Think you know Hans Christian Andersen? Four experts pick his weirdest fairy tales to read this Christmas
Hans Christian Andersen is one of Denmark’s most cherished writers – a master of the literary fairy tale whose influence stretches far beyond The Little Mermaid, The Emperor’s New Clothes and the other classics many of us first encounter in childhood.
Born in 1805 in Odense, on the island of Funen, Andersen was the son of a shoemaker and an illiterate washerwoman who would grow into an author who wrote across genres – novels, travelogues, poems and plays. But in his short tales he created a form uniquely his own: emotionally daring, stylistically inventive and rich with both whimsy and existential bite.
Although not all of his stories are about winter or Christmas, Andersen’s name has become closely associated with the festive season around the world.
His tales have been read aloud for generations, adapted into countless winter performances and films and returned to each year for their blend of wonder, melancholy and moral imagination. They remind us that the season is not only about sparkle and celebration, but also reflection, hope and the small fragile miracles of being human.
So, as the days grow shorter, we’ve asked four leading Andersen experts to choose one story they believe is perfect for reading – or rereading – this Christmas. Their selections may not be the Christmas tales you’ve come to associate with Andersen. But they showcase the author at his most profound and playful – and offer new ways into his writing.
The Story of a Mother
Ane Grum-Schwensen, associate professor in the Department of Cultural and Linguistic Studies at The Hans Christian Andersen Centre, University of Southern Denmark
Choosing a single Andersen story as a favourite feels almost impossible. There are so many remarkable ones and my favourite often ends up being the one I have most recently revisited. Yet some stories return to me repeatedly, both in thought and in research.
One of these is The Story of a Mother, first published in 1847. It is a fantastic tale in every sense of the word. It includes classic fairy-tale elements: a protagonist – the mother – leaving home and facing trials, helpers guiding her and an ultimate antagonist, Death. Yet Andersen challenges this structure: the helpers demand steep prices and the antagonist could even be seen as a kind of helper. The story also reflects the fantastic, as seen in modern fiction, through its dreamlike quality and its unsettling open ending, where the mother finally allows Death to carry her child into the unknown.
This story is profoundly moving. It portrays both the desperate lengths a parent will go to to protect a child and the crushing surrender when confronted with an irreversible fate. Andersen’s ability to capture this parental anguish so vividly, despite never having been a parent himself, is striking.
The theme of the dying child was common in 19th-century art and literature, partly because of the harsh reality of child mortality. In the early decades of the century, roughly one-third of all Danish children died before their tenth birthday. Andersen addressed this theme repeatedly. Indeed, his first known poem, at age 11 was written to comfort a grieving mother. Later, in 1827, another poem he wrote, The Dying Child was published anonymously and widely translated.
The language and narration in The Story of a Mother are quintessential Andersen. Within the first few paragraphs, the theme is clear and features his imagery-rich language:
The old clock whirred and whirred, the great lead clockweight slid straight down to the floor, boom! and the clock too stood silent.
Although Andersen had written about dying children before, he struggled with the ending of this story, even in the handwritten copy he delivered to the printer. His first version was what you might call a happy ending: the mother wakes to find it was all a dream. He immediately crossed this out and replaced it with: “And Death went with her child into the ever-flowering garden”.
Still unsatisfied, he changed “ever-flowering garden”, a synonym for paradise, to “the unknown land”. A Danish critic recently described this creative shift as “how to punk your sugar-coated sentiment into salty liquorice” – a fitting metaphor for Andersen’s refusal to settle for sentimentality.
Today, the story is not as well known as some of his other tales, yet its influence in its own time was undeniable. It was translated into Bengali as early as 1858 and became popular in India. When Andersen turned 70 in 1875, one of his gifts was a polyglot edition of the story translated into no less than 15 languages – a testament to its global reach.
You can read the full version of The Story of a Mother, here.
The Comet
Holger Berg, special consultant at The Hans Christian Andersen Centre, University of Southern Denmark
No spectacular comets appeared in the sky in 1869, but the year nevertheless stands out in literature thanks to The Comet. Andersen’s reflective tale of the cosmos and the soul begins simply. A boy blows bubbles while, by the light of a candle, his mother seeks signs about the child’s life expectancy. Childlike delight and superstition live side by side in their home.
More than 60 years pass. The boy has become an elderly village schoolmaster. He teaches history, geography and astronomy to a new generation, bringing each subject vividly to life. Science has not destroyed his wonder – it has deepened it. Then the very same periodic comet returns.
What allows The Comet to echo across the ages is, paradoxically, its quiet, unassuming form. In earlier works, Andersen confronted one of the great fears of his age: that a comet might strike the Earth and end human civilisation. He responded either with comedy or with factual precision, but neither approach proved moving.
In 1869, he shifted away from satire and intellectual argument and towards poetic prose. Meaning now emerged through suggestion rather than debate. He also abandoned the romantic mode of his youth, in which the moon, the morning star and other celestial bodies directly commented on earthly affairs.
Part of my fascination with this tale lies in the four surviving manuscripts. Andersen gradually developed his narrative from a quaint scene in a village classroom into a life story with genuine cosmological reach and this can be seen in each version of the story.
It’s often said that a human life is merely a glimpse when measured against astronomical time. In Andersen’s time, people quoted the Latin expression homo bulla: the human being is but a soap bubble. To this familiar poetic image, Andersen in his second manuscript added the comet. Against the brevity of the bubble, he set the vastness of the comet’s arc – and with it, the question of where the human soul travels once it leaves the body.
Andersen achieved his narrative breakthrough in late January of 1869 through a shift in both theme and structure. In the third manuscript, he added a final paragraph nearly identical to the opening. This narrative circle matches the subject at hand: “Everything returns!” the schoolmaster teaches us, be it periodic comets or historical events. And yet the tale ends by imagining what does not return: the “soul was off on a far larger course, in a far vaster space than that through which the comet flies”.
Andersen invites us to gaze upward with the openness of a child. And raises profound questions about what it means to be human, both in this world and, for spiritually inclined readers, in whatever may lie beyond it.
You can read the full version of The Comet, here and listen to a podcast on the story here.
The Shadow
Jacob Bøggild, associate professor at The Hans Christian Andersen Centre, University of Southern Denmark
The Shadow by Hans Christian Andersen was first published in 1847. In some ways, it is Andersen’s darkest tale. The character the reader is led to believe is the protagonist is known only as “the learned man,” a figure never given a name, whereas his shadow – which breaks away from him – gives the tale its very title.
At the end of the story, the shadow has the learned man executed and marries the daughter of a king, implying that they will rule her country together. Thus, the shadow triumphs in the manner of a genuine fairy-tale protagonist, while his former master dies miserably.
But the tale is not solely dark and tragic. The scene in which the shadow separates from the learned man is perfectly choreographed in accordance with the way a shadow follows every movement of the body that casts it.
Afterwards, it irks the learned man that he has lost his shadow, but since he is visiting a country with a warm climate he soon grows a new one. And one reason the shadow can seduce the princess is that he is a wonderful dancer – he is, of course, ever so light on his feet. Throughout the tale, Andersen treats each impossible occurrence as though it were entirely natural, and the effect is extremely funny (as well as uncanny).
In traditional fairy tales, the protagonist often leaves home because some imbalance has occurred. Away from home, out in the wide world, the protagonist must accomplish a number of tasks. The happy ending usually means that the character finds a new home, often by marrying a princess and becoming ruler of half a kingdom.
In The Shadow, the learned man is already away from home at the beginning, visiting a country with a hot climate before returning to his own homeland with a cold one. It is here that his former shadow appears and manipulates him into exchanging roles, making the learned man literally the shadow of a shadow. The two then travel to a spa. The learned man is once again far from home, and it is there that he dies.
The shadow, on the other hand, begins its story “at home”, since its home is wherever the learned man is. It then separates itself, goes out into the world and becomes highly successful – albeit through mischief. Its ultimate triumph comes when it establishes a new home for itself by marrying the princess. The Shadow is a reversed fairy tale in every possible sense.
The way Andersen executes this reversal is a masterpiece and bears witness to his acute awareness of genre conventions and narrative structures – something that has, unfortunately, rarely been recognised as fully as it deserves.
You can read the full version of The Shadow, here.
The Princess on the Pea
Sarah Bienko Eriksen, postdoctoral researcher at The Hans Christian Andersen Centre, University of Southern Denmark
The Princess on the Pea has suffered the odd fate of being so popular that many people never bother to read it. This is an oversight. And given that it clocks in at about 350 words, or shorter than the article you’re reading right now, it’s also a problem that’s easily remedied.
The tale opens with a prince’s worldwide search for a “real” princess. He’s met plenty of hopefuls along the way, but they weren’t really “real”, and for him, only a “true” one will do. The words “real” and “true” (in Danish, rigtig/virkelig) appear in this tiny story a total of nine times — very much in defiance of certain truisms about good writing and the spice of life.
So when a prospective princess shows up to the castle one stormy night with rainwater gushing down her hair and out of her heels, she quite literally embodies the problem of how to tell whether something is real or not. Is it visible at a glance? Can it be observed through behaviour? Or must we simply feel it?
To see if their guest is the genuine artefact, the queen tests her with a bed fit for a princess: 20 duvets piled atop of 20 mattresses and at the very bottom, a single pea. Not a pearl or a diamond but the lowliest of domestic objects.
The guest, however, doesn’t miss a thing, awakening black and blue and worse off than when she arrived. The court is immediately satisfied – only a true princess could be so sensitive! – yet amusingly, the entire exercise brings them no closer to actually spotting one: it’s her powers of observation that pass the test, not theirs. The real, it seems, simply knows itself.
We can all guess what happens next, but what comes after the wedding? Here we find Hans Christian Andersen’s most innovative contribution to this traditional fairy tale: namely, that the pea gets its own ending, receiving a place of honour in the Royal Museum “where it can still be seen, providing no one has taken it”.
A Dane reading this story in 1835 couldn’t help but notice this nod to the 1802 theft of Denmark’s national treasure, the Golden Horns of Gallehus, from that same location. Less obvious is that with this reference, Andersen bursts the bubble containing all fairy tales and thrusts the pea into the real world.
Did we feel it? Perhaps not. But then again, it might have been stolen.
“Now, that was a real story!” the tale concludes, knowingly. Not a true story, mind you, but the impossible state of being “real fiction”. (And if we wish to test this for ourselves, it won’t be Andersen’s fault that the genuine artefact is missing from the Royal Museum.)
Unlike our princess, this tale offers no tidy resolution, which is precisely the richness of great art: it prompts reflection, hides wonder in the humble detail and is never truly finished, inviting us to play along in happily ever after.
You can read the full version of The Princess on the Pea, here.
This article was commissioned as part of a partnership collaboration between Videnskab.dk and The Conversation.
Ane Grum-Schwensen receives funding from Augustinus Fonden, Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond and The Danish Research Reserve.
Holger Berg receives funding from Augustinus Fonden, Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond and The Danish Research Reserve.
Sarah Bienko Eriksen receives funding from the Independent Research Fund Denmark.
Jacob Bøggild does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.