59 Fun Facts About Hans Christian Andersen

In which Danish city was Hans Christian Andersen born in 1805?

Odense. When he left as a boy, a fortune-teller told his mother the town would one day be lit up in his honour; in 1867 it was, with a torchlight procession for its new honorary citizen.

Which famous fairy tale did Andersen write?

'The Little Match Girl' is one of the 156 tales Andersen published. Its barefoot heroine burns her whole bundle of matches on New Year's Eve to hold on to a vision of her dead grandmother.

What was the occupation of Andersen's mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter?

Washerwoman. After his father died she went out washing to keep them both, and she ended her days in an almshouse in 1833; Andersen, abroad on his first grand tour, heard the news only weeks later.

In Andersen's 'The Wild Swans', which plant must Elisa knit into shirts to turn her swan brothers human again?

Nettles, picked barehanded in graveyards, blister her hands, and she may not speak a word until the shirts are done. She runs out of time, so her youngest brother keeps a swan's wing in place of one arm.

In Andersen's 'The Little Mermaid', what does every step on her new legs feel like?

Treading on sharp knives is the price the sea witch names, on top of the mermaid's voice. She dances for the prince all the same, and he marries another princess.

At 14, Andersen left home for Copenhagen hoping to win fame as what?

An actor was the plan. His boy-soprano voice got him into the Royal Theatre, but it soon broke, and after three years of failed tries on stage a director sent him to school instead.

In one Andersen tale, a one-legged toy soldier falls in love with which other toy?

A paper ballerina, balanced on one toe, looks to him as if she has only one leg too, so he decides she is the match for him. Both end in the stove, where he melts into a little tin heart.

In one Andersen tale, the emperor of which country prefers a jewelled mechanical bird to a living one?

China's emperor banishes the living bird for a jewelled wind-up one sent from Japan. When the toy has broken down and he lies dying, the real bird comes back and sings him well.

Andersen's first book appeared under the pen name Villiam Christian Walter, honouring himself, Walter Scott and which writer?

William Shakespeare. Andersen was 17, and the book, a play and a ghost story that leaned heavily on other writers, sold so badly that most of the edition was pulped.

In Andersen's 'The Emperor's New Clothes', the two swindlers who fool the court pose as what?

Weavers, they say, of a cloth invisible to anyone unfit for his office or hopelessly stupid. They pocket the silk and gold thread and work the empty looms late into the night.

Andersen's first novel, The Improvisatore (1835), was inspired by his travels in which country?

Italy. The novel came out a month before his first fairy tales and was an immediate success, so for years readers knew Andersen as a novelist rather than a teller of tales.

In which Andersen tale does a soldier win a princess with the help of three dogs with enormous eyes?

'The Tinderbox': each strike of it calls a dog, the biggest with eyes the size of Copenhagen's Round Tower. At the gallows they toss the judges and the king into the air, and the soldier gets the princess.

Which famous German had never heard of Andersen when the Dane called on him unannounced in 1844?

Jacob Grimm asked who he was and what he had written, Andersen recalled, and the embarrassed Dane fled without meeting Wilhelm. A year and a half later he was meeting both brothers in Berlin and talking fairy tales with them.

In Andersen's 'The Fir-Tree', what becomes of the tree after its one glorious Christmas Eve?

Chopped up and burned, after months forgotten in an attic with only mice to hear its stories. All its life the tree had longed for something grander to come, and it never noticed when it was happy.

In Andersen's 'Thumbelina', which bird does the tiny heroine nurse back to life in a mole's tunnel?

A swallow, left for dead underground, is warmed through the winter by Thumbelina. It comes back just before her wedding to the mole and carries her south, where she marries a tiny winged king her own size.

Which German Romantic novella about a water spirit influenced 'The Little Mermaid'?

Fouqué's Undine is a water spirit who wins a soul by marrying a knight. Andersen's mermaid loses her prince, yet she is still offered the chance to earn a soul by her own good deeds.

In 'The Emperor's New Clothes', who first says the emperor has nothing on?

A child says it, and the crowd takes up the cry. In the Spanish tale Andersen borrowed, a stable hand spoke up; he added the child at the last moment, when his own tale was already at the printer's.

In 'The Emperor's New Clothes', what does Andersen's emperor do when the whole town shouts the truth?

Walks on, prouder than ever: he suspects they are right but decides the procession must go on, and his noblemen carry a train that isn't there. In Andersen's first draft, nobody in the crowd spoke up at all.

When Andersen's first fairy tales appeared, what did several of his friends advise him to do?

Stop writing them, they said, and one journal called the tales childish after his successful novel. Andersen went back to novels for a year, but the tales, he wrote later, 'forced themselves from me'.

Which philosopher's first book, in 1838, was a long attack on Andersen as a novelist?

Søren Kierkegaard set out to review Andersen's novel Only a Fiddler and ended up with a whole book arguing he had no philosophy of life. Andersen heard it was coming and felt martyred before it was even out.

In Andersen's 'The Little Mermaid', what do her sisters trade to the sea witch for a dagger to save her?

Their hair buys a dagger: if she kills the sleeping prince before sunrise, she can be a mermaid again. She looks at him, flings it into the waves and leaps after it.

Which Copenhagen waterfront, now lined with restaurants, was Andersen's home at three different addresses?

Nyhavn. He wrote his first fairy tales in rented rooms at No. 20, and in all his decades in Copenhagen he never owned a home, only lodging with landladies or living in hotels.

Which English novelist stopped answering Andersen's letters after the Dane stretched a two-week visit into five?

Charles Dickens had once given him his books inscribed from 'his friend and admirer'. When Dickens died in 1870, Andersen wrote in his diary that now he would never learn why the letters had stopped.

In which New York park does a bronze Andersen sit with an open book, paid for partly by Danish and American schoolchildren?

Central Park. Children climb into the statue's lap, and storytellers have gathered young audiences around it every summer since the 1950s.

Besides writing, which craft was Andersen known for, often practised to amuse his hosts' children?

Paper cutting helped earn his keep: at the manor houses where he stayed as a guest he repaid his hosts with readings and cut-outs, and one Christmas he made the tree decorations for an estate's poor children.

Which Andersen tale is widely believed to have been inspired by his love for Jenny Lind?

'The Nightingale' was written in two days, weeks after her Copenhagen concerts, and she became known as the Swedish Nightingale. She liked him but never loved him back, calling him 'a child' and her brother.

When Andersen died, a leather pouch at his chest held a farewell letter from whom?

His first love, Riborg Voigt, was engaged to another man when they met and turned him down by letter. She never forgot him either: his poems and a bouquet lay hidden in a secret drawer of her desk until she died.

Andersen's father went to war in 1812 as a paid substitute, when Denmark was allied to which ruler?

Napoleon of France was the shoemaker's hero, his son wrote. He took a farmer's son's place for pay that the state bankruptcy of 1813 all but wiped out, got no farther than Holstein and came home broken in health.

In which Andersen tale does the title character pine hopelessly for a stove?

'The Snowman' can't say why the stove's glow draws him so. When he melts, the reason is left standing in the yard: the boys had built him around an old stove rake.

In Andersen's 'The Shadow', what finally happens to the scholar whose shadow takes on a life of its own?

Executed, quietly, on the very evening his former shadow marries a princess. He had refused to go on posing as the shadow's shadow and threatened to tell her the truth.

In one Andersen tale, a toy soldier sailing a paper boat down the gutter ends up in the belly of what?

A fish gulps him down in the canal, is caught, sold at market and cut open in the kitchen of the very house he fell from, so he lands back on the same table among the same toys.

In Andersen's 'The Swineherd', what does the princess pay the disguised prince for his musical pot and rattle?

Kisses: ten for the pot and a hundred for the rattle. Her father catches her at it and throws her out, and the prince, having seen what she values, shuts his own door on her too.

What did the Danish crown grant Andersen in 1838 that freed him from writing for bread?

An annual stipend meant, he wrote, that he was no longer forced to write in order to live. When a later king hinted that he might ask for more, Andersen would not, and it was raised the next year anyway.

Which American town founded by Danes has a Hans Christian Andersen Museum and park?

Solvang, Danish for 'sunny field', was founded in 1911 by Danish-American educators who wanted a colony with a folk school of its own to keep their culture alive. Its Andersen museum sits upstairs from a bookshop.

Which star played Andersen in the 1952 musical film that calls itself 'a fairy tale about this great spinner of fairy tales'?

Danny Kaye. Danes complained before its release that Hollywood had turned their national hero's life into a fairy tale, then packed a Copenhagen cinema to see it, with the queen at the opening.

Which Disney hit took seven decades of failed attempts to film an Andersen tale?

Frozen began when Walt Disney wanted 'The Snow Queen' for a film of Andersen's life, and team after team gave up on it. One suggestion finally cracked the story: make the queen and the heroine sisters.

In Andersen's 'The Princess and the Pea', where does the pea end up?

In a museum, Andersen says, where it can still be seen if nobody has taken it. It had proved her a real princess, because she felt it through twenty mattresses and twenty feather beds.

Which Andersen tale is retold in Disney's Fantasia 2000, set to a Shostakovich piano concerto?

'The Steadfast Tin Soldier' gets a happy ending from Disney: the jack-in-the-box villain falls into the fire and the hero survives. In Andersen's tale it is the soldier who melts.

Andersen's birthday, 2 April, is celebrated internationally as what?

International Children's Book Day has been held since 1967. Each year a different country hosts it and picks a theme, and one of its authors writes a message to the children of the world.

The Hans Christian Andersen Awards go every two years to a children's writer and to whom else?

An illustrator has been honoured beside the writer since 1966. The medals now reward a whole life's work rather than one book, which is how Tove Jansson and Maurice Sendak each came to win one.

In Andersen's 'Thumbelina', the thumb-sized heroine is first found sitting inside what?

A flower, grown from a barleycorn that a childless woman buys from a witch, bursts open with a pop to show the tiny child. A polished walnut shell then becomes her cradle.

In an Andersen tale, the kindly dream-bringer Ole Lukøje has a brother of the same name, better known as whom?

Death rides by in a hussar's uniform and calls on everyone just once. He tells only two stories, and those with a bad school report must sit behind him on his horse and hear the frightful one.

Copenhagen's Little Mermaid statue was a gift to the city from the son of which brewery's founder?

Carlsberg. Carl Jacobsen, the brewery founder's son, was so taken with a ballet of the tale at the Royal Theatre that he commissioned the bronze and gave it to Copenhagen in 1913.

On whom was the body of the Little Mermaid statue actually modelled?

The sculptor's wife, Eline Eriksen, posed because the dancer who had inspired the statue, Ellen Price, would not model nude for it.

How tall is the Little Mermaid statue on Copenhagen's Langelinie promenade?

1.25 metres. Small as she is, she is seen the world over as a symbol of Denmark, and that has made her a favourite target for protesters with paint.

Which part of Copenhagen's Little Mermaid statue did vandals saw off in 1964, never to be found?

Her head was never recovered, and a new one had to be cast. Decades later an artist claimed in his memoirs to have sunk it in a Copenhagen bog, and in 1998 the replacement was sawn off too, though that one came back.

Where was Copenhagen's Little Mermaid statue displayed for six months, its first official trip off its rock?

Shanghai, at Expo 2010, where she sat in the Danish pavilion. On her empty spot in Copenhagen the artist Ai Weiwei set up a screen that showed her live from the pavilion.

Disney filmed which Andersen tale twice, in 1931 and again in 1939 as its Oscar-winning last Silly Symphony?

'The Ugly Duckling' was first told in 1931 with a duckling hatched among chicks who wins his place by saving them from a waterfall. The colour remake went back to Andersen's swan.

In Andersen's 'The Snow Queen', who sets Gerda free and gives her a reindeer to ride north?

A little robber girl, who sleeps with a knife and keeps the reindeer tied up to tease it, is won over by Gerda's story. She lets them both go, but keeps Gerda's pretty fur muff for herself.

In Andersen's 'The Snow Queen', who makes the mirror that shows everything good as small and ugly?

The devil, a wicked troll in Andersen's telling, is so pleased with it that his pupils fly it up towards heaven to mock the angels. It slips from their hands and shatters, and the splinters lodge in people's eyes and hearts.

In 'The Ugly Duckling', which two pets of an old woman bully the hero?

Cat and hen rule the old woman's cottage and think themselves half the world. Since he can neither purr nor lay eggs, they tell him, he has no business holding opinions.

Andersen's father, a poor shoemaker, read to him on Sundays from Holberg's comedies and which collection of tales?

The Arabian Nights. His father had longed to go to grammar school and been made a shoemaker instead, so he poured his love of books into his only child.

From 1843, which words did Andersen drop from the title of his fairy-tale collections?

Told for Children went because, as he saw it, people of every age enjoyed the tales: the little ones laughed at the characters, while their elders caught the deeper meaning.

What does Gerda offer the river in exchange for Kai's return in 'The Snow Queen'?

Her red shoes, the dearest thing she owns, wash straight back to the bank. She climbs into a boat to throw them farther out, and the boat drifts away with her.

What word must Kai spell out of ice pieces to be freed by the Snow Queen?

Eternity. The Snow Queen threw in a new pair of skates as part of the prize, but the ice pieces only spell the word after Gerda's tears thaw his heart.

In 'The Snow Queen', how does Gerda get past the snowflakes guarding the palace?

She prays the Lord's Prayer. In the intense cold her breath takes the shape of angels with helmets and lances, who shatter the living snowflakes and warm her hands and feet.

In Andersen's 'The Little Mermaid', mermaids live about 300 years and then turn into what?

Sea foam. Mermaids have no immortal soul, her grandmother explains, which is why the little mermaid sets out to win one through a human's love.

In 'The Snow Queen', the Lapp woman has no paper, so she writes Gerda's message on what?

A dried codfish. The Finn woman reads it three times, learns it by heart and then drops the fish into her soup kettle, since she never wastes anything.

In the medieval tale behind 'The Emperor's New Clothes', the cloth was invisible to whom?

Illegitimate sons. The king wanted the cloth to expose them, then saw nothing himself and praised it anyway, afraid he would lose his throne.