something radically different with Andersen's

mermaid story. And what did they do? They changed the story into a true fairy

tale, where the mermaid, Ariel,9 finally conquers the sea witch and marries her
one and only love, Prince Erik, and then they live happily ever after. Andersen,

finally and with full effect, is thus placed where his audience believes he
belongs - in the children's corner.

So even where Andersen's fairy tales have the appearance of being true
fairy tales, they often place themselves in a different literary context, miming
the fairy tale and imitating the gestures of children's literature, but behind this
surface they are far beyond both.

Already in the 1830s, when Andersen was in the middle of publishing the
series of volumes called Fairy Tales , Told for Children, his texts develop features

of narration that are antithetic to the basic character of storytelling. No wonder, therefore, that a booklet of his from 1839, Picture Book without Pictures,

contains texts that are not really stories. They are lyrical prose sketches, pic-

tures, or sometimes even poems in prose, all in a loosely connected composition, that of an arabesque.
Picture Book without Pictures was in Andersen's days a rather popular book in

German as well as in English translations, but in Denmark it never reached the

same level of popularity as it did in nineteenth-century translations. It is often
ignored in complete editions of the fairy tales and stories, even in the scientific

ones, where it is generally misplaced among travel books and minor sketches.

In an overview of Andersen's works, Picture Book without Pictures should

hold a strong position among his so-called fairy tales and stories, since its radically different modes of expression, its experimental character in terms of style,

genre, and composition point to the fact that right from the beginning
Andersen was far from doing what he seemed to do - far from simply passing
on a traditional craft, the oral storytelling in its remake as printed literature,
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THE TIME OF THE FAIRY TALE

what the first eighteenth-century German fairy-tale editor Johann Karl August

Musus called an "instrumentalized rural tune."10

To Andersen the fairy tale (or later on, the story) was an open playground,

not limited by rules of the already fixed laws of genre. He allowed himself to
mix narrative positions and voices and to make subtle composites of irony and
the nave, of adult horizons and experiences, and apparently childish or childlike reductions of angles and points of view.

Within a genre that invites a reading along with traditional guidelines,

Andersen allows himself any experiment and mix of expressive modes he might
find suitable in his ongoing quest for a new kind of literature.
Andersen the teller of fairy tales is in fact Andersen the poet. And the poet

Andersen was always very conscious about having a mission in literature. It is

obviously there already in his youth. His first diaries date back to 1825, when
he was attending grammar school in the small provincial town of Slagelse. The
second entry in his first diary says: "Forgive me, Heavenly Father of All, the
bold thoughts that rise in my soul, but they alone encourage me, otherwise I
should sink in despair. I must fulfill the task! I must paint to mankind the pic-

ture, which appears so colorful and strong to my soul. My soul senses that it

can do it and must do it, and consequently thou cannot abandon me" (H. C.
Andersens Dagboger 2; my translation). And later on, in a letter to his female
friend Henriette Hanek dated 15 May 1838, he fantasizes about how he is seeking a poesy that is appropriate for his period. He has before him an ideal picture of it, but he "cannot see it clearly. When will the Messiah of poetry appear,

where will he be born? Happy the one who can be his S. John the Baptist."11

And then again in 1861, at a time when Andersen himself had achieved
international fame as the author of fairy tales and stories, he writes a text that

appears among the fairy tales but is in fact an ecstatic essay, "The Muse of the

New Century." Once again he responds to a call for a hitherto unseen poetry,
all-encompassing, not far from the ideas of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner,12
the idea of das Gesamtkunstwerk , an art of totality.

True, Andersen did not realize such ideas in actual writing himself. But as
an artist he was a genuine child of the nineteenth century, an era of a new progressive mind, a century maybe for the first time in history that was constantly
aware of being a century ; "the nineteenth century," in its developments, its rise

and change, and in its move away from a past and its search for a new world
soon to come.

This is one of many reasons for Andersen's position as a writer. He is constantly changing, constantly in a quest for new land, striving to develop a new

style, "short, clear, rich," as he characterizes it himself. Especially in the less

well known stories or non-stories from the 1850s and on, he appears to be
much of an experimental writer, dissolving the story as such, allowing musical
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JOHAN DE MYLIUS

and lyrical elements to take over in his short prose. Long before post-Romantic

or symbolist, or later on even expressionistic, poets made similar experiments,

Andersen was opening the door for a poetry of a new century Later poets had
a forerunner in Andersen, a storyteller who rapidly crossed the given border-

lines of traditional storytelling and textualized the text, ascribing coherence

and meaning to inherent textual elements as such, allowing them to be the raison d'etre of the text.

Let this be the answer to my third initial question - the question of

Andersen's position in the literature of his century - and let this immediately

lead to the fourth and last question, concerning Andersen's personal position
in and toward the developments of his period.

Andersen was an early modernist in terms of literature, an heir to

Romanticism, but like his friend Franz Liszt and not unlike the developments
toward the visionary - music of new structures in the "Ring" by Liszt's protg,

Richard Wagner, going far beyond the achievements of Romanticism, mixing

genres and modes of expression - this Andersen was also - and here perhaps in
contrast to parallel figures like Liszt and Wagner - in terms of personal life and
views, a participant in and co-traveler on the long journey toward modernity.
Right from the beginning Andersen was aware of himself as a modern man,

a man of his own time, and, hopefully, as a man of future developments. His
own social rise from extreme poverty to the elite of intellectuals and artists of

Europe - the "nobility of spirit," as he often called it - gave him no reason

whatsoever to look back at the past as an era of supreme and even divine character, a golden age, or as the great Danish Romantic poet Adam Oehlenschlger
put it, "the golden top, from which we have sunk, but to where we strive again
to get up."13

In this respect Andersen certainly differed from the former period of

Romanticism in literature. Throughout his life and his writings, he looks at the

preceding centuries as ages of darkness, dirt, and inhumanity. In line with at

least the second part of his own century, he finds himself in development, in
progress, in a rise toward new heights.

In his first travel book, Shadow Pictures (1831), the twenty-six-year-old

Andersen claims: "With giant steps we are approaching a new and better time,
but first Europe must have ended its strives, the wild lava must have stopped
sizzling down the mountain before it can bear the vigorous vines of peace and
prosperity. A sensible freedom, a natural enlightenment shall then spread its mild

summer warmth over the countries, then the new Gimle shall mount behind the
fighting Ragnarokr!" (ch. 9; my translation). Written in 1831, Andersen here has

the recent French Revolution of July 1830 in mind, not, as was common among

Danish authors, as a bogey, but as a necessary and natural outburst, an unavoidable step on the path toward the promised land of the future.
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THE TIME OF THE FAIRY TALE

Where S0ren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher and contemporary of

Andersen, was, like most other Danish authors of that time, a devotee of absolutism and negative in his attitude against liberalism and the upcoming democ-

racy, Andersen took his stand among the liberals, a fact that is never really
mentioned in the literature on Andersen,14 which is mostly occupied with his
visits at manor houses and his friendships with kings and royalties, often seen

as a token of mere social climbing.

But if we read Andersen - and that's where the problem lies, there is more

gossip than reading behind the Andersen biographies! - it becomes obvious

that in line with his own original social experiences and as a constant outsider
in his sympathies, Andersen is quite close to the liberal movement of his time.

An early newspaper article, "The Poor Boy on the Throne of France" (1836),
first reprinted in my book from 2004, Forvandlingens pris: H. . Andersen og
hans eventyr , ends with the words: "For freedom and fatherland." This might be

a motto for young Andersen's political stand. This also explains why he was a

friend of the liberalist leader Orla Lehmann, whom Kierkegaard as a student

attacked vehemently in a number of newspaper articles.
If we take a survey of Andersen's writings, we shall notice that he often

refers to the past as a period of darkness. He does so in "The Galoshes of

Fortune" (1838), where the Councilor of Justice so much wants to live in
medieval Denmark, at King Hans's time. By means of the galoshes he falls back
into his favorite period, but is deeply frightened by seeing that it's all darkness

and dirt. Accordingly, he wants to return to his own time, now happy about its
progress.

In his novel The Two Baronnesses - by a peculiar coincidence published in

1848, the same crucial year of Danish political history in which absolutism
came to an end by the death of King Christian VIII - Andersen describes the
development of Danish society from the ages of cruel suppression of the poor
small farm owners and farmworkers up to another king's death, the death of
King Frederik VI in 1839, and makes himself a spokesman of a future society
of more human understanding of organic solidarity between the social classes.
And in a late story, "Godfather's Picture Book" (1868), Andersen lets the godfather read and show a picture book of Copenhagen's history to the little godson.
And what kind of history is it? It is a development from darkness, dirt, and inhu-

manity up to present-day humanity, glorious art, and general enlightenment symbolized through the introduction of gaslight in the streets of Copenhagen in

1857. That's true progress, spiritual and material progress in one, hailed by an
author who in his own life had left dirt and social despair behind - an author
who did not forget his origins, however, since he often confronts the ruling

classes and the plain people in his works, and since he himself boasted about
being the first Danish author who had "broken the ice" in reading to the working
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JOHAN DE MYLIUS
class. He did so approximately twenty times between 1860 and his death, equally
as often as he read aloud in the students' association.

Returning to the author Andersen, there is obviously much reason behind

his common achievements in the fields of novel writing and fairy-tale writing.
As an author of novels Andersen departed from the style of Ingemann, who was

more or less the only novelist in Denmark before him, turning his back to the

historical novel that praised the medieval period. Instead Andersen created
something completely new, the contemporary novel, depicting the world and
the people of his day. And in the field of fairy tales he made the same move. The

folktale dealt with "once upon a time." But in his self-invented tales Andersen
created stories or fairy tales in a contemporary setting.

As a modernist in personal life and in his art, Andersen managed to show

us that everyday phenomena might reveal the essence of poetry, the true fairy

tale of life. As readers of Andersen, we should always remember what he says

in his story "The Dryad" (1868), a story about the World Exhibition in Paris in
1867: "Our time is the time of the fairy tale."

As a writer of his time and always having his eyes directed toward the yet

unseen, there is much good reason to the fact that around the same time he
published his novel The Two Baronnesses (1848), Andersen was able to pub-

lish a long-prepared philosophical reading drama called Ahasvrus (1847)

about the eternal Jew, ending this drama about the progress of European
thought and civilization with Columbus's discovery of the New World, America.

In Ahasvrus Columbus kneels down and embraces the new land, expressing
in a pathetic gesture his - and his author's! - hopes for future solidarity and

understanding.
Andersen's modernism is not only a literary project, but it is a human and

social project as well. He is a progressive mind, a child of the nineteenth century in its quest for the new, the hitherto unseen - a quest for light and redemption. In this sense Andersen was a true traveler in both literature and life. His

was an eternal journey from darkness toward light. It was the journey of the
mermaid and of so many other figures in his fairy tales and stories - the journey through life and death and into eternity.
Notes

1. See Brandes, "Andersens Eventyr" (1869) and later reprints under the title "H. C.

Andersen som Eventyrdigter" (1899). Brandes's essay was translated in 1886 as

"Hans Christian Andersen."

2. The words are in chapter 7 of his autobiography, M it Livs Eventyr (1855). The
autobiography was translated in 1954 by W. Glyn Jones as The Fairy Tale of My
Life. The quotation here says "raised my sunken fortunes" (134).
3. See de Mylius, H. C. Andersens liv: Dag for dag [Hans Christian Andersen's Life:
Day by Day], 60. The index, by year, of this biography is available in English at
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THE TIME OF THE FAIRY TALE

<http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/liv/tidstavle/vis_e.htmb. The excerpt of the letter

to Henriette Wulff is available there under the year 1835.

4. This is my translation. A slightly different translation can be found in Conroy and

Rossel, 422.
5. The number 210 was established by the Hans Christian Andersen Center at their
Web site: <http://www.andersen.sdu.dk>. Traditionally the number of Andersen
tales is stated as 156, but this only includes the stories published in Denmark by

Andersen in his subsequent volumes of tales and in his collected works from
1853 onward and 1876 onward.

6. Andersen's words can be found in the story (or rather hymnic essay) "The Muse

of the New Century" (1861).

7. This is my translation from Andersen's At vcere eller ikke vcere [To Be or Not to Be] ,

pt. 3, ch. 6. The contemporary translation by Mrs. Anne S. Bushby (1857) is not
divided into three parts but holds twenty-seven forthcoming chapters. Here the

quotation can be found in ch. 24, p. 340. But since Mrs. Bushby changes and
leaves out essential passages in the text, I use my own translation, and for the
sake of comparison I quote her translation here in this note: "I think that the
poetry which has the widest range is that of the romantic and marvellous kind; it
stretches from the blood-recking graves of ancient times, to the pleasant little leg-

ends in children's picture books; it includes within itself popular poetry and more

refined poetry; it is to my idea the representation of all poetry [and here Mrs.
Bushby cuts out the succeeding definitions!]."

8. "Undine" is translated into Danish - in an abridged version - by Adam

Oehlenschlger in his Eventyr af forskiellige Digiere.

9. Ariel is what she is called in the Disney version; in Andersen's version she has no
name.

10. Johann Karl August Musus, Volksmrchen der Deutschen, 1 782-86, Vorbericht an

Herrn David Runkel, p. 12. The quotation goes like this in its full context: "Wenn

Er sich inzwischen den Erzhler als Komponisten denkt, der eine lndliche
Melodie mit Generalba und schicklicher Instrumentalbegleitung versieht: so

hoff ich wird schon alles recht sein."

11. Quotation is from the letter as rendered in de Mylius, Hr. Digter Andersen, 315;
German version: Hans Christian Andersen: Mrchen, Geschichten, Briefe, 335.

12. On his travels to Germany in the 1840s Andersen became personally acquainted
with Liszt, who urged him to listen to Wagner's music - a fact reflected in
Andersen's last novel, Lucky Peter (1870).
13. The quote can be found in Oehlenschlger's early drama St. Hansaften-Spil (Digte
1803).
14. See de Mylius, "Hans Christian Andersen - On the Wave of Liberalism."
Works Cited
Andersen, Hans Christian. At vcere eller ikke vcere. Copenhagen, 1857.
Trans, of Mit Livs Eventyr. Copenhagen, 1855.

Gad, 1971. Vol. 1 of H. C. Andersens Dagb0ger, 1825-1875. Helge Topsoe-Jensen,

gen. ed., 12 vols., 1971-1977.

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JOHAN DE MYLIUS

Andersen og hans eventyr. By Johan de Mylius. Copenhagen: H0st, 2004.

Brandes, Georg. "Andersens Eventyr." Illustrerei Tidende 11 July 1869: 348-49; 18 July

1869: 356-60; 25 July 1869: 373-76.

2: 91-132.

Literary Portraits. Trans. Rasmus B. Anderson. New York, 1886. 61-122.

Conroy, Patricia L., and Sven H. Rossel, trans. The Diaries of Hans Christian Andersen.
Seattle: U of Seattle P, 1990.
The Hans Christian Andersen Center. Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies,

University of Southern Denmark <http://www.andersen.sdu.dk>.

Musus, Johann Karl August. Volksmrchen der Deutschen: Vollstndige Ausgabe , nach

dem Text der Erstausgabe von 1 782-86. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft; Munich: Winkler- Verlag, 1961.
Mylius, Johan de. "Andersen - On the Wave of Liberalism." In Hans Christian Andersen:

A Poet in Time. Ed. Johan de Mylius, Aage Jorgensen, and Viggo Hjornager
Pedersen. Odense: Odense UP, 1999. 109-24.
Insel, 1999.
English at <http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/liv/tidstavle/vis_e.html>.

Oehlenschlger, Adam. Digte. Copenhagen, 1803.

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