Andersen's Fairy Tales (with and Introduction by Edmund Gosse)

By Hans Christian Andersen

19th century Danish author Hans Christian Andersen was one of the most prolific writers of fairy tales to ever have lived. His unique literary gift for storytelling was not immediately recognized as his first fairy tale collections sold poorly. The humor of Andersen’s writing was often lost in translation and his darker sensibility was not fully appreciated at first. However by the mid 1830s he would begin to gain the popularity that he so justly deserved. His works, which were often retellings of folk tales he had heard as a child, are noted for their lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity, and for the dark humor that made them appealing to mature readers. This collection draws together thirty-five of his most popular tales, including “The Little Mermaid,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Nightingale,” “Thumbelina,” “The Princess and the Pea” and “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Andersen’s stories have inspired numerous adaptations and are likely to remain as some of the most popular legends for generations to come. This edition includes an introduction by Edmund Gosse.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
• Release date: Jan 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781420953633

Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875) was a Danish writer and author of many notable books including The Snow Queen. He specialized in writing fairytales that were inspired by tales he had heard as a child. As his writing evolved his fairytales became more bold and out of the box. Andersen's stories have been translated into more than 125 languages and have inspired many plays, films and ballets.

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ANDERSEN’S FAIRY TALES

By HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

Introduction by EDMUND GOSSE

Andersen’s Fairy Tales

By Hans Christian Andersen

Introduction by Edmund Gosse

From the translations of Susannah Mary Paull, Charles Boner, and other anonymous translators

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5362-6

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5363-3

This edition copyright © 2016. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: ‘And the Whole Day they Flew Onward’ by Harry Clarke (1889-1931), illustration from The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen / British Library, London, UK / © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

The Marsh King’s Daughter

Thumbelina (Tommelise)

The Story of a Mother

The Ice Maiden

I. LITTLE RUDY

II. THE JOURNEY TO THE NEW HOME

III. THE FATHER’S BROTHER

IV. BABETTE

V. HOMEWARDS

VI. THE VISIT TO THE MILL

VII. THE EAGLE’S NEST

VIII. THE NEWS WHICH THE PARLOUR-CAT RELATED

IX. THE ICE-MAIDEN

X. THE GOD-MOTHER

XI. THE COUSIN

XII. THE EVIL POWERS

XIII. IN THE MILLER’S HOUSE

XIV. THE VISIONS OF THE NIGHT

XV. CONCLUSION

The Steadfast Tin Soldier

The Snow Queen

PART THE FIRST

PART THE SECOND

PART THE THIRD

PART THE FOURTH

PART THE FIFTH

PART THE SIXTH

PART THE SEVENTH

The Little Match Girl

The Elfin-Mount

The Storks

The Nightingale

The Wild Swans

The Princess and the Pea

Little Tuk

The Fir Tree

The Shadow

The Bell

The Galoshes of Fortune

A BEGINNING

WHAT HAPPENED TO THE COUNSELLOR

THE WATCHMAN’S ADVENTURES

THE EVENTFUL MOMENT—A MOST UNUSUAL JOURNEY

THE CLERK’S TRANSFORMATION

THE BEST THING THE GOLOSHES DID

The Sandman

The Red Shoes

The Emperor’s New Clothes

The Old House

The Happy Family

The Swineherd

The Flying Trunk

The Leaping Match

The Shepherdess and the Chimney-Sweeper

The Ugly Duckling

The Naughty Boy

The Tinder Box

Little Claus and Big Claus

The Travelling Companion

The Elf of the Rose

The Buckwheat

She Was Good For Nothing

Little Ida’s Flowers

Introduction

Such an original species of writing as that in which Andersen excelled does not burst full-blown upon the world. It is the result of many experiments, many accidents, even, perhaps, of some blunderings. Andersen did not set out deliberately to be a teller of fairy stories, much less did he expect or desire to be mainly known as the composer of these smaating, as he called them, of these trifles or bagatelles. He set out in life intending to be a serious poet, a writer of five-act dramas, a novelist of passion and society. Almost to the very last he persisted in believing that the critics and the public had made a mistake, and that his ambitious works, in the conventional branches of the profession, were what he would really live by. Don’t you think, he said to me in a sort of coaxing whisper, toward the very close of his life—"don’t you think that people will really come back to ‘The Two Baronesses’ when these smaating have had their day? The Two Baronesses is an old novel of Andersen’s, which I had not read, so I could only bend my eyes politely. But that was in 1874, and people have neither come back to The Two Baronesses nor forgotten The Ugly Duckling and The Snow Queen."

Unwilling as he was to admit it, however, Andersen could not fail to be aware that the Fairy Tales were his real possession and treasure-trove. In 1862 he deigned to recollect how these stories came into existence, and his notes,—which I do not happen to have seen translated or even referred to,—although tantalizingly scanty, are very valuable. He put back the germ of his fairy-story telling to the year 1829, when he published, along with a little collection of his poems, a tale in prose called The Dead Man. This was a treatment of one of the disquieting, half-humorous, half-melancholy legends which Andersen had heard when in his childhood he haunted the Odense workhouse and its old women. He deliberately tried to tell it in the tone of Musäus, a German author of the eighteenth century, who began by being an imitator of Richardson, and who ended as the first man to collect and retell, after a somewhat over-genteel fashion, the folk-tales of Germany. Musäus possessed no great talent, but it is interesting to see him, who set the Brothers Grimm and all the multitude of modern folk-lorists in motion on the one hand, giving the start-word in a very different direction to Andersen. For The Dead Man—which was quite a failure—was the story which, entirely rewritten, appeared in 1831 as The Traveling Companion.

In Andersen’s account of his journey in the Harz Mountains, published in 1831, there is to be found a story of an old king, who believed that he had never heard a lie, and therefore promised that the man who should first successfully tell him a falsehood should receive the princess, his daughter, and half his royal kingdom. Here the fairy-tale tone is clearly perceptible, but it has not yet discovered its form or its final character. But in 1835 there appeared a little pamphlet,—the originality and importance of which it would be difficult to appraise too highly,—Fairy Tales Told for Children. This precious pamphlet of sixty-one pages contained four tales, The Tinder-Box, Little Claus and Big Claus, The Princess and the Pea, and Little Ida’s Flowers. These four stories are included in the present collection, and the reader may find it interesting to detach these, with a view to observing what we may call Andersen's primitive manner in the evolution of a fairy tale.

There was one peculiarity in these stories which startled a Danish ear, and led at first to almost universal reproof by the critics, and neglect by cultivated readers. Like the other literatures of Europe, and more than some,—more than our own, for instance,—the poetry and prose of Denmark were held at that time in the bondage of the proprieties. An author still had to consider not merely what he should, but also what he should not say. There was little attempt to reproduce, even in comedy, the actual daily speech of citizens, but something more polished, more rhetorical, more literary, in fact, was put into the lips of even vulgar persons before they could be permitted to speak in public. It would not be easy to make an Englishman or a Frenchman understand how startlingly lax and puerile the conversations in these little stories of Andersen’s appeared; perhaps a German would realize it more. It was the first time that children and uneducated people of the lower middle class had been allowed to speak in Danish literature, and their naiveté and their innocent picturesqueness were at first an absolute scandal. Conceive what Johnson and Burke would have thought of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and you have a parallel to the effect of Little Claus and Big Claus upon academic Denmark.

But in this first typical specimen there were differences to be observed. The Tinder-Box and The Princess and the Pea are not of the same class as Little Ida’s Flowers. Nothing of its kind could be more exquisite than the last, and Andersen never excelled its lightness and brightness of fancy, its intimate recognition of the movement of a child’s imagination. Only a great poet could have written it—only the great poet who subsequently wrote so many other pure fairy tales of the same enchanting innocence and ebullience. But that poet needed not to have had Andersen’s peculiar training. As a matter of fact, Little Ida’s Flowers was composed in consequence of hearing the small daughter of Thiele make remarks about the plants in the Botanic Gardens of Copenhagen; remarks the delicious artlessness of which so delighted Andersen that he noted them down, and reproduced them in the setting which we all know so well. This is an example of the side of Andersen’s genius on which he most closely approaches Lewis Carroll.

If from this lovely fantasia we turn to the other three stories, we see something different, something more entirely original, and suggestive of a more surprising departure. These also were suggested to Andersen by matters lurking in his recollection. He never, perhaps, absolutely invented the material of his tales. But these were legends the crude germ or kernel of each of which he had heard long ago, in his unparalleled childhood—fragments of the prejudice and ignorance and mother-wit of the untaught peasant mind. These were atoms of folklore left sticking to his memory from the days when he went weeding in the garden of the lunatic asylum, or strolled along among the hop-pickers at Bogense. These worn fragments of a primitive age, shapeless and unsuggestive to any less penetrating imagination than his, Andersen redeemed from their low uses, and clothed again with his fancy and his humanity.

The next little collection, that of 1836, contained three, and that of 1837 only two stories. It appeared in these that Andersen had become a little shy of his old, direct folk-lore. He had put forth his discovery, and the world had proved averse to it. Here was The Traveling Companion, in its remodeled form, which, indeed, was actual folklore; but the others belonged to the modern, the invented, or, as we English may roughly call it, the Alice section of the stories. The Naughty Boy came out of Anacreon; The Emperor’s New Clothes, remarkable as showing the first complete development of Andersen’s satiric irony, from Spanish sources. In Thumbelina and The Little Mermaid we have pure fairy tales, works of literary fancy, unattached to any genuine folklore. The last mentioned, however, was the earliest of all Andersen’s tales to become widely popular. It was in The Wild Swans, of 1838, that he first dared to come back to actual Danish legend. By this time he had begun to conquer his public, and he now went on writing as it happened to please him best. Oddly enough, he himself was never perfectly converted. To the last, and in the presence of his immortal little masterpieces, he continued to be slightly scandalized at the liberties he had persuaded himself to take with classical Danish.

Perhaps there never existed a more remarkable instance of the adaptation of extraordinary circumstances to the purposes of a unique genius than was seen in the case of the early training of Andersen. His childish days had been spent in strange places, in still stranger company. He must have been about five years of age when he went with his parents to dine with the jailer of the common prison in Odense. Two prisoners waited at table, but Hans Christian could eat nothing; his brain was full of all the stories of robbers and dungeons and enchanted castles that he had ever heard of, and he had to be put to bed. But when he was left alone, he characteristically tells us, he forgot to be frightened, for he turned the whole incident into a wonderful fairy tale. How he played about in the corridors of the madhouse, and how a beautiful lunatic nearly frightened him to death, is well known; but this is an incident which could have happened, one is inclined to say, to no poet but Andersen. He has given us a most curious account of the long hours he used to spend in the old women’s ward of the poorhouse at Odense, and how he offered to sketch the internal economy of any one of the ancient ladies, with chalk, on the door of the room. With these and other ingenuities he so diverted them that they declared with one voice that so clever a child was not long for this world. But, in their turn, to this ignorant, freakish, wild little boy, the old women told stories, legends of troll and water-sprite, ghost and goblin and wizard, such as in those days the uninstructed imagination of the Scandinavian peasant teemed with.

When the child was eleven, his father, the gentle, consumptive young cobbler, fell deadly sick. Already Andersen had gained a reputation as a clever, uncanny boy (he is cracked, like his grandfather, people said in Odense); accordingly when his father was very ill, his mother sent him out at night to walk by the river, for, she said, if thy father is to die this time, thou wilt meet his ghost. The poor frightened child came home, having seen nothing, and his mother’s superstition was assuaged; but the third day after that her husband did die. Little Andersen and his mother watched with the corpse, and all night long a cricket chirped; till at last the mother sat up and cried to it, You need not call to him; he is dead! In this amazing old-world atmosphere of terror and spiritual bewilderment was the delicate and nervous brain of this great modern poet nurtured, and we must not forget it if we would understand in what manner he was prepared for the composition of the Fairy Tales.

It may be said that in his address to his imaginary audience Andersen never advanced beyond what he recalled of his own childhood in those loose, undisciplined and fruitful years when it was doubtful whether he would become a tailor’s apprentice or a super at a provincial theater. It is to what he recollected of his own dimly-luminous mind before he set out for Copenhagen, in 1819, that he addressed, in later life, the ingenuous language of his tales. Hence he uses the simplest words, the most concrete images, is occupied with the rudest tastes and the humblest ambitions. If he wishes to conjure up power, it is always in the person of an old king, generally a peasant in intelligence and experience, but known to be a king by his wearing a golden crown and an ermine robe, and by his carrying a scepter. So, if he wishes to suggest wealth, he uses none of its symbols or evidences, but quantities of bullion—bars of gold, or bags of minted money. The child’s want of clear distinction between the seen and the unseen, the experienced and the impossible; its naive acceptance of animals and flowers, and even of the winds and the stars and the inanimate domestic objects around it, as creatures allied to itself, with which it may be in mutual comprehension, the dullest of which, in fact, is more in sympathy with it than an ordinary grown-up person,—all this was realized by Andersen with a clairvoyance which becomes almost supernatural when we recollect that no previous writer had ever seriously dreamed of it, and that this was a little chamber of literature into which even Shakespeare had never forced his way.

It has taken the world sixty years to become perfectly assured that Andersen, in his own best line, is an author of the very highest originality, that—given the particular genre—he is as great in it as Milton or—shall we say?—Molière in his. Nothing less than this can be claimed for Andersen,—absolute supremacy in his own special field. Only one man perceived this fact, however, at first. This was the Dane, Johan Ludvig Heiberg, the acutest critic of Northern Europe in those years, who, though hitherto not well affected to Andersen’s writings, told him bluntly as soon as he had read The Princess and the Pea, that here he had struck at last into the road that leads to immortality. But the excellent Frederika Bremer could only wish that The Little Mermaid had been brought down to the level of a young child’s apprehension, and most of what were considered the best judges of that age were shocked at the humor which gives the very salt of life to the fairy tale, which, without it, is apt to be a little mawkish. Andersen’s autobiography is full, perhaps over full, of instances of want of appreciation of his writings by those from whose praise he anticipated the most pleasure. But the children soon took up the matter themselves, and paid him an abundant and enthusiastic devotion which dragged their elders along with it.{1}

There can be little doubt that one peculiarity of Andersen’s imagination especially endeared him to the minds of the children. A child is like a savage in its calm acceptance of incongruous elements, in the ease with which it passes over essential difficulties of tone and plane. Andersen’s art consists largely of the adroitness with which he blends together ideas which in the real world cannot be conceived of in combination or even in relation. He is unique, for instance, in his mingling of images from the Christian religion and from primitive forms of superstition. When The Traveling Companion, for example, opens, Johannes is at the parish church, and the people are singing a hymn. But in the tower of the old church a brownie or nisse is squatting, and it waves its red cap at him. He follows the bells through the forest, and with a good conscience enters another little church, listening to the word of God. This does not prevent him from presently enjoying the gambols of the elves in the woodland. He is a good little modern boy, living in a quiet parish, among God-fearing people, but the mountain opens before him and he enters without surprise the great hall where the king of the trolls sits under a canopy of pink spiders’ webs, and listens to the choir of great black grasshoppers playing on Jews’ harps. But he is the same sober Christian lad as ever, and in due time overthrows all his enemies by his honesty and sagacity. Here the mixture of spiritual ideas is bewildering, if we only persuade ourselves to realize it, and involves an incongruity which no other teller of fairy stories allows himself to undertake. In one of Grimm’s stories, for instance, or of Asbjörnsen’s, we have trolls, and wicked princesses, and imps with enormous noses, but they are not mixed up with the singing of hymns in church and preparing for a first communion. But in the mind of a child this or any incongruity is possible, and the mind of Andersen was exactly like that of a child. Hence, even when his topsy-turvy world is most startling, we are never scandalized. Probably no one was ever found to accuse Andersen of profanity.

A somewhat similar moral incongruity would not be quite so easy to condone, if we were inclined to take a very high ground. The soldier in The Tinder-Box cuts off the head of the old woman and steals her treasures with shocking ingratitude, yet with complete impunity. His ultimate good fortune even springs directly from his crime. The behavior of the merchant’s son to the Turkish princess in The Flying Trunk was deplorable, but Andersen does not seem to regret it. Little Claus can hardly be said to live up to any recognized standard of morals in his relation to Big Claus. But all this is very characteristic of the childish instinct. Life to a child is a phantasmagoria, and thanklessness and rapine and murder are amusing shadows which the unsubstantial human figures throw as they dance in the flicker of the firelight. It is precisely the absence of any priggishness in this respect, and the daring with which he sets himself against all the obvious school-room axioms of conduct that help to make up the astounding fascination of Andersen. His very savagery endears him to the little innocent barbarians of the nursery.

It was a favorite exercise with Andersen to read aloud his fairy tales, soon after they were written, to some fortunate friend. The number of those who can say that they have enjoyed this privilege must now be growing small. In England it must be extremely small, for Andersen’s latest visit to this country was paid in 1857. The present writer, therefore, is tempted to believe that there is some little rarity, at least, in the experience which he is able to relate, and the more so from a particular which will be presently mentioned. Only on a single occasion did Hans Christian Andersen read to me one of his unpublished fairy tales, and, indeed, I had not the honor of knowing him until he had given to the world the main bulk of his productions. But in the summer of 1872 I had the happiness of listening to The Cripple. At that time Andersen had a suite of rooms in Copenhagen, but he was much more frequently to be found at the mansion of some friends just outside the fortifications, called Rolighed or Quietude. This house had been the residence of several interesting people, among others of no less a person than Örsted. It was now owned by a wealthy and liberal merchant, Mr. Moritz Melchior, who had rebuilt it, and who had turned it into a miniature of Rosenborg Castle, with a tower, and with high balconies overlooking the Sound.

In this house Andersen was so constantly welcome that a portion of it—three or four charming rooms—was set apart entirely for his service, and he came and went in them without constraint. Rolighed is the subject of Andersen’s latest poem, in which he says:—

"My home of homes, where behind the slope of elder-bushes

My life regained its sunshine and my harp its tone,

To thee I bring with gratitude this blithe song of mine!"

It was here, in his bright room open to the east, with the long caravan of ships going by in the Sound below, like a flock of wild swans, as he said, with the white towns of Malmo and Landskrona sparkling on the Swedish coast, and the sunlight falling on Tycho Brahe’s island, that Andersen proposed to recite to me a new fairy tale. He read in a low voice, which presently sank to almost a hoarse whisper; he read slowly, out of mercy to my imperfect apprehension, and as he read he sat beside me, with his amazingly long and bony hand—a great brown hand, almost like that of a man of the woods—grasping my shoulder. As he read, the color of everything, the twinkling sails, the sea, the opposite Swedish coast, the burnished sky above, kindled with sunset. It seemed as if Nature herself were flushing with ecstasy at the sound of Andersen’s voice.

When he had finished, he talked to me a little about the story, and confided to me that he intended this, The Cripple, to be his last. He was very much pleased with it; he thought it summed up all his methods, and that in a certain sense it presented symbolically his lesson, his imaginative message, to mankind. The reader may not recollect this story, since it is far from being the best known of Andersen’s tales; nor is it really one of the most characteristic, for there is nothing supernatural or fantastic about it. It has, therefore, not been included in this collection. It presents a little complicated episode of humble manners. A gardener and his wife have five children, of whom the eldest, a fine boy, has the misfortune to be a bed-ridden cripple. The parents, worthy, narrow people, live engrossed in their materialistic interests, and when someone from whom a present is expected gives the cripple a book, they ungraciously say to one another, He won’t get fat on that. But it is a book of fairy tales, and the boy’s whole spiritual life is awakened by the vistas these open for him in every direction. He finds two simple and direct parables, which he reads over and over again to his parents, and their hearts, too, are humanized and melted. Finally, a little dark bird, like the Emperor of China’s nightingale, is presented to him, and in a supreme nervous effort to save its life the cripple regains the use of his own limbs. In this story Andersen intended to sum up the defense of fairy tales and of their teller. It was to be a sort of apologia for his whole poetical career, and he told me that it would be the latest of his writings. In this matter his mind afterward changed, for later in the same year, 1872, he composed Auntie Toothache, inspired by his own sufferings, and it is with this story that the long series of his fairy tales ultimately closed with the original.

He gradually realized that his work was done. In a most pathetic letter to me, on New Year’s Day, 1875, he admitted that we must look for nothing more, that his bag of magic was emptied. After a long illness, however, his physical health seemed in large measure restored, and at the completion of his seventieth year, great festivities were arranged at Copenhagen and at Odense. The whole nation, from the Royal family down to the peasants in the country villages, kept Andersen’s birthday as a holiday, and this attention soothed and pleased him. But his vital energy was now fast ebbing. He began to suffer great torture from an obscure complaint which puzzled the doctors. It was interesting that when he was dying Andersen expressed a curiosity to study the ancient Indian fables which are identified with the mythical name of Bidpai, and the death-bed of the greatest modern fabulist was strewn with translations and commentaries of his earliest fellow-craftsman of Hindustan. At last, on the 4th of August, 1875, he fell asleep in the room at Rolighed, where we were sitting when he read me The Cripple three years before. And out of that peaceful slumber he never woke again. His laborious and beautiful life had been the most enchanting of his fairy tales. It closed at last in honor and serenity. It will probably be centuries before Europe sees again a man in whom the same peculiar qualities of imagination are blended. She can never see one more blameless in his life, or inspired by an aim more delicate and guileless.

EDMUND GOSSE.

1900.

The Marsh King’s Daughter

The storks have a great many stories, which they tell their little ones, all about the bogs and the marshes. They suit them to their ages and capacity. The youngest ones are quite satisfied with Kribble krabble, or some such nonsense; but the older ones want something with more meaning in it, or at any rate something about the family. We all know one of the two oldest and longest tales which have been kept up among the storks; the one about Moses, who was placed by his mother on the waters of the Nile, and found there by the king’s daughter. How she brought him up and how he became a great man whose burial place nobody to this day knows. This is all common knowledge.

The other story is not known yet, because the storks have kept it among themselves. It has been handed on from one mother stork to another for more than a thousand years, and each succeeding mother has told it better and better, till we now tell it best of all.

The first pair of storks who told it, and who actually lived it, had their summer quarters on the roof of the Viking’s timbered house up by Vidmosen (the Wild Bog) in Wendsyssel. It is in the county of Hiörring, high up toward the Skaw, in the north of Jutland, if we are to describe it according to the authorities. There is still a great bog there, which we may read about in the county chronicles. This district used to be under the sea at one time, but the ground has risen, and it stretches for miles. It is surrounded on every side by marshy meadows, quagmires, and peat bogs, on which grow cloud berries and stunted bushes. There is nearly always a damp mist hanging over it, and seventy years ago it was still overrun with wolves. It may well be called the Wild Bog, and one can easily imagine how desolate and dreary it was among all these swamps and pools a thousand years ago. In detail everything is much the same now as it was then. The reeds grow to the same height, and have the same kind of long purple-brown leaves with feathery tips as now. The birch still grows there with its white bark and its delicate loosely hanging leaves. With regard to living creatures, the flies still wear their gauzy draperies of the same cut; and the storks now, as then, still dress in black and white, with long red stockings. The people certainly then had a very different cut for their clothes than at the present day; but if any of them, serf or huntsman, or anybody at all, stepped on the quagmires, the same fate befell him a thousand years ago as would overtake him now if he ventured on them—in he would go, and down he would sink to the Marsh King, as they call him. He rules down below over the whole kingdom of bogs and swamps. He might also be called King of the Quagmires, but we prefer to call him the Marsh King, as the storks did. We know very little about his rule, but that is perhaps just as well.

Near the bogs, close to the arm of the Cattegat, called the Limfiord, lay the timbered hall of the Vikings with its stone cellar, its tower, and its three storeys. The storks had built their nest on the top of the roof, and the mother stork was sitting on the eggs which she was quite sure would soon be successfully hatched.

One evening Father Stork stayed out rather late, and when he came back he looked somewhat ruffled.

I have something terrible to tell you! he said to the mother stork.

Don’t tell it to me then, she answered; remember that I am sitting; it might upset me and that would be bad for the eggs!

You will have to know it, said he; she has come here, the daughter of our host in Egypt. She has ventured to take the journey, and now she has disappeared.

She who is related to the fairies! Tell me all about it. You know I can’t bear to be kept waiting now I am sitting.

Look here, mother! She must have believed what the doctor said as you told me; she believed that the marsh flowers up here would do something for her father, and she flew over here in feather plumage with the other two Princesses, who have to come north every year to take the baths to make themselves young. She came, and she has vanished.

You go into too many particulars, said the mother stork; the eggs might get a chill, and I can’t stand being kept in suspense.

I have been on the outlook, said Father Stork, and to-night when I was among the reeds where the quagmire will hardly bear me, I saw three swans flying along, and there was something about their flight which said to me, ‘Watch them, they are not real swans! They are only in swans’ plumage.’ You know, mother, as well as I, that one feels things intuitively, whether or not they are what they seem to be.

Yes, indeed! she said, but tell me about the Princess. I am quite tired of hearing about swan’s plumage.

You know that in the middle of the bog there is a kind of lake, said Father Stork. You can see a bit of it if you raise your head. Well, there was a big alder stump between the bushes and the quagmire, and on this the three swans settled, flapping their wings and looking about them. Then one of them threw off the swan’s plumage, and I at once recognized in her our Princess from Egypt. There she sat with no covering but her long black hair; I heard her beg the two others to take good care of the swan’s plumage while she dived under the water to pick up the marsh flower which she thought she could see. They nodded and raised their heads, and lifted up the loose plumage. What are they going to do with it, thought I, and she no doubt asked them the same thing; and the answer came, she had ocular demonstration of it: they flew up into the air with the feather garment! ‘Just you duck down,’ they cried. ‘Never again will you fly about in the guise of a swan; never more will you see the land of Egypt; you may sit in your swamp.’ Then they tore the feather garment into a hundred bits, scattering the feathers all over the place, like a snowstorm; then away flew those two good-for-nothing Princesses.

What a terrible thing! said Mother Stork; but I must have the end of it.

The Princess moaned and wept! Her tears trickled down upon the alder stump, and then it began to move, for it was the Marsh King himself, who lives in the bog. I saw the stump turn round, and saw that it was no longer a stump; it stretched out long miry branches like arms. The poor child was terrified, and she sprang away on to the shaking quagmire where it would not even bear my weight, far less hers. She sank at once and the alder stump after her; it was dragging her down. Great black bubbles rose in the slime, and then there was nothing more to be seen. Now she is buried in the Wild Bog and never will she take back the flowers she came for to Egypt. You could not have endured the sight, mother!

You shouldn’t even tell me anything of the sort just now, it might have a bad effect upon the eggs. The Princess must look after herself. She will get help somehow; if it had been you or I, now, or one of our sort, all would have been over with us!

I mean to keep a watch, though, every day, said the stork, and he kept his word.

But a long time passed, and then one day he saw that a green stem shot up from the fathomless depths, and when it reached the surface of the water a leaf appeared at the top which grew broader and broader. Next a bud appeared close by it, and one morning at dawn, just as the stork was passing, the bud opened out in the warm rays of the sun, and in the middle of it lay a lovely baby, a little girl looking just as fresh as if she had just come out of a bath. She was so exactly like the Princess from Egypt that at first the stork thought it was she who had grown small; but when he put two and two together, he came to the conclusion that it was her child and the Marsh King’s. This explained why she appeared in a water lily. She can’t stay there very long, thought the stork; and there are too many of us in my nest as it is, but an idea has just come into my head! The Viking’s wife has no child, and she has often wished for one. As I am always said to bring the babies, this time I will do so in earnest. I will fly away to the Viking’s wife with the baby, and that will indeed be a joy for her.

So the stork took up the little girl and flew away with her to the timbered house, where he picked a hole in the bladder skin which covered the window, and laid the baby in the arms of the Viking’s wife. This done, he flew home and told the mother stork all about it, and the young ones heard what he said; they were old enough to understand it.

So you see that the Princess is not dead; she must have sent the baby up here, and I have found a home for her.

I said so from the very first, said Mother Stork; now just give a little attention to your own children; it is almost time to start on our own journey. I feel a tingling in my wings every now and then! The cuckoo and the nightingale are already gone, and I hear from the quails that we shall soon have a good wind. Our young people will do themselves credit at the manœuvres if I know them aright!

How delighted the Viking’s wife was when she woke in the morning and found the little baby on her bosom! She kissed and caressed it; but it screamed and kicked terribly, and seemed anything but happy. At last it cried itself to sleep, and as it lay there a prettier little thing could not have been seen. The Viking’s wife was delighted; body and soul were filled with joy. She was sure that now her husband and all his men would soon come back as unexpectedly as the baby had come. So she and her household busied themselves in putting the house in order against their return. The long coloured tapestries which she and her handmaids had woven with pictures of their gods—Odin, Thor, and Freya as they were called—were hung up. The serfs had to scour and polish the old shields which hung round the walls; cushions were laid on the benches, and logs upon the great hearth in the middle of the hall, so that the fire might be lighted at once. The Viking’s wife helped with all this work herself, so that when evening came she was very tired and slept soundly. When she woke toward morning she was much alarmed at finding that the little baby had disappeared. She sprang up and lighted a pine chip and looked about. There was no baby, but at the foot of the bed sat a hideous toad. She was horrified at the sight, and seized up a heavy stick to kill it, but it looked at her with such curious sad eyes that she had not the heart to strike it. Once more she looked round and the toad gave a faint pitiful croak which made her start. She jumped out of bed and threw open the window shutter; the sun was just rising and its beams fell upon the bed and the great toad. All at once the monster’s wide mouth seemed to contract, and to become small and rosy, the limbs stretched and again took their lovely shapes, and it was her own dear little baby which lay there, and not a hideous frog.

Whatever is this? she cried; I have had a bad dream. This is my own darling elfin child. She kissed it and pressed it to her heart, but it struggled and bit like a wild kitten.

Neither that day nor the next did the Viking lord come home, although he was on his way, but the winds were against him; they were blowing southward for the storks. It is an ill wind that blows nobody good.

In the course of a few days and nights it became clear to the Viking’s wife how matters stood with her little baby; some magic power had a terrible hold over her. In the daytime it was as beautiful as any fairy, but it had a bad, wicked temper; at night, on the other hand, she became a hideous toad, quiet and pathetic, with sad, mournful eyes. There were two natures in her both in soul and body continually shifting. The reason of it was that the little girl brought by the stork by day had her mother’s form and her father’s evil nature; but at night her kinship with him appeared in her outward form, and her mother’s sweet nature and gentle spirit beamed out of the misshapen monster. Who could release her from the power of this witchcraft? It caused the Viking’s wife much grief and trouble, and yet her heart yearned over the unfortunate being. She knew that she would never dare to tell her husband the true state of affairs, because he would without doubt, according to custom, have the poor child exposed on the highway for any one who chose to look after it. The good woman had not the heart to do this, and so she determined that he should only see the child by broad daylight.

One morning there was a sound of stork’s wings swishing over the roof; during the night more than a hundred pairs of storks had made it their resting-place, after the great manœuvres, and they were now trying their wings before starting on their long southward flight.

Every man ready! they cried; all the wives and children, too.

How light we feel, cried the young storks; our legs tingle as if we were full of live frogs! How splendid it is to be travelling to foreign lands.

Keep in line! said father and mother, and don’t let your beaks clatter so fast; it isn’t good for the chest. Then away they flew.

At the very same moment a horn sounded over the heath. The Viking had landed with all his men; they were bringing home no end of rich booty from the Gallic coast, where the people cried in their terror as did the people of Britain:

Deliver us from the wild Northmen!

What life and noise came to the Viking’s home by the Wild Bog now! The mead cask was brought into the hall, the great fire lighted, and horses slaughtered for the feast, which was to be an uproarious one. The priest sprinkled the thralls with the warm blood of the horses as a consecration. The fire crackled and roared, driving the smoke up under the roof, and the soot dripped down from the beams; but they were used to all that. Guests were invited and they received handsome presents. All feuds and double-dealing were forgotten. They drank deeply, and threw the knuckle-bones in each other’s faces when they had gnawed them, but that was a mark of good feeling. The Skald—the minstrel of the times, but he was also a warrior, for he went with them on their expeditions, and he knew what he was singing about—gave them one of his ballads recounting all their warlike deeds and their prowess. After every verse came the same refrain: Fortunes may be lost, friends may die, one dies one’s self, but a glorious name never dies! Then they banged on the shields, and hammered with knives or the knuckle-bones on the table before them, till the hall rang.

The Viking’s wife sat on the cross bench in the banqueting hall. She was dressed in silk with gold bracelets and large ember beads. The Skald brought her name into the song, too; he spoke of the golden treasure she had brought to her wealthy husband, and his delight at the beautiful child which at present he had only seen under its charming daylight guise. He rather admired her passionate nature, and said she would grow into a doughty shield maiden or Valkyrie, able to hold her own in battle. She would be of the kind who would not blink if a practised hand cut off her eyebrows in jest with a sharp sword. The barrel of mead came to an end, and a new one was rolled up in its place; this one, too, was soon drained to the dregs, but they were a hard-headed people who could stand a great deal. They had a proverb then, The beast knows when it is time to go home from grass, but the fool never knows when he has had enough. They knew it very well, but people often know one thing and yet do another. They also knew that the dearest friend becomes a bore if he sits too long in one’s house! but yet they sat on. Meat and drink are such good things! They were a jovial company! At night the thralls slept among the warm ashes, and they dipped their fingers in the sooty grease and licked them. Those were rare times indeed.

The Viking went out once more that year on a raid, although the autumn winds were beginning; he sailed with his men to the coast of Britain; it was just over the water, he said. His wife remained at home with the little girl, and certain it was that the foster-mother soon grew fonder of the poor toad with the pathetic eyes and plaintive sighs than she was of the little beauty who tore and bit.

The raw, wet autumn fog Gnaw-worm which gnaws the leaves off the trees, lay over wood and heath; and Bird loose-feather, as they call

Reviews for Andersen's Fairy Tales (with and Introduction by Edmund Gosse)

[jessiqa_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Note: The version I read is on DailyLit.com, so this review is for that edition.This is a classic set of short stories by Hans Christian Andersen. While I was vaguely familiar with some of the tales in this set, most were entirely new to me. Thanks to Disney, we tend to think of fairy tales as having “happily ever after” endings, and that is most definitely not the case with Andersen’s stories. A few do, but plenty also end with death or loss. While most are short stories, “The Shoes of Fortune” and “The Snow Queen” are both longer pieces. “Shoes” involves a pair of boots that transports the wearer to wherever and whenever they want to be, including whomever they wish to be. One character visits the moon, another becomes a bird, and another goes back to the Middle Ages. This was easily my favorite story of the whole set.Andersen keeps a playful tone in most of the stories, even the darker ones. In one story, he mentions people reading “a new poem by H. C. Andersen.” I love when authors unabashedly insert themselves into a story. If you’re interested in fairy tales, you should check out this book.

[meredy_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Six-word review, nth reread of 1923 edition:Beloved childhood treasure still enchants me.

[gamermom2004 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I love fairy tales and these are some of the best and are great classics.

[gingerzing_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Children's fairy tales but not what has been watered down and added with cutesy animals. Not as graphic as some versions of the old tales, but a good collection of the tales from this master storyteller.

[jmcdbooks · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rated: B+Wonderful tales told with a child-like perspective. Many of Disney's classics owe a debt to Andersen.

[atimco-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales are world renowned. Endlessly inventive and quirky, they've sparked countless adaptations and retellings, from Disney animated films to stage plays to choral works to short stories. Some of the tales are better known than others, like "The Little Mermaid," "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Little Match Girl," and "The Steadfast Tin Soldier." Others are less well known (and some understandably so!), like "The Marsh King's Daughter," "The Wood Nymph," "The Red Shoes," and "The Shadow," to name a few.I was struck by the harshness of some of the stories. I knew going in that Andersen's imagination was informed by a culture very different from our sanitized, politically correct world, back when children knew all about life's grimmer realities. But it's still a bit of a shock. Most of the stories don't end on an entirely happy note. Beyond "Thumbelina" I'm hard pressed to remember any that do, actually.Many of the stories deal with the theme of not being content with your position in life, like the pine tree that wasn't happy in the forest and then had one night of splendor as a Christmas tree before being tossed away to die, or the nymph who traded her natural lifespan for a day as a human. Mortality lurks everywhere in these stories, bittersweet around the edges. The china shepherdess and her china chimney-sweep lover are faithful to one another "until they break." In one story, a man's shadow eventually breaks free of him and arranges his execution... chilling. Always death is peering around the corner; always the good things are tinged with a sense of impermanence.But despite the dark themes, there is a pervasive humor throughout the stories that I found entirely engaging. Much of it comes from personifying household items, like a kitchen pot or gentleman's necktie and poking fun at the absurdity of human vanity. Relationships come in for their fair share of gentle mockery, too — Stork Father and Stork Mother have some amusing insights on one another, and Andersen isn't above wry observations in the narrative.As a Christian, I found the theological aspect of the stories fascinating. Sometimes Andersen gets it right and it's biblical and beautiful — and other times (well, most of the time) his conception of a works-based salvation ruins everything. "The Little Mermaid" was particularly bad in this regard; she's told she can gain an immortal soul if she does good deeds for three hundred years. The three hundred years' span just seemed so arbitrary, I laughed out loud. Maybe this conception of earned salvation is another reason why most of the stories end so sadly...I listened to this on audiobook from Listening Library and was familiar with the readers, Kate Reading and Robert Whitfield, from other audio productions. Both performed these stories admirably (even the tedious ones), alternating back and forth between tales. Though some of the stories dragged out, others were delightful, and I found the unpredictability an enjoyable listening experience. I've read that Tina Nunnally's translation from the Danish is the most accurate to date, and though I can't speak to that, the stories certainly do possess a distinctive tone that one hopes is Andersen's. I'm glad I picked this up, even if just to know these iconic stories as they were originally imagined.