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.

References:

Andersen, HC (1835). Fairy Tales Told for Children. Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel. 

Andersen, HC (1835). The Travelling Companion. Copenhagen: Unknown.

Beltane Fire Society. (2013). Mind to Mind, Heart to Heart. Available: https://beltane.org/2013/04/25/mind-to-mind-heart-to-heart/. Last accessed 25th May 2016.

Biography.com Editors. (). Hans Christian Andersen Biography.Available: http://www.biography.com/people/hans-christian-andersen-9184146. Last accessed 25th May 2016.

de Morgan, M (1900). The Wind Fairies. London: Seeley and Co

Encyclopaedia Britannica. (2007). Trickster Tales. Available: http://www.britannica.com/art/trickster-tale/article-history. Last accessed 25th May 2016.

Encyclopaedia of Greek Myth. (Unknown). Orpheus. Available: http://www.mythweb.com/encyc/entries/orpheus.html. Last accessed 25th May 2016.

Fourth Grade Space. (2015). Cinderella Stories Around the Globe.Available: http://fourthgradespace.weebly.com/cinderella-stories-around-the-world.html. Last accessed 25th May 2016.

Jackson, J. (2016). Why do different cultures have the same folk tales?. Available: http://www.jjbooks.com/blog/why-do-different-cultures-have-the-same-folk-tales. Last accessed 25th May 2016.

Maori People (1946). Myths And Legends of Maoriland. 5th ed. London: Wellington. 32-40.

Roma People (1899). Gypsy Folk Tales by Francis Hindes Groome. Unknown: Sacred Texts

Shakespeare, W (C.1599). Hamlet. London: N/A. Act 4 Sc 1.

Wilde, O (1888). The Happy Prince and Other Tales. London: Watchmaker Publishing.