![]() ![]() ![]() Naturally he called on the trolls, tricksters and ice creatures who were part of the oral tradition of his peasant background, but much of what he did with them came directly out of his own sad, fertile brain. For, unlike the Brothers Grimm who collected German folk tales that had been sitting deep in the culture for centuries, Andersen made his stories up from scratch. It is the correspondingly quotidian world of cobblers, ploughmen, fir trees and darning needles that make Andersen's universe such a vital one. It isn't just his particular brand of idiosyncratic, "low" Danish that accounts for the stories sounding so fresh 150 years after they were written. This is especially true of Hans Christian Andersen. But it is the language, subtle and insinuating, that slips beneath your defences and delivers the tales' odd, twisted meanings straight into the bloodstream. Universal themes - Oedipal rivalry, oral gratification - count for a great deal, to be sure. Perhaps more than most genres, folk tales depend for their power on an absolute precision of language. ![]()
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