Fairy Tales Told for Children: First Booklet

Andersen was twenty-nine and hoping to be known as a novelist. In a letter of March 1835 to his friend Henriette Wulff, he said he had just written some fairy tales. He passed on what the physicist Hans Christian Ørsted had told him: The Improvisatore might make him famous, but the fairy tales would make him immortal. Andersen wrote that he did not agree.[1]

Years later he explained where the four tales came from. The first three were stories he had heard as a boy, in the spinning room and at the hop harvest. Little Ida's Flowers began on a visit to the writer Just Mathias Thiele. Andersen told Thiele's daughter Ida about the flowers in the botanical garden, and kept some of her remarks when he wrote the story down.[1]

He wanted the tales to sound spoken. In his autobiography he said he wrote them down in the words he used when telling them aloud to children, and called them "told for children" to quiet the critics. He meant them for young and old alike.[2] The booklet sold for a quarter of a rigsdaler, the Danish currency of the day. The Andersen Centre puts that at about five US dollars now.[1]

The Tinderbox opens the booklet. A soldier walking home from the war meets a witch, who sends him down inside a hollow tree to fetch an old tinderbox. Down there, three dogs sit on chests of copper, silver and gold. Their eyes are as big as saucers, as big as millstones, and as big as the Round Tower in Copenhagen. The soldier keeps the tinderbox. Striking it calls the dogs, and he uses them to fetch a sleeping princess to his room at night.[3]

Little Claus and Big Claus is a comic tale about two farmers with the same name. Big Claus owns four horses and Little Claus owns one. On Sundays Little Claus borrows all five to plough, and he cannot stop shouting "Gee-up, my five horses!" Big Claus kills his one horse to shut him up. Little Claus sells the hide, and a string of lucky lies makes him rich. Every time Big Claus copies him, it goes badly for Big Claus.[3]

The Princess and the Pea is barely a page long. A prince wants to marry a real princess. On a stormy night a soaking-wet girl knocks at the town gate and says she is one. The old queen puts a single pea under twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds. In the morning the girl says she hardly slept and is black and blue all over, so she must be real.[3]

Little Ida's Flowers closes the booklet. Ida's flowers have wilted, and a student who is good at stories tells her why. They were at a ball all night, he says, dancing in the king's summer castle while everyone slept. That night Ida gets up and watches her own flowers dance.[4]