This is a review of the kindle edition of Hans Christian Andersen's Complete Fairy Tales. I notice that most of the reviews for it are for the hardcover edition. Paper and print quality for this edition were not an issue. The version I had was free of any illustrations except for the cover art.
I was reading an older speech or essay by Daisaku Ikeda in either the World Tribune or Living Buddhism a while back in which he referred to a story by Hans Christian Anderson called “The Silver Shilling.” It occurred to me then that not only had I never heard of this particular story before, but I had never read any of Hans Christian Anderson’s stories in their original format. By this, of course, I mean a good translation as they were originally written in Danish. This book has no mention of who the translator was.
There are 127 stories in this collection of which I only know about ten or twelve, and not all of them very well. Even of the ones I thought I knew pretty well, some as they are presented here are so different from the frequent retellings you hear most often as to be almost unrecognizable. “The Red Shoes” for example is much different from the version you usually see. “The Fir Tree” is probably the story I know the best. It usually finds its way into Christmas anthologies because of the little fir tree’s experience one year as a Christmas tree. It is substantially the same as the story I know.
The designation of fairy tales for these stories is surprising, as fairies are not mentioned in no more than three of them and elves in perhaps as many as five. Much more common are stories featuring birds, flowers, or inanimate objects who talk and act very much like people. In one case there is a bottle neck that has a surprisingly long story. There are also several life stories of pretty much average people; some of them live good lives and end by going to heaven and meeting someone they had lost. Others do not live so well and die very unhappy. There are three or four stories of boys and girls who played happily together as children but were later separated in one way or another. Some of these children were later reunited. Others drift away and never find each other again. Angels feature prominently in some of the stories. Almost all of the stories have a moral of some sort.
There is also an unexpectedly large number of stories of the lives of prominent artists or writers, occasionally as viewed by the flowers or birds that lived in their yards. Most of these were Scandinavian artists so I didn’t recognize many of them. They almost invariably died young, however.
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