‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ is an 1838 fairy tale by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. One of the shortest among Andersen’s well-known tales, ‘The Steadfast Tin Soldier’ is about a toy soldier who falls in love with a paper ballerina, and who undergoes a series of hardships, seemingly as […]
‘The Red Shoes’ (1845) is perhaps the strangest of all of Hans Christian Andersen’s well-known fairy tales. Divining the meaning of some of Andersen’s other stories for children is relatively easy, but a number of aspects of the meaning and symbolism of ‘The Red Shoes’ remain troubling. Let’s take a […]
Aesop wasn’t the first person to write animal fables. Several centuries earlier, Hesiod had written one about a hawk and a nightingale, while a poet named Archilochus penned several, including one about an eagle and a vixen, and one about a fox and a monkey. But Aesop, a writer about […]
‘The Dog in the Manger’ is one of several fables attributed to the ancient writer Aesop which have become not just famous, but proverbial: the fable has itself become a well-known phrase whose meaning is synonymous with the fable’s moral. However, as with a few other famous ‘Aesop fables’, the […]
10 of the most classic children’s rhymes – selected by Dr Oliver Tearle For most of us, nursery rhymes are the first poems we ever encounter in life. They can teach us about rhythm, and about constructing a story in verse, and, occasionally, they impart important moral lessons to us. […]