Despite coming from humble origins, and growing up in a small provincial Danish town in the early nineteenth century – a country which at that time counted little more than 1 million inhabitants – Hans Christian Andersen became one of the most famous authors in the world. A national icon in Denmark, Andersen’s fairy tales can be read in more than a hundred and fifty languages. He is listed among the ten most widely translated authors in the world, and especially his fairy tales have had a rich afterlife in animated films, such as Walt Disney’s The Little Mermaid (1989), been adapted for the stage and TV productions, and been reimagined by generations of writers from around the world, from Yi Shengtao to Joyce Carol Oates.
While he is arguably best known internationally for a dozen or so fairy tales, including “The Little Mermaid”, “The Princess on the Pea”, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, “The Little Match Girl”, “The Snow Queen” and “The Ugly Duckling”, Andersen was a prolific and versatile writer in many genres. Apart from a total of 156 tales and stories, Andersen published six novels, five travelogues, wrote 51 plays, and more than one thousand poems. He also composed four autobiographies over the span of his career from his debut as a published writer in the early 1820s to his death in 1875.
Perhaps no other portrait of Hans Christian Andersen has had as lasting and profound an influence on the perception of his work as the 1952 Samuel Goldwyn musical film featuring Danny Kaye in the role of the happy-go-lucky storyteller, who left his provincial duck-yard to seek his fortunes and become recognized as the beautiful swan he was always meant to be. There is, of course, not much in this popular retelling of the fairy tales and the story of Andersen’s life that holds true – and, to be fair, the film does not pretend otherwise. It presents the famous storyteller as a rather naïve cobbler, “unlucky in love, who sought to entertain children with his delightful storytelling” (Zipes, The Enchanted Screen, p.252). It gives, and has succeeded in propounding a rosy image “of a [in reality] highly neurotic man, who was afraid to love and had only occasional contact with children” (p.252) – the film constructed an image that literary scholarship and especially two biographies by Jackie Wullschlager and Jens Andersen have attempted to lay to rest by drawing much more complex characteristics of an author whose egocentric quest for fame was accompanied by tortured relationships with his past, his social position, sexual identity and his art. Though such biographies have done much to shed light on the life and character of the author, the likeable, compassionate and modest man-child captured in Danny Kaye’s impersonation has overshadowed, what Jack Zipes has identified as, the “profound and disturbing contribution that Andersen made to the fairy-tale tradition throughout the world” (p.252).
However, Andersen was, from early on in his career, engaged in a romantic self-mythologizing or branding of his own image and authorship. The most successful way Andersen exercised control over his authorship and its reception was through serial autobiographies. The first, unfinished and unpublished until 1925, was the 1832 Levnedsbogen written when Andersen was merely 27 years old. In 1847 he wrote and published in German Das Märchen meines Lebens ohne Dichtung, his first official autobiography written for the collected edition of his works in Germany. The first version of Mit Livs Eventyr [The Fairy Tale of my Life]) came out in 1855 (reissued and enlarged in 1869) and was written for the Danish first edition of his collected works that started to appear in 1853. Where the German edition focused on Andersen’s ascent in life, this text is directed towards a Danish readership, for whom Andersen tried to document both the misrecognition he had encountered at home and especially the appreciation he had met abroad. He begins The Fairy Tale of My Life as follows:
My life is a lovely story, happy and full of incident. If, when I was a boy, and went forth into the world poor and friendless, a good fairy had met me and said, “Choose now your own course through life, and the object for which thou wilt strive, and then, according to the development of thy mind, and as reason requires, I will guide and defend thee to its attainment,” my fate could not, even then, have been directed more happily, more prudent, or better. The history of my life will say to the world what it says to me, – There is a loving God, who directs all things for the best. (Andersen, Fairy Tale of my Life, p.1)
Andersen proceeds to record his birth in his poor but poetic shoemaker-father and kind but ignorant mother’s wedding bed made from a count’s coffin: “That was myself”, he writes with the naïve optimism of Danny Kaye, “Hans Christian Andersen”. Andersen propagated a tale of his own life as a Romantic myth and a moral tale of social ascent that fused his biography with the fairy tale genre with which his name had by then become synonymous.
Early Years
Hans Christian Andersen was born in Odense (c. 6,000 inhabitants), a medieval town close to the countryside, on the island of Fyn on 2 April 1805. He grew up by the small stream that divided the town from the surrounding pastures. However, Odense was, despite its rural character, the second city of Denmark in the early 1800s, as it had its own garrison and was home to the Crown Prince. It was also the only town outside of Copenhagen to have its own theatre, frequently visited by touring companies from Germany and the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. Andersen’s early artistic aspirations were closely tied to his encounters with the theatre in Odense, and he would use his knack for performance and imaginative storytelling to turn his precarious, turbulent childhood experiences into art.
His mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter (1775‒1833), a washerwoman, and his father, Hans Andersen (1782‒1816), a shoemaker, and the son of a shoemaker, Anders Hansen, were married only two months prior to Andersen’s birth. His mother, who was herself an illegitimate child, had given birth to a daughter (Karen Marie, 1799‒1846) outside of wedlock, Andersen’s half-sister. She was brought up outside of the home, presumably with the maternal grandmother, and although Andersen never once mentions her in his biographical writings and spoke of himself as an only child, we do know that Andersen later in life feared that she would seek him out ‒ her name is given to the wicked heroine of the story “The Red Shoes” (1845). His grandmother had herself, following the birth of her third illegitimate child, served eight days in Odense Gaol (Odense Tugthus or O.T.), which would become a haunting figure in Andersen’s second novel O.T. (1836). His paternal grandfather, Anders Hansen, was in Andersen’s childhood committed to Gråbrødre Hospital, a lunatic aylum. Andersen would recall watching his grandfather carving strange figures out of wood – “men with beasts’ heads and beasts with wings; these he packed into a basket and carried them out into the country, where he was everywhere well received by the peasant women because he gave to them and their children these strange toys” (The Fairy Tale of My Life, p.8). If he came to represent artistic origins to Andersen’s own life story, his wife, Anne Cathrine Nommensdatter (1785‒1822), who tended the asylum garden and brought flowers round to Andersen’s childhood home, came to represent the benign, wise old woman, a frequent figure in Andersen’s tales.
Andersen described his own parents in a romantic tone. He thought of his father as a man of a richly gifted and truly poetic mind, and his mother as ignorant of life and the world, but with a heart full of love – portrayed as an alcoholic washerwoman and loving mother by Andersen in the tale “She Was No Good” (1852). Practically illiterate, relying on omens and fortune tellers, she was the source of much of the folktale imagery Andersen would preserve in his early tales. Andersen portrays his relationship to his father as symbiotic. They shared a love for literature. His father would read the comedies of Ludvig Holberg, the fables of Jean de la Fontaine and The Arabian Nights, his craftsmanship was put into making puppet theatres for the dreamy Andersen, and he is commemorated in Andersen’s frequent references to shoes and feet in tales such as “The Galoshes of Fortune” (1838) and “The Little Mermaid” (1837), whose protagonist must sacrifice her voice for human feet.
A major turning point in Andersen’s early life came with the death of his father in 1816. Driven by poverty and lack of work, he had volunteered for the army in 1812. Though he never saw battle in the last stages of the Napoleonic wars, he returned home from Holsten, where he was stationed for two years, a physically and psychologically broken man. He died following prolonged illness only 33 years old. In the Aladdin-inspired tale, “The Tinderbox” (1835), Andersen would later pay homage to his father as the poor soldier who returns home form war. He acquires a magical tinderbox with which he can summon three dogs who provide him with the riches and social recognition his father never saw. Perhaps the one-legged toy soldier in “The Steadfast Tin Soldier” (1838), who falls in love with a paper ballerina, also reflects the perilous, socially stagnant and unhappy life of his father, at the same time pointing to social and sexual anxieties that would follow Andersen throughout his life. Following the death of her husband, Andersen’s mother maintained herself as a washerwoman, and she spent her last years as an alcoholic in the Odense workhouse.
It is safe to say that Andersen’s childhood was anything but a fairy tale. In a letter, Andersen later described himself as a “swamp plant”, pointing to the poverty, alcoholism and promiscuity of his childhood and his life-long struggle to grow out of the social “swamp” into which he was born, but perhaps also capturing his origins by the river between the solid urban life and shifting natural and cultural environment of the countryside. These figures are all present in his perhaps most famous autobiographical tale “The Ugly Duckling” (1843). In the form of a traditional “rise tale”, it captures the solitude, hardship and many trials of the unrecognized genius in the shape of an awkward “duckling”, who eventually realizes his true nature, is recognized by a flock of swans as one of their own and finally joins their flight. Following his confirmation in Odense Cathedral in 1819, Andersen, at only 14, decided to leave Odense to seek a better future for himself and follow his dream of becoming an actor at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen.
On 4 September 1819, Andersen left Odense and arrived two days later in Copenhagen. Years of further hardship followed while he sought access to the Theatre. His unflinching belief in his own abilities, an unbelievable flair for creating connections with influential people, his unsolicited and untrained one-man performances, singing and recitations of poems and dramatic scenes did eventually lead to some important doors being opened to him among the artists and intelligentsia in and around the Royal Theatre. He was eventually taken in and given voice training by the Italian opera singer and director Giuseppe Siboni. The poet Jens Baggesen and the composer Christoph Ernst Friedrich Weyse, who perhaps saw a Romantic ideal in the poor nature’s child from the province, made collections to support Andersen, who was still living a poor and precarious life in Copenhagen. When Andersen eventually had to abandon his hope for a singing career at the theatre when his voice broke, he tried his luck as a dancer and actor and did see his name appear on the bill for the Royal Theatre in a small role as a troll in the ballet Armida in 1821, only to be finally dismissed from the Theatre in 1822. With the doors finally closed to a career as a performer, Andersen turned his attention to the writing of dramatic works as his last resort.
Youthful Attempts
Despite his poor knowledge of grammar and orthography, Andersen was persistent in submitting plays to the Royal Theatre though he received harsh criticism and little encouragement. Already in these early failed attempts, however, we see Andersen experimenting with his trademark witty, terse dialogue, dramatic scenes, colourful characters and a treasure trove of his childhood’s folklore materials as in “The Robbers of Vissenberg on Fyen” (1822), written in Shakespearean blank verse of which only one scene has survived. The play was brutally rejected as unfit for the theatre. However, we also witness an ambitious young writer who was beginning to manoeuvre confidently in the tight-knit literary field of Copenhagen. He succeeded in having a scene from the dismissed play published in the important journal Harpen and publicized his plans for his debut publication Youthful Attempts. Though later dismissed by Andersen as an immature work, he published it under the aspirational pseudonym Villiam Christian Walter, where he placed himself in between two of his literary heroes Shakespeare and Walter Scott. Acting as his own author, publisher, publicist, reviewer and book seller, his debut was published by subscription in 1822. It was prefaced by a sentimental autobiographical prologue, where Andersen introduces himself as the innocent child sitting by the idyllic banks of his childhood river. In a dream-like vision he is endowed with poetic inspiration by nature spirits and divine imagination. Despite the unquestionable ambitions and self-belief presented in Youthful Attempts, it became a financial failure, and most of the print run was scrapped to be used for wrapping paper – a tormenting destiny of unrecognized genius recalled in Andersen’s late story “Aunty Toothache” (1872).
Although his intense self-promotion did not bring the coveted acceptance by the Theatre, a towering figure in the cultural circles, Knud Lyhne Rahbek, spotted a glimpse of raw talent in Andersen, and it was decided to ask the King for a grant to allow Andersen to receive proper schooling under the guidance of Jonas Collin, the Theatre’s managing director. Andersen’s subsequent years at the Grammar School in Slagelse were the unhappiest in his life. At the age of 17, he was several years older and less educated than his peers, he lived and studied under the regime of the terrifying headmaster Simon Meisling, felt exiled from Copenhagen and its theatre, and had to agree not to waste his time on poetic endeavours.
Nevertheless, returning to Copenhagen in 1827 to prepare for his exam at University of Copenhagen, Andersen succeeded in having what would become one of his most popular poems, “The Dying Child”, published first in translation in a German newspaper, then in the most important Danish critic and poet Johan Ludvig Heiberg’s new journal Kjøbenhavns flyvende Post [The Flying Post]. The sentimental poem, which gained an extraordinary and lasting popularity in Denmark and abroad, established the recurring mother-child motif and several darker themes that would reappear throughout Andersen’s work such as loneliness, despondency and death, as seen, for instance, in “The Little Match-Girl” (1845). Andersen included the poem in his first collection “Digte” (Poems) in 1830 – a publication where he also included “Dødningen” (The Dead Man), a folktale from “Fyn” rewritten in a literary style reminiscent of the German folktale collector and satirist Musäus. Andersen would later revise the tale for his second collection of fairy tales in 1835, where it was published as “Reisekammeraten” [The Travelling Companion].
At the same time, Andersen was experimenting with the prose genre resulting in the grotesque, satirical genre-hybrid Journey on Foot from Holmen’s Canal to the Eastern Point of Amager (1829), which drew on Andersen’s life, repurposed past writings and exhibited links to the German Romantics E. T. A. Hoffmann, Jean Paul and Ludwig Tieck. At first self-published, as the publisher Reitzel would not pay what Andersen demanded, Journey on Foot quickly sold out, and Reitzel, who would become Andersen’s life-long publisher from then on, finally agreed to his price and put out a second print run. Now a successful young author, the protégé of leading critics, writers and the board of the Royal Theatre, Andersen was also due to finally have his first play, a vaudeville, accepted for the stage, and in 1829 Kjærlighed paa Nicolai Taarn premiered at the Royal Theatre. Later that year Andersen passed his exam at the university, where he was examined by another of his benefactors, the physicist, H.C. Ørsted, famed for his work on electromagnetism, and the first to notice the potential of Andersen’s fairy tales.
While Andersen’s writings before and beyond his fairy tales are little known, they tell a story about a career long and hard in the making; and although Andersen did much to propagate the myth of his own individual genius, a miraculous rags-to-riches story where he was indeed eventually recognized for the beautiful swan he had always been, his early biography tells of a more complex, less naïve and certainly less rosy journey, where desolation, hardship and misrecognition was overcome (but never forgotten) partly by his impressive persistence in adversity but most importantly by his unique ability to create connections, solicit support for his cause, and to navigate social, cultural and literary circles of which he had very limited experience. Andersen’s literary career is established on and draws much of its material from his experiences as a “social traveller”, journeys that often end in his character’s disillusionment and death such as in “The Fir Tree” (1844), “The Little Mermaid”, “The Snow Man” (1861) and “The Dryad” (1868).
Andersen the Traveller
On 16 May 1831, Andersen left Copenhagen for a six-week tour through the Harz Mountains to Leipzig and Dresden and back to Copenhagen via Berlin and Hamburg. This was Andersen’s first of 29 travels abroad that would take him to every corner of Europe, to Turkey and Morocco. Disguised as Romantic educational grand-tours sponsored by the Danish king, his travels throughout Europe resembled international publicity tours, from where he reported his meetings with the literati and aristocracy, who lend their cultural and social positions to the shaping of Andersen as a major European writer. In his biography, Jens Andersen portrays the author as the nineteenth-century traveller par excellence: he discovered new travel destinations, was constantly restless in his pursuit of new sites and sights and in his quest for new experiences and inspiration. Andersen was a cosmopolitan traveller, who dreamt of “a harmonious Europe based more on cultural and linguistic communities than on nationalistic demands for borders and narrow, regional political interests”, a traveller for whom “it was strangely easy … to traverse borders and cultures” (Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen, pp.482‒483).
Experiences from his travels were meticulously recorded and sketched in his diaries and published travelogues. Lyrical, fleeting impressions from his first journey were published in 1831 as Shadow Pictures: From a Journey to the Harz Mountains, Saxon Switzerland, etc. etc. in the Summer of 1831 with notable inspiration from Heinrich Heine’s Die Harzreise (1826) and Jens Baggesen’s travel account The Labyrinth (1792‒3). Andersen’s 1833‒44 journey through Germany and Switzerland to Italy and Rome provided rich material for his debut novel, The Improvisatore (1835), which might be read as yet another self-portrait relocated to Italy. The protagonist, a young, poor, but talented boy, Antonio, finds benefactors and a new home in an affluent Borghese family. The novel proceeds to account his intricate love relations and his inevitable development into an artist. Although a major success in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, a young Søren Kierkegaard famously attacked Andersen’s debut novel arguing that to produce credible novel characters it was essential for an author to annihilate himself. Andersen’s travels not only left their traces in travelogues and on his novels, but also provided settings for several of his famous tales: the Swiss setting in “The Ice Maiden” and the Mediterranean in “The Little Mermaid”, and Andersen would submit early mass-tourism to poetic treatment in the tales “A Thousand Years from Now” (1852) and “The Dryad”.
Having had three novels published from 1935 to 37, Andersen abandoned novel writing for a decade to focus on his tales. His fourth novel, The Two Baronesses, was first published in English in 1848 to prevent piracy, and a year later in Denmark. Contemporary Danish reviewers felt that the novel was clearly written for a foreign readership, and his novels were generally not well received in his native Denmark. While he found praise in the United Kingdom as the Danish Walter Scott, his novels are today largely forgotten; however, a major recent study of Andersen’s work by Paul Binding recuperates the importance of Andersen’s novels and places them alongside Scott, Dickens, Hugo, Stendahl, Balzac and Turgenev.
Writing the Modern Fairy Tale
In 1835, Andersen published the first slim booklet of tales under the title “Fairy tales, as told for children”. It included the now classic tales “The Tinderbox”, “Little Claus and Big Claus”, “The Princess on the Pea” and “Little Ida’s Flowers”. Although Andersen at first considered his tales less important, they had an immediate appeal to a nineteenth-century audience interested in folklore, the untamed nature of the child and a storyteller who came from humble and rural origins. “The Tinder Box” was, according to Andersen himself, inspired by folk tales he had heard as a child “in the spinning room and during the harvesting of the hops”, but it was also strongly influenced by his father’s reading from The Arabian Nights and the Danish Romantic poet Adam Oehlenschläger’s poetic treatment of the Aladdin figure (Aladdin; or, The Wonderful Lamp, 1805). While often credited with almost single-handedly having invented the literary fairy tale, Andersen’s tales drew on a wide European tradition of popular fiction. Most notably we find in Andersen’s existential fantasy “The Shadow” (1847) inspiration from Adelbert von Chamisso’s 1814 novella Peter Schlemihl’s Miraculous Story, and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s fairy-tale novella Undine (1811) is the source for “The Little Mermaid”. In fact, very few of Andersen’s 156 fairy tales and stories could be said to be directly inspired by known folktales. However, Andersen was in his tales drawing on an eclectic range of sources including a wealth of folk belief, myths and legends noticeable particularly in his choice of motifs and characters, confirming Andersen’s own belief, as he stated it in 1868, that all literature “begins with folk-poetry” (A Visit to Portugal, p.50).
While there was a growing interest in and acceptance of fairy tales in the Romantic literary circles of his time, his tales were not met with immediate critical acceptance in his home country. In a short preface to the third booklet from 1837, Andersen included a note directed “To the older readers”, in which he advised that “one should hear the narrator in the style, the language therefore had to approximate the oral diction; they are told for children, but the older ones may also listen in”. Here Andersen is pointing out the now famous double-articulation of his narrative style, partly in order to counter elitist contemporary criticism of his non-literary oral diction, but also to ensure a place for his tales in the literary canon as more than just tales for the nursery, and (the shrewd marketer that he was) to expand the potential audience for his stories. Andersen was vain and determined to be remembered as a serious artist of novels and tales that adults would ponder and read with wonder, not because of the talking toys, the “staffage”, as Andersen called it, which was intended for the children, but because of their profound meanings and contemporary relevance. By substituting the generic title of “Fairy tales, as told for children” for New Fairy Tales (1844), Stories (1852), and New Fairy Tales and Stories (1858), Andersen attempted to distance himself further from the nursery, and would probably have been astonished to see what Hollywood and Disney made of his life and tales, though he would surely have been excited by his continuing fame.
In Andersen’s hands, the fairy tale as a genre is not a stranger to modern experiences and concerns. Andersen could turn just about anything into a tale. For instance, in “A Drop of Water” (1847), he demonstrated that, with an attuned poetic vision resembling the scientist’s magnifying glass, the artist, or the Seer (as he referred to the poet in the travelogue In Sweden), may find beauty and poetry in the most prosaic details of everyday life. “A Drop of Water” also contains a biographical element as it presents Andersen’s own experiences in London in 1847, the largest, busiest, and most polluted metropolis in nineteenth-century Europe. In his diary from London, we see Andersen marvelling at the crowded streets, the unfamiliar urban characters, the incessant traffic, advertisement posters, and the shops illuminated by gas lights. In fact, the tale was first published in English in the collection of tales entitled A Christmas Greeting to my English Friends (1847), which suggests that it was written with his experiences in London fresh in mind, and, not least, under the influence of Charles Dickens with whom he had stayed during his time in England. On his many travels, Andersen encountered the attractions and horrors of urban life in the century’s largest metropolitan areas such as London, Paris and Naples, and he would refer to these experiences directly in his tales to instil wonder in his Danish readers in the comparatively provincial capital of Copenhagen.
The social reality and technological advances of modernity can be found throughout Andersen’s career from his early novella A Journey on Foot, to the futuristic “Thousands of Years from Now” (1852) and “The Great Sea Serpent” (1871), which dramatized the laying of the transatlantic telegraph cable, and in treatments of the urban experience in tales such as “Godfather’s Picture Book” (1868) and “The Dryad” – tales that are both driven by a desire for the new and by a sense of loss or nostalgia for simpler times and for the past.
Andersen’s paradoxical vision for the fairy tale as an ancient literary form ready-made for capturing modernity is expressed in his 1851 travelogue In Sweden. The last chapter, which amounts to a new program for his writin,g or as he called it “poetry”, has the title “Poetry’s California”. The California Gold Rush of 1848 lends itself to Andersen as a metaphor for the unearthing of valuable materials in the poetry of his time. The text is composed as a dialogue between a poet who claims that modern times have nothing new to bring to poetry, which should in turn be thoroughly engrained in the past, and the narrator’s voice that claims that poetry should turn to modern science for its aspirations: “Our time is the time of discoveries”, he says, “poetry also has its new California”. Poetry’s California is a modern-day Aladdin’s treasure cave to Andersen, and it is set to replace the Romantic world and poetry of his childhood’s Aladdin figure.
While Andersen in the last decades of his life became preoccupied with the turbulent modern world he witnessed on his travels, to his great disappointment, the most influential Danish and European critic of the late nineteenth century, Georg Brandes, discounted the possibility of the fairy tale to represent modern life in his seminal articles about Andersen’s fairy tales first published in the weekly newspaper Illustreret Tidende in 1869. According to Brandes, Andersen’s genius lay in his childish “universal spirit”. However, Andersen criticized Brandes for his failure to mention his modern tale “The Dryad”, wherein, as he wrote in a letter, “the poetry of all things material in our time is extracted”. The fairy tale was, to Brandes, the antithesis to modern life; as the fairy tale was timeless and universal, modernity appeared as fleeting and temporary. However, as Andersen found a growing interest in capturing the modern experience, so did his tales also depart from the classical fairy tale in significant ways.
Despite Brandes’s dismissive view of Andersen’s abilities as a modern writer but in keeping with Brandes’s evaluation of his universal genius, following his tours to Germany and England in the late 1840s, Andersen and his fairy tales would be met with phenomenal acclaim among readers and writers alike. Although his fear of long journeys by sea would keep Andersen from traveling to the United States, he was also celebrated there as a figure who transcended national and linguistic origins and became every nation’s author, as claimed by one of his first English biographers, the folklorist and historian R. Nisbet Bain. He wrote that, “Andersen … is the one foreign author whom we can never regard as an alien; whom, from long familiarity and association, we have come to look upon as one of ourselves” (v). Having throughout his life felt like an alien swamp plant, and turned his anxieties about poverty, misrecognition and social exclusion into a vast literary production, he had at the end of his life achieved recognition across social, geographical and linguistic divides.
References
Hans Christian Andersen, A Visit to Portugal 1866,
transl. by Grace Thornton, London: Peter Owen, 1972.
Hans Christian Andersen, The Fairy Tale of my Life: An
Autobiography, New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000.
Jens Andersen, Hans Christian Andersen: A New Life,
transl. by Tiina Nunnaly, New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2005.
R. Nisbet Bain, Hans Christian Andersen: A Biography, New
York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1895.
Paul Binding, Hans Christian Andersen: European Witness,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014.
Jachie Wullschlager, Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a
Storyteller, London: Allen Lane, 2000.
Jack Zipes, Hans Christian Andersen: The Misunderstood
Storyteller, Abingdon: Routledge, 2005.
Jack Zipes, The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fairy
Tale Films, Abingdon: Routledge, 2011.
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Citation: Stougaard-Nielsen, Jakob. "Hans Christian Andersen". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 19 July 2018 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=108, accessed 21 November 2024.]
