Magazine
Danish author Hans Christian Andersen was neither a futurist nor a scientist, but his entire oeuvre, including poems, travel descriptions, paper cuts, plays and fairy tales is a bountiful outburst of creativity, attributable to an exceptional power of imagination. He never grew tired of the world and always saw it in new ways. He travelled, wrote, experienced and dreamed up parallel universes so that we might delight in his imagination and begin to see facets of our own world from different perspectives.
Once upon a time, a young and poor Hans Christian Andersen left the provincial areas of Denmark for Copenhagen with dreams of becoming a ballet dancer and actor. That didn’t happen. However, his dreams spilled over and to this day delight our imagination with The Princess and the Pea, stir our fears with The Snow Queen, lead our curiosity through the living room in The Teapot and introduce us to the Emperor’s false values in The Nightingale. Not least, then, has the fairy tale of the poor boy who proved to be a genuine artistic genius come true in the figure of Denmark’s most beloved author.
Andersen’s tales dip their toes in parallel universes and play out in past, future or present spaces — and sometimes places not rooted in time at all. In this tendency lies fiction’s modest strength: to tell stories about imagined lives without threatening, promising or assuring, but merely depicting, opening up and providing food for thought while the reader forgets themselves. Although we usually relegate speculations of the future to prognoses or hypotheses, literary fantasies can most certainly be included in this group as well. And fairy tales are one of the most fantastic genres of fantasy, often detached from time or space while adhering to a mythical form that appeals to children and adults alike throughout time and space. From the pen of the uncontested master of the genre, small and large scenes of life, death, love, society, class, philosophy, power and growth reflect how everything either could be, is or is not. And in this respect, H.C. Andersen is the master. Walking by his side serves both to delight and sharpen our minds.
Andersen’s tales dip their toes in parallel universes and play out in past, future or present spaces — and sometimes places not rooted in time at all.
Rites of Passage
Andersen’s fairy tales derive much of their societal impact because the author was able to utilise his own context and experiences in the stories he wrote. Take the somewhat trite trope of the journey, a priceless premise upon which many fairy tales are told: in order to grow, someone must travel from point A to point B with the outer world dramatising the protagonist’s inner world. Andersen always has his characters moving between spaces, sometimes across short distances — a drawer, a living room or a table top such as in The Top and the Ball or The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep — and at others through fractals of worlds such as The Snow Queen, in which Gerda’s journey through seven parallel societies distort actual, non-fictional societies.
From the pen of the uncontested master of the genre, small and large scenes of life, death, love, society, class, philosophy, power and growth reflect how everything either could be, is or is not.
Andersen’s own travels took him throughout Europe, North Africa, England, Ireland and Sweden, where he wrote, met colleagues such as Dickens and Dumas, read, enjoyed the cultural scenes and demonstrated a remarkable interest in worlds of any and all sizes.Along the way, his records reveal an increasing preoccupation with the idea of a pan-European identity, resulting from the convergence of the natural, cultural and communal spirit, rather than an identity defined by the national state or political systems; his views and values evolved as he moved across space and he was able to channel those interactions between the known and the unknown into his adventure tales as a result of his own journeys.
The physical journey of his characters is also always reflected as one of personal growth — an evolution into another version of themselves by encountering other, bizarre worlds that encourage a growth in both the character and the reader. This dynamic interrelation between our everyday and alternative realms also appears in The Little Match Girl. In this story, Andersen criticises the earthly conditions that prevent his otherwise strong and not seldom female protagonists from achieving their goals in this life, like class struggles, ingrained power structures and social norms. By depicting their plight and death in such vivid terms in a speculative landscape, we readers are free to examine our own values and context in a more abstract way.
Andersen’s and his characters’ journeys, desires and proclivities even prompts explorations of imagined landscapes beyond Earth. There are rumours indicating that when he was young, Andersen desired to end his life because he was so excited to experience death. For him, death was a concrete place that could be experienced and learned from. In The Story of a Mother, Anderden indulges in this imagination when he lets his protagonist experience the realm of Death in order to save her child. It is a brutal and beautiful story about a mother’s courage and self-sacrifice. More than that, and despite being set in a wholly unfamiliar space, the personification of Death and the character’s struggles against it serves so that we might draw a deeper understanding about life in this world.
Throughout his works, Andersen looked to the outer world not only for pure artistic inspiration, but to reflect on the structures and conditions that characterised other societies. In short, Hans Christian Andersen was a modern Romantic; he lived his ideals and communicated them by extrapolating on his own experiences and distilling them into characters and adventures; in this way, he was able to also speak to conditions affecting a larger community of people. And it’s carried over into today, not because Anderson’s nor our viewpoint is old-fashioned; rather, it’s because these beliefs in personal and communal critique and growth have themselves been carried over into today’s society. Our values find their form in the confines of the fairy tale.
Although we usually relegate speculations of the future to prognoses or hypotheses, literary fantasies can most certainly be included in this group as well.
Fiction Leads Us into New Worlds
Fairy tales, with their deep complexities, layers of philosophy and myth-miming structures have always endured to the enchantment of both children and adults. The statue of The Little Mermaid has become both one of Denmark’s most beloved tourist attractions as well as the icon for the city of Copenhagen; even after a century and a half, people still find value in these tales, having translated them into over 160 languages. We find delight in Andersen’s visions which revolve around themes of growth, exploration and new perspectives, which guides us towards insight like the glow of a lit candle in a bare attic room. Only in speculative spaces, like that of a fairy tale, does the mingling of one’s personal microcosm and the world’s macrocosm make intuitive sense.
The fairy tales of H.C. Andersen are neither sci-fi, dystopian or utopian, but exist in parallel universes or non-spaces that function on dynamic levels within society. The mythological landscapes that Andersen’s characters inhabit make the abstract issues of our lives, such associetal injustice and death, into tangible parallel realities, leading us as readers through the thought experiment and towards epiphany and action. With his tales, Andersen has guided us down new paths, led us astray and shown us characters in all shapes and sizes and, most importantly, relatable fates in unknown surroundings, and as readers we cannot help but grow when we immerse ourselves in his fantasies.
Only in the speculative space, like that of a fairy tale, does the mingling of one’s personal microcosm and the world’s macrocosm make intuitive sense.