From Andersen On: Fairy Tales Tell Our Lives

Abstract

Human beings are storytelling animals. It is what distinguishes us from the other beasts. We are dreamers, too, always looking for that bit of luck, that bit of magic, that bit of courage that guarantees us the prize. We are wizards of the mouth. Our stories reflect the human condition, and none more so than the folk tales that have been an inheritance from our great-great-ever-so-many-greatgrandparents back to the beginning of time. We polish those stories and send them on. Stories about transformations and transportations, about miracles and mayhem, about fairy wives and demon lovers, about the gods walking about as humans and humans walking on the streets of heaven. Now children, those great eavesdroppers, have overheard these stories for years. Ehey remembered the ones they wanted to remember, forgot the rest. Somewhere in the nineteenth century, many of the tales began being set down specifically in books for children. Oh, there had been chapbooks before and schoolbooks and religious books and courtesy books before. But the great movement of children's publishing did not get its kick start until the mid-1800s. Still, children had been coveting and keeping some of the great folk romances and legends like King Arthur and Robin Hood and St. George, resurrecting for their own use the sly fabliaux of Aesop and the stories of Reynard the Fox. Children had been hearing bits of the Arabian Nights and the Ocean Stream oj Stories and the jokes and jests out of the mouth and from the page of the medieval storehouse of such tales. We could call this - as John Rowe Eownsend does in Written jor Children - the prehistory of children's interest in folklore (18). And then, in 1805, two hundred years ago, a baby was born on a bed that was made from a coffin platform. Ehe bed still had the black borders of cloth at the bottom. Life and death both sleeping together. Ehat baby would grow up to be the great fairy-tale writer, Hans Christian Andersen. Or at least such was the story he told. It was as much a fairy tale as any he ever made up. reinvented his life perfectly. And whether you like his stories as I do - or find them frequently sentimental and horrific as Maurice Sendak does (though I must note he has illustrated a number of them!) - you have to admit one thing. made his life into a perfect tale. lived for twelve years with his parents in a tiny one-room house in Odense, a city in Denmark. A lanky child with white-gold hair, Hans was very homely, even by his own account. His parents were terribly poor. His father was a shoemaker and his mother a washerwoman who did other people's laundry. He had an older half-sister who was probably a prostitute. He hardly knew her. His father's father was quite mad. He would wander into the woods return singing loudly, beech leaves and garlands of flowers plaited in his hair. His father's mother incessantly told lies. Hans told lies, too. About his past life. About his present life. He called them fairy tales. My life is a beautiful fairy tale, he began his autobiography, wonderous happy. Now used his life - and the world of story and superstition into which he'd been born - to make fairy tales. As Danish critic Hans Brix put it, Andersen wrote more self-portraits than Rembrandt ever painted. But was not alone in this. AU fiction writers lie, or at least we cannibalize our lives, reinventing them in tales. Some tales we call realistic, but they are hardly that. Ehey are fiction, a lie that is - at its core - true. Let's take a look at the three kinds of fairy stories: the actual folk tale from the mouths of storytellers within a culture, the retold story sometimes told within the culture but often from outside of it, and the art or original fairy tale. Ehe actual folk tale is polished by years of telling. …