The Constant Muse: Copyright and Creative Agency

Abstract

In 1873, ailing Hans Christian Andersen traveled to Switzerland, where he sought treatment at a spa in Glion, high above Lake Geneva, drinking daily doses of whey-a cure that brought affluent people from all over Europe to Swiss resorts. The whey did nothing for him. This is no surprise considering that two years later he died of a cancer from which he was in all likelihood already suffering. A family from Hamburg stayed in the room directly above him, a Mr. Mai, his wife, and their young daughter. Andersen kept company with them, among other guests in the spa, and on Thursday, May 29, he recorded in his diary:The weather doesn't look promising today either. I slept with many interruptions, but slept nonetheless. My ringworm itches constantly and I have many small liver spots on my legs, what does that mean? A letter from Mrs. Melchior and from Simon Henriques. A visit from Mr. Mai, who maintained that the about What the Old Man was taken from Grimm. I told him it was a Danish folktale and that Grimm had never composed a fairy tale, he was only a collector. . . . I am not in a good mood.(Andersen, H. C. Andersens dagboger vol. 10, 93; my translation)What the Old Man Does Is Always Right appeared in 1861 in the second series of Andersen's New Fairy Tales and Stories. In introductory remarks to a complete collection of his tales published in 1874, a year after Mr. Mai's visit, Andersen notes that 'What the Old Man Does Is Always Right' is one of the Danish folktales I heard as a child and I have here retold in my own (Andersen, H. C. Andersens eventyr vol. 6, 19; my translation).Ten recordings of the tale are found in the Danish Folklore Archives, according to head archivist Else Marie Kofod, most of them recorded from 1854 to 1902 and the earliest from 1756 (Kofod 41-42 and 168-70). Andersen was correct, then, in explaining to Mr. Mai that What the Old Man Does Is Always Right is a tradi- tional folktale and that it was well known in Denmark, though he overreached in claiming that it was a Danish folktale. As Mr. Mai pointed out, the Brothers Grimm published a version of the same tale forty-nine years earlier in the first volume of the very first edition of their folktale collection, the Kinder- und Hausmarchen. The Grimms call it Hans-im-Gluck, or Lucky Hans, and it is a traditional numskull tale with broad international distribution.1A review published in Berlingske Tidende, the Danish equivalent of The Times, praises What the Old Man Does Is Always Right as excellent example of Andersen's storytelling, distinguished by such a freshness . . . that even when he tells old we all . . . he tells it in such a way that it seems to us a wholly new story, which we are encountering for the first time (qtd. in Topsoe-Jensen 220; my translation). A dissenting review published in Dansk Maanedsskrift, a monthly cultural magazine, found however that What the Old Man Does Is Always Right was absolutely the best story in the collection, precisely because through the magnificence of its subject and its parable-like conciseness it gives the of a true folk fiction (Rosenberg 450; my translation). The measure of Andersen's authorship in an old we all know is thus, on the one hand, the degree of originality (freshness) that he breathes into it through his peculiar manner of telling it, but on the other hand, ironically, the degree to which it captures and conveys the impression of a true folk fiction.It seems fair to say that the international success of Andersen's fairy tales owes much to how deftly they resolve this paradox. At the same time, it is worth recalling that this dynamic tension between tradition and creativity is not peculiar to Andersen, nor even to literary fairy tales; it is the heart of the storyteller's art and characteristic of folklore in general, not only of its literary adaptations. In this essay I propose a genealogy of this dynamic tension. …