On 8 May 1835, C. A. Reitzel published a small octavo in Copenhagen: Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Første Hefte. Sixty-one pages of text. Price: 24 skillings. Four stories: “The Tinderbox,” “Little Claus and Big Claus,” “The Princess on the Pea,” and “Little Ida’s Flowers.” Edvard Collin later called it a cheap edition. Andersen, writing to B. S. Ingemann that February, said he had written them as he would tell them to a child.
Danish reviewers were not uniformly charmed. Dansk Literaturtidende and other notices worried about tone, grammar, and whether nursery shelves wanted soldiers and chopped-off heads. The complaint was not that the booklet failed to be folklore. It was that it sounded like a person talking.
That is the revolution, and it is not the same job as the Brothers Grimm. Jacob and Wilhelm, from 1812, presented themselves as collectors of a German oral inheritance, however much they edited. Andersen, a shoemaker’s son from Odense, used a few remembered spinning-room motifs and then wrote original literary fairy tales out of a private nervous system. “The Little Mermaid,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Ugly Duckling,” “The Nightingale,” “The Steadfast Tin Soldier”: those are authored objects, not anonymous village property.
Junk with an interior life
Before Andersen, enchantment liked swords and crowns. He looked at the floor.
The tin soldier of 1838 is cast from a spoon, one-legged because the metal ran out, in love with a paper dancer. He does not make speeches. Thrown into the stove, he melts to a tin heart; she burns to a cinder. The darning needle of 1845 is sure she is too fine for her station, then meets the gutter. The match girl of the same year strikes sulfur on a wall on New Year’s Eve until morning finds her with burnt sticks in her lap.
Children already know that a button can have a destiny. Andersen took that seriously enough to let the objects suffer. Fables compress by refusing psychology. Andersen compresses by giving psychology to a needle.
The bargain Disney did not keep
Den lille Havfrue (1837) is viscera, not a seashell comedy. The witch cuts out the mermaid’s tongue. The potion feels like a sword through the tail. Walking on human feet is described as stepping on knives. The prince is fond of her the way one is fond of a graceful pet. When he marries someone else, her sisters bring a knife bought with their hair: his blood on her feet would buy her tail back. She throws the knife into the sea and goes over the side.
Andersen does not give her a beach wedding. He gives her a later metaphysical consolation: the “daughters of the air,” a soul to be earned. Later adaptations, including the 1989 Disney film, are a different contract with the same title. The original’s fascination is the body as the price of a voice.
The Snow Queen (1844) begins with a mirror, made by a demon in Andersen’s telling, that shrinks the good and magnifies the mean. Splinters lodge in Kay’s eye and heart. Roses rot. Geometry looks cleaner than affection. The Snow Queen carries him to a palace of ice; he sits at a frozen lake called the Mirror of Reason, trying to spell Eternity with shards. Gerda walks. Tears thaw the splinter. The geography is north: Finland, Lapland, a polar palace. Naming a particular Arctic archipelago is more specific than the text requires.
Andersen died in Copenhagen in 1875, famous, still the boy who carried paper scissors and cut swans and dancers at tables. The paper cutting is documented habit, not a cute invention. It matches the tales: something frail, intricate, and able to take a person’s head off if you open it wrong. He did not owe children a guaranteed marriage. He owed them a world in which love can cost a tongue, and a tin heart can still be the true part of the fire.