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Hey there. Here is another book review…which also serves as a means by which I can ruin some kids’ stories for you. Heh heh heh…but really, you shouldn’t blame me. Blame the parents and writers and filmmakers who dumbed them down for all of us.


Selection:
The Complete Hans Christian Anderson Fairy Tales
by Hans Christian Anderson, translated by Lily Owens

 

Synopsis:

This is a more-or-less comprehensive collection of Anderson fairy tales. The book includes well known stories like The Little Mermaid and The Emperor’s New Suit, and many more obscure fairy tales and morality stories like The Saucy Boy and The Bird of Popular Song.

Packing in over 130 short stories and several illustrations, this book will certainly keep you occupied, whether you read them yourself or dare to read them to your children before bed.

 

 

Reeser’s Opinion:

You might think the idea of reading fairy tales to your little kids (for my one subscriber who has a kid or for anyone else who stumbles across this…), but I really don’t think should read these particular stories to them.

 

You might think I’m kidding, but I’m not. You really shouldn’t read these to children unless you think you can gloss over things so your kid won’t notice the bad parts of the stories, of you think your kid is reasonably understanding and you plan on having serious discussions with said kid about God (whether you believe in a God or not, many of these stories will have you address the issue), death, poverty, and all kinds of social and moral problems.

 

Yep. You might think you know some of Anderson’s fairy tales, but I highly doubt that you know them the way that he told them. I will be honest and say I haven’t read all of the stories in this book, but I did read most of them before it got to be too much for me. “Too much” here meaning “tedious and depressing.”

I took special pains in this latest reading to look at the stories that I thought people might recognize because I know I heard some version of them as a child, and then to note the differences I saw between the original stories and the ones you and I might have seen in picture book adaptations or cartoons at some point. Unfortunately, the entry was getting lengthy, even though I tried to make my notes brief, so I’ve split this review into three sections. Both this one and the second one are about stories that you’ve either definitely heard, or might have been exposed to via obscure television shows. The third entry will be about a few fairy tales that I thought were worth reading and that you probably haven’t heard of.

 

Here we go:

 

The Ugly Duckling:

Anderson’s story is mostly the one we know, but parts are different. For instance, the cygnet (baby swan) runs away from his duck mother because all the animals and the farm girl treat him badly, and when he’s in the wild, a hunter shoots some geese that were his companions. When the dogs come for the geese, the cygnet is too afraid to run away, and thinks he’s done for…but it turns out he’s so ugly the dogs won’t even have him. That’s pretty awful.

So young Cyg goes out, alone and ugly and wishing more and more that he would just die…and after running over and over into the problem of being “too ugly” for anyone he meets, he sees some swans. By then he’s all grown up, but he doesn’t know it. All he can think is that he wants to talk to these gorgeous birds. He thinks they’ll kill him for daring to speak when he’s so hideous, but that it would be nicer to try and talk to them and be murdered than to stay alone and alive. But, while he’s waiting for the swans to kill him, he looks down at the water and sees his reflection. He’s astonished to find that he’s the best looking swan of all.

It’s not a bad story, but I don’t know how comfortable some people would be with the suicidal undertones.


 

The Princess And The Pea:

This story is, fortunately, short and unchanged from the one we probably heard growing up. The only thing I can say about it is that I think it’s actually making a bit of a jibe at picky girls, but kids might not get that out of the story unless you read it to them that way. It’s all about inflection, I guess.


 

The Little Mermaid:

Oh.Em.Gee. This is not the Disney story we all know.

It doesn’t get bad until the mermaid starts pining away after a handsome human prince that she rescued from a shipwreck. Then the mermaid’s grandmother tells her it’s no good to love him, and starts talking about how short human lives are, and how it’s better to be a mermaid and live hundreds of years before dissolving into sea foam. Of course, the mermaid wants to know why humans don’t dissolve when they die, and the grandmother says that they have souls instead, and that the souls go to heaven when humans die (how did she ever find this out, I wonder?).

That’s where the story starts getting weird, because then the little mermaid starts pining after a soul, and is told that the only way she could get one would be to marry a human because then she would get a little piece of his soul to call her own. How, I have no idea (although I have some suspicions…), but then the grandmother tells her that no human would ever marry her because she has an ugly fishy tail.

The mermaid then goes to a sea witch and the witch gives her a potion to turn her human, and in exchange, cuts out the mermaid’s tongue so she can no longer sing. A little bit different from Disney’s version, but either way the mermaid loses her voice. Additionally, though she can walk and dance very well, each step the mermaid takes is like walking over sharp knives.

This is where we realize that unlike in the Disney version where it was all done for the prince, Anderson’s little mermaid is probably doing all of this for herself because she wants a soul. An admirable goal, I’m sure…but still pretty bizarre.

And the prince does like her, but he tells her that the only girl he could ever love is the girl who he thinks rescued him from the shipwreck, and—ta-da!—he finds out that she’s a princess that his parents want him to marry. And he does. Unfortunately for our mermaid, that means she’ll dissolve into sea foam the next morning because she failed to marry the prince, and now she’ll also never have a soul. Her sisters try to rescue her though…they give up their hair to the witch and get a knife that the mermaid can use to kill the prince and become a mermaid again. But she won’t kill the prince, and so dissolves the next morning. But because she was such a good person though, she becomes an air spirit and as long as she works for 300 years to do good deeds, she’ll get a soul after all and she’ll get to go to heaven.

So…very, very different from Disney’s Ariel. I know some people complain about Disney’s Mermaid having scary and violent moments, but at least with that one you don’t have to explain all this soul business, which, even if you do believe in souls, you probably don’t buy what Anderson says happens to the mermaid.


 

The Snow Queen

I can’t find a link to the cartoon version I saw of this story, but I am 100% sure it wasn’t the one with Hugh Laurie (the actor from the show House) as one of the characters. That one might actually be good (I haven’t seen it though, so don’t take my word for it) because it seems to include some parts that the one I saw left out.

Basically, the story is about a girl called Gerda and boy called Kai who are friends, but when Kai gets a piece of a magic mirror stuck in his eye, and it makes him focus on bad things instead of good ones and he starts being really mean. Then the Snow Queen kidnaps him and Gerda has to find and rescue him.

In the version I saw, an old woman stops Gerda and makes her forget Kai. Gerda stays with the old woman for a looong time, but eventually is reminded that she was trying to rescue her friend. Once she escapes from the old woman, she relies on the wild animals to help her, and eventually makes it to the Snow Queen’s palace, where she sings a song that makes Kai cry. The tears wash the mirror piece out of his eye, and Kai is good again and they escape together from the Snow Queen.

All of that happens in the Anderson version, but there is also a band of robbers that detain Gerda for a while. They drink and fight and curse, and the old robber woman has a very abusive daughter. The robber girl threatens over and over to stab Gerda, and also to slit the throat of a reindeer that the robbers keep tied up. Eventually the robber girl sympathizes with Gerda and lets her take the reindeer to help find Kai.

I don’t remember any robbers in the cartoon, but the one with Hugh Laurie apparently has some robber characters, so maybe it’s a little truer to the story than the one I saw. Dunno. They also include a Prince and Princess in the list of characters…and the one I saw didn’t. They don’t play a huge role in the story though, so I can understand why they’d get cut out.

Basically I think you wouldn’t want to read it to your kids because of that robber girl and her constant threats.


 

Stay tuned for the second installment in this three-part fairy tale series!  ; )

 

 

 

Cheers.

 

Reeser