The Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales

If you remember Thumbelina, The Nightingale, The Ugly Duckling or The Princess and the Pea, they are all here in a wonderful collection of stories written by Hans Christian Anderson. Unlike the Brothers Grimm, who collected and recorded popular tales, Hans Christian Anderson wrote his own "folk" tales, which also contain Danish history and foreign literature.

Not all of his stories end well, yet this is a side of life children should learn about so they can be aware of it later in life. Your child might be horrified to learn that not everything ends up quite as magical as it would in a Disney movie. My favorite tale has always been "The Little Mermaid." She wanted to be something she was not meant to be and for me that is a lesson of how we should be who we really are. She actually ends up not marrying the prince. I quote:

The little mermaid lifted up glorified eyes towards the sun, and felt them, for the first time, filling with tears. On the ship, in which she had left the prince......she saw him and his beautiful bride searching for her; sorrowfully they gazed at the pearly foam, as if they knew she had thrown herself into the waves.

Some of the stories are very moralistic, yet he retains a mischievous sense of humor in some stories. His stories always reflect his fertile imagination. This particular collection was translated by Mrs. H. B. Paull, H. Oskar Sommer, Jean Hersholt and several other unknown translators. Six distinguished artists helped to illustrate this book. These are black and white illustrations and there are not really very many of them. To me a fully illustrated book should be fully illustrated. Nonetheless, this is not a book just for children. In fact, I see this more as a book which should be read to children by their parents. In this way parents and children can discuss items of interest. This book on its own would most likely not appeal to a child, due to the lack of pictures. It is meant to be read to them as far as I can tell. I also would recommend it to adults who remembered these stories as I did and want to read them again.

Perhaps I also remember the story about the tinder box very well. It is a magical story of a soldier who goes into a hollow tree and finds a passage with doors which lead to chambers. It sounds frightening at first but has a lovely happy ending.

Books can take us to another world and this one will take a child to many places they will never forget. And so the first story begins: "Far down in the forest, where the warm sun and the fresh air made a sweet resting place, grew a pretty little fir-tree; and yet it was not happy, it wished so much to be tall like its companions¯the pines and firs which grew around it. The sun shone, and the soft air fluttered its leaves, and..."

~The Rebecca Review

While I'm sure the stories are great, I can't get past the poor type setting, and cheap paper which is practically newsprint. The words and illustrations bleed through from the next page making reading very difficult. And to make matters worse, the stories are set in a terrible, hard to read font and tight leading. This book is NOT kid-friendly at all.

I ordered this for my daughter and will be sending it back. It is not "fully illustrated." The reading level is designated as ages 9 to 12. I can't imagine anyone in that age group enjoying this book. The stories are wonderful classics, but the illustrations are few and far between. Not a book for kids.

I have always been a fan of the original versions of fairy tales, so I picked this book up a few years ago, just to read for myself. A few weeks ago my six year old found it hidden among my millions of other books, and asked me to read it to her. While easy to read silently, it is a bit hard to get into the rythm of the wording at first, but after stumbling through a few paragraphs, it becomes much easier to handle.
Since the discovery of this book, my children have been requesting stories from it almost every night. At first my three year old complained about the lack of pictures (it really isn't "fully illustrated"), but she quickly got over that and enjoys listening to every story. Both of my older children like to compare these stories to ones they've seen on TV, or read in the few modernized fairy tale books we own (given to us by friends and relatives). Maybe my children are warped - which is very likely - but they prefer the original stories, with their not-so-happy, and often times violent, endings.
I've never been one to believe children need to have their reality padded... real life doesn't always end the way we hoped, so neither should stories. Hopefully this book, and ones like it, will be a bedtime favorite for years to come.

I was thrilled to find a truly COMPLETE collection of Hans Christian Andersen's folk/fairy tales! I have a collection, inherited from my mother (published in the first few years of the 20th C) with beautiful illustrations on nice rag stock paper--but it does not include every H.C.A. tale. This book is complete, though of inferior quality as a book. To begin with, it includes not many, nor the best illustrations--and all of those in black and white. The paper is light, thin and cheap (wood pulp paper, I would say).
So to summarize, if you are most interested in just reading Hans Christian Andersen's complete oeuvre, this is a GREAT book. If you want a book that is a beautiful, well-crafted object in its own right, this will probably be a disappointment.

Hans Christian Andersen aretfully spins tales of love, adventure and comedy in this easy to read collection. His stories are a treat to read- no matter what age you may be- he's able to weave something in for everyone. His stories, which have been made into everything from disney movies to sculpture, have been able to endure the passing of generations. This is a book I would highly recomend to anyone who'd like to recapture a bit of that whimsical fatasy that made childhood so precious.

It ought to be a source of some astonishment that the writings of Hans Christian Andersen have triumphed over the passage of time as they have. Who is more stolidly nineteenth-century, more bourgeois, more moistly sentimental, than this ever-lonely Danish poet and fabulist? Yet the continuing stream of translations and adaptations of his work--of which Disney's diluted and distorting version of his great "Little Mermaid" is only the most famous recent example--testifies to the ageless qualities of his genius. He often represented himself as the mere mouthpiece of traditional lore, the transmitter of the folk wisdom of his nurses; in our day he is tucked away with Mother Goose rhymes and other noncontroversial literature. Neither mode of understanding fully represents him. He belongs to that remarkable category--small even among great writers--of myth-makers, whose characters have come to assume near-archetypal significance. The little mermaid, the dauntless tin soldier, the ugly duckling are no longer simply memorable: they are continuing analogues for the developing self. He is a writer for children only in the sense that children deserve the best literature. His stories offer nothing easy, and little that is sweet: they puzzle and trouble; they take root in the imagination, and childhood is only the beginning of our long relationship with Andersen's haunting images. Is it joy or sorrow that first makes us weep for Elisa and her unlucky brothers in "The Wild Swans"? Who but Andersen could have dared to make the inanimate fixity of the tin soldier an image of the steadfastness of deep love in adversity? Who could forget the robber girl in "The Snow Queen," gruffly loyal,never sleeping without her knife? He wrote his tales with the colloquial humility of the storyteller, spiced with wit and homely details that give his great themes a distinctive flavor:the oysters clamped to the royal merfolk's tails in "The Little Mermaid," or the puppet queen offering her cr! own to the wandering friends in "The Traveling Companion." Andersen's sway over the writing of literature for children is well known, but more could be said about his deep influence on psychological theory, and the fascination he has exerted on contemporary writers, from Ursula Synge and a host of other fantasists to poets such as Marilyn Hacker and Anne Sexton. He importantly anticipates, and may have influenced, writers as important and diverse as Isak Dinesen, Franz Kafka, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. With a writer as rich, as pleasing, as rewarding, as Hans Christian Andersen, it is never too soon to commence reading his tales, and it is never too late to read them again.

It ought to be a source of some astonishment that the writings of Hans Christian Andersen have triumphed over the passage of time as they have. Who is more stolidly nineteenth-century, more bourgeois, more moistly sentimental, than this ever-lonely Danish poet and fabulist? Yet the continuing stream of translations and adaptations of his work--of which Disney's diluted and distorting version of his great "Little Mermaid" is only the most famous recent example--testifies to the ageless qualities of his genius. He often represented himself as the mere mouthpiece of traditional lore, the transmitter of the folk wisdom of his nurses; in our day he is tucked away with Mother Goose rhymes and other noncontroversial literature. Neither mode of understanding fully represents him. He belongs to that remarkable category--small even among great writers--of myth-makers, whose characters have come to assume near-archetypal significance. The little mermaid, the dauntless tin soldier, the ugly duckling are no longer simply memorable: they are continuing analogues for the developing self. He is a writer for children only in the sense that children deserve the best literature. His stories offer nothing easy, and little that is sweet: they puzzle and trouble; they take root in the imagination, and childhood is only the beginning of our long relationship with Andersen's haunting images. Is it joy or sorrow that first makes us weep for Elisa and her unlucky brothers in "The Wild Swans"? Who but Andersen could have dared to make the inanimate fixity of the tin soldier an image of the steadfastness of deep love in adversity? Who could forget the robber girl in "The Snow Queen," gruffly loyal,never sleeping without her knife? He wrote his tales with the colloquial humility of the storyteller, spiced with wit and homely details that give his great themes a distinctive flavor:the oysters clamped to the royal merfolk's tails in "The Little Mermaid," or the puppet queen offering her cr! own to the wandering friends in "The Traveling Companion." Andersen's sway over the writing of literature for children is well known, but more could be said about his deep influence on psychological theory, and the fascination he has exerted on contemporary writers, from Ursula Synge and a host of other fantasists to poets such as Marilyn Hacker and Anne Sexton. He importantly anticipates, and may have influenced, writers as important and diverse as Isak Dinesen, Franz Kafka, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. With a writer as rich, as pleasing, as rewarding, as Hans Christian Andersen, it is never too soon to commence reading his tales, and it is never too late to read them again.

It is just sad that publishers like this one are opportunistic and know that just because Andersen is on the cover the book will sell. The translations are rickety and unreadable. And the quality of the book is disappointing. I immediately resold mine and bought another, far superior, volume. Don't get taken for a ride.

I first read HCA when I was about 8 and I remember being baffled at their deviation from the standard "fairy tale" formula. They stayed with me however.

I bought this edition because I wanted to explore more of his work and I am very glad I did. I have finished about 3/4ths of this volulme and the richness, satire, obersvation, depth, humor and relevance of the themes continue to awe me. It's not a book for children but for those adults who want to go on adventures with a master storyteller.