What Hans Christian Andesen feared most of all and other little-known facts about the sad storyteller

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

We all come from childhood! From that magical dreamy time when our life is full of good mood, wonderful games and, of course, fairy tales. Many beloved fairy tales of our childhood were written by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. Few people know that this storyteller went through a huge number of difficulties in his life. How did this amazing person manage to turn his pain into art?

Hans Christian Andersen was born in 1805. He is known all over the world for his wonderful stories "The Ugly Duckling", "Thumbelina", "The Snow Queen", "The Little Match Girl", "The Princess and the Pea" and others.

1. Some of Hans Christian Andersen's tales are autobiographical

According to scientists, the story of The Ugly Duckling reflects Andersen's own feelings. When he was a young boy, other children teased him because of his unusual appearance and an unusually high voice. The future great writer suffered from loneliness, isolation, he felt underappreciated. Like an ugly duckling from his own fairy tale, Andersen later became a real "swan" - a cultured, educated and world famous writer. Later, he himself admitted that this story is only a reflection of his personal life.

Andersen put the heroes of his stories in such desperate and hopeless situations because it reflected his own personal psychological trauma. After all, Hans grew up in extreme poverty, he lost his father early and was forced to work at the age of 11 in a factory in order to feed himself and his mother.

2. Andersen's original version of The Little Mermaid was much more depressing than Disney's

The story of Andersen's The Little Mermaid, written in 1837, was much darker than the Disney cartoon. In the original, a nameless mermaid who falls in love with a prince is offered the chance to assume human form. The price for this was that she would live in constant painful agony and she would have to cut off her tongue. The goal of the mermaid, in addition to love, is to find an immortal soul, which is possible only if the prince falls in love with her and marries her.

However, when the prince marries another girl, the mermaid first contemplates killing him, but instead accepts her fate and throws herself off the cliff into the sea. There she dissolves into sea foam. The mermaid is met by some spiritual beings who say that they will help her get to heaven if she does good deeds for 300 years. Somehow this story is not very similar to what we are used to, right?

3. Poor translations have damaged the writer's image abroad

Hans Christian Andersen, according to the World Organization of UNESCO, is one of the writers whose books have been translated into a huge number of languages. In this ranking, he is in eighth place. But here it should be noted that although his works have been translated into more than 125 languages, not all of them were accurate retellings.

From the very beginning, there were many low quality translations. As a result, his original stories became not very clear. Because of this, Andersen was considered not a literary genius outside of Scandinavia, but a strange author of adorable children's stories.

4. How Andersen fell out with his friend Charles Dickens

Hans met his colleague, Charles Dickens, at an aristocratic party in 1847. They constantly kept in touch with each other. After ten years of their acquaintance, Charles invited Andersen to visit. He came to the Dickens at their home in Kent, England. The visit was supposed to last a maximum of two weeks, but in the end, Andersen stayed for five weeks, which plunged the Dickens family into real horror.

The fact is that the writer, upon closer acquaintance, turned out to be a not so pleasant person. On his first morning, Andersen announced that there is a Danish custom: one of the sons in the family should shave a guest. The Dickens family, instead of yielding to the strange demand, brought in a local hairdresser.

Moreover, Hans was prone to hysteria. One day he read a bad newspaper review for one of his books. After that, the children's writer threw himself face down on the lawn and sobbed. As soon as Andersen left, Dickens and his entire family breathed a sigh of relief. On the door of the room where Hans slept, Charles Dickens wrote and hung a note with the following content: "Hans Andersen slept in this room for only five weeks, but it seemed to us that it was forever!" After this story, Dickens stopped responding to Andersen's letters and the friendship ended.

5. Andersen was horrified at the thought that he would be buried alive

The writer had a wide variety of phobias. He was very afraid of dogs. He did not eat pork because he was afraid of contracting parasites, trichinas, which are found in pig meat. During his travels, Andersen always carried a long rope in his suitcase in case he had to escape from a burning building.

He was even afraid that he would be accidentally pronounced dead and buried alive, so every night, going to bed, he put a note next to him: "I only look dead."

6. Andersen may have died a virgin

Although Andersen lived a very long life, he never had a serious relationship. He was never destined to finish a fairy tale in his own life. He often fell in love with different women, and possibly men as well, according to the interpretations of some of the letters he wrote to young people. However, his feelings each time remained unrequited. This allowed researchers of his biography to believe that the writer never had a sexual relationship.

Despite the fact that Andersen has a halo of pure and chaste personality, he was no stranger to lustful thoughts. When the writer was 61 years old, he visited a brothel in Paris for the first time in his life. Hans paid the corrupt woman, but he had nothing with her, he just watched her undress. When he went to a similar establishment for the second time, he wrote in his diary: "I talked to a woman, paid her 12 francs and left, not sinning in action, but sinning, obviously, in thought."

7. Hans Christian Andersen is considered a national treasure of Denmark

When the writer was sixty years old, the Danish government declared him a "national treasure". Around the same time, the writer developed the first symptoms of liver cancer, which would eventually take his life. Then the government awarded Andersen a scholarship and began to build a statue of the author in the Royal Garden in Copenhagen.

The monument was supposed to be completed by the seventieth birthday of the writer. Andersen lived to see his seventieth birthday. He died four months later. A tribute to Hans Christian Andersen's literary legacy can still be seen in Copenhagen today: a second statue of the author along a street named after him and a sculpture of the Little Mermaid on Langelinier Pier. In the house where the writer spent his childhood, in Odense, a museum was opened dedicated to his life and work.

If you want to know more about Hans Christian Andersen and the love of his life, read our article the great storyteller Andersen and his snow queen Jenny Lind.