In fact, most of Andersen’s early tales—including “The Tinderbox,” “Little Claus and Big Claus (1835),” “The Princess on the Pea,” and “The Traveling Companion” (1835)—are based on Danish folk tales that he had heard or read. He may have also used German and European tales collected by the Brothers Grimm as his sources; for instance, “The Tinderbox” and “Little Claus and Big Claus” are closely related to the Grimms’ “The Blue Light” and “The Little Farmer,” and other of Andersen’s tales show the influence of the Grimms. Knowing the sources enables us to study how Andersen appropriated and enriched these tales to reflect upon conditions in Danish society and upon the trajectory of his life. A good example is “The Traveling Companion,” an oral tale widespread in the Scandinavian countries and most of Europe. Folklorists refer to it as a tale type about the “grateful dead,” in which a dead man whose corpse is maltreated helps a young man who kindly protects the corpse from abuse. In Andersen’s version, the young man is devout and trusts the Lord and his dead father in Heaven to guide him through life. Andersen combines pagan and Christian motifs to illustrate the rise of a poor, naive man whose goodness enables him to marry a princess.

Andersen colored his tales based on folklore with his personal experience while using the folk perspective to expose the contradictions of the aristocratic class. In “The Swineherd” (1842) he remained close to the folk perspective, which he also developed in some of his original fairy tales, such as “The Emperor’s New Clothes.”

In Andersen’s early adaptations of folklore we see him in an “apprentice” phase as a writer of short prose. Taking the structure and contents of these tales as a basis, he developed his own style and tone, which was characterized by the simple folk mode of storytelling. Andersen’s style overall is really not so much “childlike” as it is “folksy,” and it was this blend of intimate, down-to-earth storytelling with folk motifs and literary themes that gave rise to some of his most significant fairy tales.

ORIGINAL FAIRY TALES

It is perhaps an exaggeration to assert that Andersen’s fairy tales are “original” because all his narratives reveal how much he borrowed from literature and from the folklore tradition. Nevertheless, he endowed them with his own original touch and personal experiences, and that makes them somewhat unique narratives. The major feature of Andersen’s original literary fairy tales is that he turned known literary motifs into provocative and uncanny stories that challenge conventional expectations and explore modes of magic realism he learned from the German Romantics, especially E. T. A. Hoffmann. Two of his greatest fairy tales—“The Shadow” and “The Little Mermaid”—demonstrate his talent for transforming known folk and literary motifs into highly complex narratives about identity formation. “The Shadow,” clearly based on German writer Adelbert Chamisso’s novella Peter Schlemihl (1813), in which a man sells his shadow to the devil, can also be traced to E. T. A. Hoffman’s tale “The New Year’s Adventure” (1819), in which a man gives up his reflection for love. For Andersen, this loss of a shadow or reflection is transformed into a psychological conflict in which unconscious forces debilitate and eventually destroy a strong ego. The learned man’s identity is literally effaced by his shadow. In “The Little Mermaid,” based on his poem Agnete and the Merman and Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s fairy-tale novella Undine (1811), Andersen depicts the quest for identity in a more positive light. There are strong religious overtones in this narrative, in which a young girl learns that becoming human involves self-sacrifice, humility, and devotion. Christian redemption is promised if the mermaid will fulfill her destiny. Other tales, including “The Bronze Pig” (1842) and “Ib and Little Christine” (1855), feature this motif. Many others reflect Andersen’s desire to uncover social contradictions.

What often makes Andersen’s original tales original is their irony—a key element in “The Shadow” but one that is even more pronounced in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” (1837) and “The Naughty Boy” (1835). Andersen used the metaphorical mode of the fairy tale to expose social hypocrisy, and in the best of his original fairy tales, he left his readers not with happy endings, but with startling ones aimed at making them reflect upon ethical and moral behavior.

EVANGELICAL AND RELIGIOUS TALES

Andersen is not commonly thought of a religious writer; yet religious motifs and themes run through a majority of his tales. This religious dimension is one reason Andersen became so popular in the nineteenth century: He “tamed” the pagan or secular aspects of the folk-tale and fairy-tale traditions and made them acceptable to the nineteenth-century European and American reading publics. To a certain extent, some of his tales fit the standards of evangelical literature, which was very strong and popular throughout Europe and North America.