I have recently finished a futurelearn course on Hans Christian Andersen. It was very fun, though most of the learning experience, for me, came from discussions with fellow learners. The educators' style was a bit too "And here is a diagram through which we can appreciate the structure of a fairytale!" for my liking.
At the end, we were challenged to write an essay on the topicality and cross-cultural relevance of Andersen's work. I took this on, of course, from a storyteller's perspective, and here's what I wrote:
HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN – WRITER OF TELLIES
Hans Christian Andersen may well have been the best known
creator of literary fairytales (Biography, Date Unknown). The fariytale is
generally thought of as a sub-genre of the folktale. A folktale is a story which
evolved through being told and retold in the oral tradition, and this wider
genre includes the myth (stories concerned with the creation of the world, the
politics of the gods, the Dreamtime and any magical times before the world as
we know it existed); the legend (stories concerning people and places who were,
or were believed to be, real, though the details of their histories have been
exaggerated); and fairytales (adventure stories, often concerning magic, whose
key features include a quest and some sort of aspiration – the poor man
overcomes a set of challenges to become King, or become rich; the downtrodden
maid marries the prince, etc. The values espoused by a fairytale are often
hidden in the nature of the challenges, eg. the protagonist who is kind to the
people and creatures he meets on the way reaps the benefits of their help later
in the story).
A literary fairytale is one which follows the contours of a
fairytale in the oral tradition, but which has been written by an identifiable
author. To understand this process, we must understand something of
storytelling. Storytelling is an art which is very much alive in the world
today, and to tell a story “mind to mind, eye to eye and heart to heart” (Beltane
Fire Society, 2013) is a very different process to writing one down or reading
one out. A story which is suitable to be told aloud, which I call a “tellie”,
is likely to have certain features that facilitate the telling: a
straightforward, linear plot; a limited number of characters and a conservative
level of dialogue; simple sentences; optional elements which make the tale more
tell-friendly such as join-in catchphrases, repetition, and bold characters
which lend themselves to voices. A writy is a tale which is written and never
designed to be anything other than written. It would not work told aloud. It is
unlikely to lend itself to retelling. Most written literature falls into this
category, thus it is possible to write a tellie, but not to tell a writy!
Andersen wrote tellies, a rare skill which he was one of the first modern
authors to exercise, and understanding this is key to understanding his
cross-cultural appeal.
Certain aspects of folktales from the oral tradition, told
since before the written word, have an uncanny habit of showing up in stories
from opposite sides of the world! Cinderella, for example, appears in the
folktales of central Europe, Korea, Scotland and Egypt, to name but a few (Fourth
Grade Space, 2015). West Africa’s Anansi, the Native American Coyote, and Loki,
of the Scandinavian (and latterly, Marvel Comics) tradition, have the same
role: the trickster (Encyclopaedia Britannica,2007). In Gold Tree and Silver
Tree, we see a Scottish version of Snow White, whilst Whuppity Stoorie and Tom
Tit Tot are Scottish and English versions, respectively, of Rumpelstiltskin.
There are two main schools of thought in terms of why this
happens (Jackson, 2016): one is that the tales simply travel, from teller to
listener to teller. Nomadic communities such as the Roma may have been instrumental
in their spread, however this may not fully explain the appearance of these
stories among Maoris, Australian Aborigines, who would have had no contact with
peoples of other landmasses in ancient times, unless the travel of these
stories actually predated the continental drift. The second theory is that
certain elements of story resonate so strongly within the human mind, that they
have cropped up independently in more than one place. The truth is likely to be
a very complex combination of the two.
However, I prefer my own hypothesis: that there is an
invisible and immortal story-dragon flying round the world, whispering tales
into the ears of those who are able to listen.
Andersen certainly felt the hot, dry breath of the
story-dragon in his ears when he wrote many of his works. The Tinderbox (Andersen,
1835), in which a soldier procures a magical item which allows him access to a
means of overthrowing the Government and marrying the princess, is a reworking
of an earlier folktale he had heard in his youth, whilst The Travelling
Companion (Andersen, 1835) in which a poor but kind man meets up with a
mysterious stranger who helps him outwit a hellish troll and win the princess,
the twist being that the mysterious stranger, is, in fact, a dead man whose
debts he paid so that he might rest, crops up in several different traditions
including a Roma folktale (Roma People, ).
In A Mother’s Story, we see a mother pursuing Death to a
strange world, in an attempt to retrieve her child from the afterlife. The
metaphor Andersen uses is death as a gardener, who brings the woman to
understand that God’s will is the prevailing factor. We never actually see the
full afterlife, which is described as an “unknown land”. This resonates with
the reflections od Shakespeare’s Hamlet:
“And at the dread of something after death, the Undiscovered
Country from whose borne no traveller returns” (Shakespeare, C.1599).
In contrast to Hamlet’s dread of the unknown, which deters
him from suicide, Andersen leads us to believe that the dead child is safe and
happy.
The essential plot, that the protagonist goes on a quest to
the hereafter to retrieve a lost love one, can be found in the Greek Myth
Orpheus in the Underworld (Encyclopaedia of Greek Myth, Date Unknown). It can
also be found in the Maori folktale, Mataora and Niwareka in the Underworld (Maori
People, 1946) Orpheus’s quest is unsuccessful: he is warned not to turn back on
his way out of the Underworld, but he cannot help himself, for he hears the
echo of his own beautiful music. Mataora, in a break from the Western
convention that one cannot return from the dead (or that it carries horrific
consequences if one does), succeeds in retrieving his lost love and securing a
remarkably uncomplicated happy ending.
Andersen’s tale, too, resonates with the Scottish folktale
in which a mother’s baby is stolen by the fairies. She learns that the fairies
have no art of their own, and she must make items of rare beauty to barter
first for entry to their realm, then for her child, and finally for the right
to leave. This quest, unlike the mother in Andersen’s tale, is successful,
though it should be noted that the fairy-taken child is not dead. That said,
abduction to an alternate realm may be taken as a metaphor for death, and since
most folktales were first told in a time where infant mortality was high, it is
easy to see how this theme resonates, and therefore may find itself repeated
often.
Other folktale elements crop up in Andersen’s work. In The
Red Shoes, a child is punished for growing obsessed with her beautiful shoes to
the exclusion of her duty to God and to her family, by having a curse placed on
the shoes which force her to dance until her feet are destroyed. Forced dancing
can also be seen in a rather different folktale about a monster who eats a boys
family, but is caused to vomit them by a drum beat he cannot help but dance to;
and in The Pied Piper, in which first rats, then children, are forced to dance
to the pipers tune, and are led away into a mountain never to be seen again.
Nor is Anderson the final stop on a story’s journey. Later
authors of literary fairytales have clearly been influenced by his work. In
Mary de Morgan’s Nanina’s Sheep, Nanina is forced by fairies to dance all
night, and come sunrise a sheep is gone. This continues until a tree tells her
that a sheep will be returned for each night she does not dance. She buries her
feet in the soil, and the tree holds her fast with its roots; then when she
strains at her restraints, she is severely injured, but secures the return of a
sheep per night until they are all back. Here the theme is courage and
sacrifice, rather than punishment, but the central idea is the same. (de
Morgan, 1900) Oscar Wilde has several fairytales in which God accepts lovingly
into His kingdom a character who has died (Wilde, 1888) – a bittersweet ending
which takes on Andersen’s idea of the immortal soul giving an ostensibly sad
ending a tinge of happiness through the idea that the immortal soul goes on in
happiness, as seen in The Little Mermaid, The Story of a Mother and The Red
Shoes.
Andersen’s cross-cultural appeal is a consequence of his
masterful ability to write a tellie. For when we connect to the world of the
tellie, we connect to a rich and varied history of oral storytelling which has
existed at least as long as humans have, and which, through the subtle
whispering of the story-dragon, connects all the peoples of this world to each
other.
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