[HN Gopher] 150 years of Hans Christian Andersen
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150 years of Hans Christian Andersen
https://archive.ph/10l96
Author : wholeness
Score : 118 points
Date : 2025-07-30 21:07 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newstatesman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newstatesman.com)
| dang wrote:
| What an great article and what a great life. I had no idea.
|
| _When he was 11, his father died and Andersen took a job in a
| factory where he had his trousers pulled down to prove he was a
| man._
|
| _Aged 14, he left [...] to make his fortune in Copenhagen.
| "First you go through an awful lot, and then you become famous,"
| he explained to his anxious mother, as though the plot of his
| life had been written already._
|
| _"I shall have no success with my appearance," he reflected, "so
| I make use of whatever is available."_
|
| _If he sounds like a character invented by Charles Dickens, it
| is because Uriah Heep was modelled on Andersen, whom Dickens met
| in 1847. David Copperfield's first sighting of Heep was "a
| cadaverous face" peering out of the round tower: "He had a way of
| writhing when he wanted to express enthusiasm, which was very
| ugly, the snaky twistings of his throat and body." "If you're an
| eel, sir," counsels Betsey Trotwood, "conduct yourself like one.
| If you're a man, control your limbs, sir!" In our own kinder age,
| we might diagnose Anderson with dyspraxia._
|
| _He saw himself, however, not as an earthly being at all but
| "one who seemed", as he told Dickens, "to have fallen from the
| skies"._
| robin_reala wrote:
| The article mentions Dickens a couple of times, but neglects to
| talk about when Dickens told Andersen that if he was ever in
| London he should drop in. The casual invitation turned into a
| five week stay despite increasingly panicky hints from the
| Dickens family that he should really leave.
| dang wrote:
| Is there a source about that you could link to? Not
| challenging you, just interested to read about it!
| robin_reala wrote:
| I read about this in Odense at either his house or the
| museum? But it looks like it's made his Wikipedia page,[1]
| with a Danish citation.[2]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Christian_Andersen#M
| eetin...
|
| [2] https://www.hcandersen-homepage.dk/?page_id=3683
| LambdaComplex wrote:
| There's also a solo tabletop RPG that someone made about
| it:
| https://x.com/Sotherans/status/1513210507506954250?lang=en
| dang wrote:
| That's hilarious!
| throw-qqqqq wrote:
| HCA is famous for overstaying his welcome when invited. There
| was a pattern :D
| agys wrote:
| I really love the less famous stories by Andersen that involve
| objects or insects... A needle, a coin in a foreign land, a
| teapot that feels empty, a tree (that wants to be cut down!) have
| deep inner thoughts; a butterfly in love! In all those stories
| the last sentence introduces some sort of a final twist.
| coneonthefloor wrote:
| About a decade ago I was at a museum in Odense, Denmark. I
| vaguely remember a comical story about him and Charles Dickens.
| In that Andersen would regularly visit Dickens and stay with
| him and his family. The gist was that Dickens found this to be
| quite irritating, as he was not enthused by Andersen's company,
| finding him to be much too emotional and having "strange"
| Danish customs.
| mths wrote:
| A whole paragraph on how freakishly ugly he was. I google images
| and he looked perfectly normal and fine in the portraits which I
| assume at least some were accurate.
| squeegee_scream wrote:
| I agree, looking at portraits he looks just fine. I wouldn't
| call him handsome but certainly not "ugly" or "grotesque". But
| it seems part of the impact of his appearance was due to his
| movements and his proportions, neither of which are going to be
| easy to discern from portraits. Take this image, for example. h
| ttps://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Hans_Chr....
| It could be his coat exaggerating his proportions, and maybe
| some amount of forced perspective, but I can begin to see that
| his hands are quite large, his head seems a bit small.
| coreyh14444 wrote:
| If you haven't visited before, Danes absolutely worship HCA. You
| can't go two blocks without stumbling on a statue of him, while
| walking on a street named for him.
| AndrewDavis wrote:
| I visited Denmark a few years ago and went to the Hans
| Christian Anderson museum in his home town of Odense.
|
| It's absolutely fantastic, the museum is presented like a story
| you walk through his life.
|
| Highly recommend!
| tokai wrote:
| A funny thing about Odense is that HCA was known as a
| quintessential Copenhagener by his contemporaries. He left
| the his providential birth town as soon as possible and
| harbored no tender feelings for his origin. That hasn't
| stopped Odense putting his name and likeness everywhere in
| the city, so much that HCA nowadays is closely linked with
| Odense - even though his person and work never actually was
| beside his childhood.
| danneezhao wrote:
| When I grow up, I realize that fairy tales are almost lies.It is
| difficult for princes and princesses to live happily ever after~
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Does Andersen ever use the "happily ever after" ending?
| miningape wrote:
| Literally, I can't think of a single happy ending in even one
| of his stories.
|
| It always ends with death, disappointment, or apathy.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Andsersen has some happy endings, eg the Snow Queen or the
| Ugly Duckling. I guess the Matchstick Girl has the closest
| to a "happily ever after" ending, since she dies and goes
| to heaven.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Death usually _is_ a happy ending in his stories. It 's
| ascension to paradise and being freed from mortal
| suffering. It makes more sense if you're a deeply religious
| man from the 19th century than it does today, admittedly.
| Exoristos wrote:
| 78% of the world population are religious today, per e.g.
| Statista.
| Exoristos wrote:
| Everybody I grew up with is pretty happy, including me. Is that
| unusual?
| Systemic33 wrote:
| Just like the article mentioned, he has become almost synonymous
| with fairy tales associated with stories for kids, but for anyone
| who has ever read from a collection of his stories, a majority of
| them are most certainly not appropriate for kids. Some of them
| are incredibly sad, and as another comment says, the fate of the
| characters often can change for the worse in the last paragraphs,
| when you least expect it.
|
| I can only recommend reading his works, they are deeply profound.
| cpp_frog wrote:
| I read The Steadfast Tin Soldier for the first time when I was
| a kid but it didn't have a special meaning for me until my late
| teens, when I first fell in love.
| secondcoming wrote:
| A story having a tragic twist doesn't automatically make it
| inappropriate for kids.
| fifticon wrote:
| I wonder what dr detroit did wrong to be bombed into
| oblivion; he is not fully wrong. As an example, the HCA story
| 'tinderbox' is clearly built from earlier borrowed cloth. As
| a dane myself, it is apparent that HCA didn't even have a
| danish term for the demon dogs, so he just calls them 'dogs'
| to avoid issues with his audience.
| xxs wrote:
| > a majority of them are most certainly not appropriate for kid
|
| I did enjoy them as kid - as sad as they were. Many years after
| I can't think of a reason to consider them: "most certainly not
| appropriate". That's being overprotective.
|
| In the light of the current events - they should introduce an
| age check verification to readers, right?
| loughnane wrote:
| I agree with you that OP is being overprotective, but its
| natural that we all draw slightly different lines about
| what's appropriate when.
|
| FWIW, when (spoiler alerts) the little girl gets her feet cut
| off in red shoes my 8 and 10 year olds were shocked at the
| turn events, but hardly shaken. Likewise when the little
| match girl died in the cold they were sad, but not
| permanently so.
|
| It's the same deal with grimm fairy tales, or even pinocchio
| (pinocchio gets hanged).
| xxs wrote:
| >grimm fairy tales
|
| Indeed, Max and Moritz ending up in the meat grinder
| (literally). Also reminds me of 'little riding red hood'
| originally lacks a happy ending at any rate.
|
| (As for age, I think I was 6-7 when I first read Han C.
| Andersen)
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Those are absolutely horrific endings. They would have
| given me nightmares as a kid. I guess if your kids can
| handle it then great there's no need to coat them in bubble
| wrap.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > They would have given me nightmares as a kid.
|
| This is not always the easiest thing to guess. The things
| that gave me nightmares were people looking at me through
| mirrors (i.e., Snow White), animal brutality (which
| featured prominently in 90s family movies), and adoption
| (i.e. getting adopted into the "wrong", abusive family).
| Meanwhile I ingested astonishingly violent material and
| slept like a baby. I think it's hard to figure out what
| kids will identify as fantasy and what they'll see as a
| real, yet-unknown risk.
| Exoristos wrote:
| I had access to no entertainment and only selected books,
| but still regularly had nightmares -- about my parents.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| Or the little mermaid, where she failed to get the prince
| to fall in love with her and fell into the sea, dying and
| turning into sea foam.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| She doesn't turn into sea foam though, she turns into an
| air spirit, getting the chance of an immortal soul, which
| is what she was after.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| I clearly remember the version I read having her throw
| herself off of a cliff and turn into sea foam. It was a
| very sad ending that stuck with me.
|
| It must have been an abridged version or something that
| skipped the redemption arc, like this:
|
| "In the end, the Prince marries another, a girl he thinks
| is the girl that saved him, but of course, isn't. And the
| little mermaid is given the opportunity to win back her
| life with her family, to return to life as a mermaid, if
| she can kill the Prince as he sleeps. But, she loves him,
| and so she can't.
|
| Instead as part of the bargain she made with the sea
| witch, she dies, turning into sea foam."
|
| That left off the redemption arc:
|
| But here, Andersen is able to deliver the ultimate
| judgment. Instead of simply perishing as sea foam as
| other mermaids do (we are told earlier that, unlike
| humans, mermaids do not have afterlives), the little
| mermaid becomes a daughter of the air. In exchange for
| her goodness, for her suffering, and her loyalty, she is
| given the chance to win immortality, to win an immortal
| soul.
|
| https://thecuriousworthy.com/2017/03/30/the-original-
| little-...
| nurettin wrote:
| I love the story of him tying his horse to a pole in the snow at
| night only to wake up and look up to see all the snow has melted
| and his horse is hanging from the roof cross of a church.
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Are you thinking of Baron Munchausen? That is not an Andersen
| story.
| nurettin wrote:
| Didn't know that, but then the book I read was definitely
| mistitled.
| erk__ wrote:
| A few years ago the H. C. Andersen center made a New website with
| all his works online:
| https://hcandersen.dk/en/works/?pageNumber=1&genre=tale
|
| Both in Danish and English
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