Some of the lesser known tales appeared first in England or in the United States. Seventeen were procured by editor Horace E. Scudder, who saw their importance for his Riverside Magazine, published in Boston for children, 1867–70. Eleven had their first printing there. (Scudder, we know, learned Danish at the time so that he could satisfy himself that he was securing good translations for his subscribers.) This new work, in its fresh and authentic transmission, and with Andersen’s notes accompanying the translation, is offered as a contribution to the history of a literature that belongs to every age.

Virginia Haviland
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Introduction

After having worked for more than two years on the translation of Andersen’s fairy tales, I have come to be on intimate terms with him. It has been said that intimacy breeds contempt; and I am sure it does for those who search for idols. But I think one can love a person for his faults as well as his virtues. Man is made from clay and clay is fragile. But maybe it is its frailty that makes us look with double wonder at an ancient Greek vase: it is so delicate, so brittle, and yet it has survived.

Andersen lived seventy years; and I believe his fairy tales will live forever. He had innumerable weaknesses, which I shall not recount, for most of them all men possess; but he had that great courage that poets must have; and that made it possible for him to be totally aware of his own faults and virtues. A poet’s laboratory is himself, and Andersen made use of those traits for which he would have been laughed at or censored, as well as those that might earn him applause.

He had an enormous pride, a faith in his own talent, and a belief in his own particular genius; and this brought him into conflict with the intellectuals of his time. What his critics did not understand was that his pride was also the guardian of his talent. He was a very careful writer. Many of his stories were rewritten many times. It was of great concern to him that his tales should be able to be read aloud as if they were being told.

The fairy tale speaks to all of us; that is its particular charm. The beggar and the prince pause in the market place to hear the storyteller; and for the moment they are merely men, subject to the passions that rule us all. Again and again, in his notes and his autobiography, Andersen refers to the stories he had heard as a child. It is a strange irony that our all-embracing modern forms of communication have killed the storyteller, and may end by making us all mute.

These stories that Andersen heard as a child were all very simple tales, and their characters were probably more archetypes than they were individuals. They were not meant to surprise—let alone shock—the listener. Indeed, their attraction lay in the fact that they were familiar. The mean, the petty, the evil, the good, and the kind were so in the manner that one was used to; it was the plot itself that held one’s interest. We of the twentieth century, who are so used to plotless novels with heroes so infinitely complex that, after having read the book, it is easier for us to describe the characters’ nervous systems than to tell what the story was about, hardly ever come into contact with this early form of literature. Yet these stories, stripped as they are of the fashionable and the modish, give us—at least for a moment—that peace which is necessary for survival. Man must live in his own time—he has no choice—but for the sake of his sanity he must sometimes escape its tyranny—if only to be able to recognize it. Once upon a time denies time and thus curtails its power over us.

Once upon a time is a definite point in the infinite. It exists somewhere but has no particular date, which is a feat that is hardly explainable—and yet, maybe it is. We have divided time into precise periods. “Was once upon a time in the Iron Age, the Bronze Age, or the thirteenth century?” we ask, for we are enlightened. But the peasant who heard a fairy tale in the market place and retold it to his family when he came home had no such conceptions. Time, for him, stretched from the creation till that moment which can best be described as now.