FAIRYTALES AND STORIES

Author: Hans Christian Andersen
Year: 1902 & 1904 (19th cemtury)
Publisher: Gyldendalske Boghandel Forlag
Language: Danish

Hans Christian Andersen is arguably the greatest writer of children’s literature in history. His collected “Eventyr og historier” (“Fairytales and Stories”) can be rivalled only by the Arabian tradition of One Thousand and One Nights for global recognition, cultural impact, and durability over time. Although most of the stories were new to me, I was already familiar with a decent number of them.

Or so I thought. As I pressed on, fairytale after fairytale (80 in total), I became increasingly aware of how differently stories were told to children 150 years ago. I had not quite braced myself for the tempest of emotions that lay ahead. Yet, what captivated me most was the persistent, haunting motif of death.

Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales are deeply embedded in the cultural, religious, and social realities of 19th-century Denmark. In Andersen’s time, death was an everyday presence. Infant mortality was high, epidemics were common, and life expectancy was short. This familiarity with death shaped how Andersen portrayed mortality in his stories. Not as a taboo or traumatic event, but as a natural, even spiritual, transition. His tales seem often to have served as moral and emotional guides, preparing, as it were, children for the inevitability of loss while offering comfort through themes of transcendence and divine justice.

Back then, death was public and communal in a completely different way than it is in our modern society. Church records mandated the documentation of burials and causes of death, and weekly lists of the deceased were curated by the authorities and published in Copenhagen papers. Not as a tribute, but as information. The Lutheran Church played a central role in framing death as a passage to Heaven, emphasising divine justice and the afterlife as a source of solace. Andersen’s stories reflect this worldview. In The Angel, a dead child is escorted to Heaven by an angel, and in The Little Match Girl, the protagonist’s death is portrayed as a peaceful release from suffering into the arms of her grandmother. These narratives normalised death as part of life, rather than something to be feared or hidden.

Andersen’s use of death also carried social commentary. Tales like The Little Match Girl highlighted the plight of the poor, where death was a frequent and visible reality. The story’s tragic ending where the girl freezes to death, was not just a moral lesson but a critique of societal neglect. Similarly, The Little Mermaid’s transformation into sea foam symbolised the sacrifice and redemption central to Christian teachings, reinforcing the idea that death could be a path to spiritual fulfilment.

Over the past century and a half, Western Europe has undergone a profound cultural shift in its relationship with death. The medicalisation of death in the early 20th centuries marked the beginning of this transformation. Advances in medicine, sanitation, and public health drastically reduced mortality rates, particularly among children. Death moved from the home to hospitals, and the secularisation of society diminished the role of religion in explaining mortality. Freud’s and his successors’ theories on grief and the pathologisation of mourning further distanced death from everyday life, turning it into a subject often avoided in polite conversation.

The World Wars, one can imagine, accelerated this shift. Mass death on an unprecedented scale forced societies to confront mortality in new ways, but it also led to a cultural suppression of grief. In the post-war era, death became taboo, particularly in children’s literature and media. Disney’s adaptations of Andersen’s tales, for example, often softened or removed the original tragic endings. The Little Mermaid’s film version ends with a wedding, not the mermaid’s dissolution into sea foam. This sanitisation targeted all of the children’s literature from the past, e.g. the aforementioned Thousand and One Night and the tales of the Grimm Brothers, and reflected a broader trend: protecting children from the harsh realities of life, including death.

By the late 20th century, death had become invisible in many aspects of Western culture. Funerals were moved from homes to funeral parlours, and discussions about death were often deferred until adulthood. The rise of consumer culture further distanced people from mortality, as death was increasingly seen as a medical failure rather than a natural part of life. Children’s literature and media largely avoided the topic, or re-packaged it in fantastical, non-threatening ways (e.g., ghosts as friendly characters).

Today, a modern young reader approaches Andersen’s tales with a very different cultural framework. Where a 19th-century Danish child might have seen The Little Match Girl as a realistic and morally instructive story, a 21st-century child may find it shocking or incomprehensible. Some say that the fluffy fairytales of our era make our children weak and ill-prepared for the challenges they encounter when they grow up. Others argue that children need to be children and should be protected from trauma and sorrow. We will all reach a point where we will have to worry about death, anyway. What’s the hurry?  

This is not to say that children’s literature has necessarily become less educational or meaningful in our era. Instead of death, it often helps the young reader to reflect on issues such as identity, loneliness, or exclusion. Issues that are more pressing to a modern child than death, which thankfully has become a rare event in that age group. Issues change over time, but the power of literature to see us through remains a constant.