In some ways Scandinavia’s answer to the tale of Aladdin and the Magic Lamp, ‘The Tinder Box’ was one of Hans Christian Andersen’s first fairy tales. ‘The Tinder Box’ contains a number of common fairy-tale tropes: the magic helper with the ability to grant wishes, the ‘rags to riches’ motif, […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle Hans Christian Andersen’s influence on the fairy tale genre was profound. Although ‘The Snow Queen’, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, ‘The Little Mermaid’, and ‘The Ugly Duckling’ have the ring of timeless fairy stories, they were all original tales written by the Danish storyteller in the mid-nineteenth […]
By Dr Oliver Tearle ‘The Little Mermaid’ (1837) is one of the most layered and fascinating fairy tales written by Hans Christian Andersen. At once the quintessential fairy tale and a curious subversion of the fairy-tale form, ‘The Little Mermaid’ requires some careful analysis to unpick its various strands and […]