Selected Fairy Tales

by Hans Christian Andersen

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.

‘It doesn’t matter if you’re born in a duck yard, so long as you are hatched from a swan’s egg!’ (from ‘The Ugly Duckling’)

This collection brings together some of Hans Christian Andersen’s most popular fairy tales – including ‘The Little Mermaid’, ‘The Ugly Duckling’ and ‘Thumbelina’ – in a celebration of one of the world’s most widely recognised children’s authors. With universal themes and dark humour at their heart, these moralistic tales have delighted readers since first publication in the nineteenth century and continued to be well loved today.

The fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, a storyteller of great importance to Western literature, have inspired many films, ballets and plays, and entertained generations of children and adults alike.

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Fantasy, Fairy Tales, Short Stories, Childrens, Danish

321 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 22, 1998

About the author

Hans Christian Andersen (often referred to in Scandinavia as H.C. Andersen) was a Danish author and poet. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories — called eventyr, or "fairy-tales" — express themes that transcend age and nationality.

Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature readers as well. Some of his most famous fairy tales include "The Little Mermaid", "The Ugly Duckling", "The Nightingale", "The Emperor's New Clothes" and many more. His stories have inspired plays, ballets, and both live-action and animated films.

Reviews

[emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

full of nostalgia! that’s all i have to say.

[Fiz|فيز (Substack link in bio) · Rating 5 out of 5]

RTC

[Kyriakos Sorokkou]

συγγραφέας που επιλέχθηκε από τους μικρούς μου μαθητές για να διαβαστεί αγγλιστί σε επίπεδο A1.
Δύο εικονογραφημένα βιβλία με δύο ιστορίες από τη συγκεκριμένη έκδοση
Το Αηδόνι και τον Αυτοκράτορα και τον Μολυβένιο Στρατιώτη.

Φυσικά εγώ στη δική μου έκδοση διάβασα αρκετά άλλα παραμύθια του Άντερσεν όπως το Κοριτσάκι με τα Σπίρτα, Την Τοσοδούλα, Την Μικρή Γοργόνα, Τα Ρούχα του Αυτοκράτορα και πολλά άλλα.

Γραμμένα την Βικτωριανή Εποχή αυτά τα παραμύθια του μεγάλου δανού κλασικού συγγραφέα θέλουν κάποια προσαρμογή για να διαβαστούν από σημερινά παιδιά.
Όχι φυσικά λογοκριμένα αλλά να μην σοκάρουν τα παιδιά.
Φυσικά δεν είναι οι σπλατεριές των Αδερφών Γκριμ και νιώθω ότι μου άρεσαν ένα τσικ παραπάνω.

[Mohammadreza · Rating 3 out of 5]

هانس کریستین آندرسن اهل دانمارک است او شهرتش را مدیون این افسانه های کودکان است این افسانه ها تخیلی و کوتاه کوتاه هستند
این کتاب شامل ۱۰ داستان کوتاه به نام های
قوطی آتش زنه
کلاوس بزرگ و کلاوس کوچک
شاهزاده خانم و نخود سبز
بند انگشتی
پسر بچه ناقلا
همسفر
پری دریایی کوچک
لباس تازه امپراطور
سرباز قلعی قرص و محکم
و قوهای وحشی است

[Liselotte · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great edition to my collections!

[Pgchuis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for my OU course. Those Victorians really knew how to ram home a moral.

[Andràș-Florin Răducanu · Rating 4 out of 5]

Foarte frumoase poveștile lui Andersen, absolut perfecte pentru o zi liniștită și friguroasă alături de un ceai aromat și o lumânare parfumată aprinsă.

[Katrina · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

This was a good collection of Andersen’s tales, I didn’t love the narrator on the version I got which did affect my rating. I liked listening to classics I am familiar with, especially the little mermaid that is not quite the same as the Disney version!! I also liked discovering new ones like the nightingale, or ones I’ve heard retellings of but never read the original like the wild swans. He was a gifted storyteller and it he got my wondering what categorises a story as a fairytale…of down the rabbit hole I go

[Zeinah · Rating 5 out of 5]

makes you feel like a child again, to son extent. the difference in the real fairy tales and those done by Disney is the best part, where you expect a happy ending you find none.

[Zachary Waltz · Rating 2 out of 5]

“For the Read Shoes, I would just say leave it on the shelf. If you’re going to read it, wait until you are 47 and have a bottle of whiskey open next to the reading table that can get you through it, and then, if you read it, read it with the realization that you are getting a certain lesson in certain psychopathologies along with the story.” - David Bentley Hart in Another Conversation with Salley Vickers

This statement could apply to many Hans Christian Anderson stories. The general complaint the two authors had was his moralizing sadism, which were combined in the Red Shoes. I personally never found them combined, but I certainly found one or another in his tales. Whenever I think of his moralism, I think of “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. “The Emperor has no clothes” is an excellent catchphrase, but the tale itself hardly adds to the delight one finds in the principle or its application. “The princess and the pea” and “The ugly duckling” are like it in that respect. As for the purely sadistic side of his tales I have not come across “the Red Shoes”, but I have read “The Little Match-Girl” and “The Steadfast Tin-Soldier”, two tales that are filled with suffering from beginning to end with nothing to enjoy at any point of the story.

I do not necessarily detect either extreme of moralism or sadism in “the Snow Queen”, and I will admit that the opening and closing of the Snow Queen appeal to me. The mythic story of the glass mirror carried by the demons and the finale of the quest where the boy is being rescued and restored by his friend are at least moments of awe and delight. But the fault of that story is that the intervening episodes on the quest between the opening and its resolution are boring: it is not a complete story as a whole.

However, as I come to “the Little Mermaid”, I must make an exception. The authors are not alone in knocking his tales including the Little Mermaid. I confess I had a completely different experience reading the Little Mermaid, a beautiful experience of awe each time I read it as recently as this summer. In fact, in my eyes, it’s as if the rest of Hans Christian Anderson’s oeuvres was written to show how excellent the Little Mermaid is by illustrating how many pitfalls it avoids. Here I may detect Moralism and Sadism, but, for the most part, they do not seem to me trite or gratuitous, and, if they exist, the art of the story-telling seems to overcome them.

The first difference between this story and the rest is how much I am totally overcome by the sheer beauty of it. The colors and their symbolism though only mentioned are moving. I can remember the vibrant colors of the ocean floor, the plant life there, the sun (viewed from the ocean floor), the sea (viewed from ocean surface), the red sunrise and the sunset.

The second major difference is the sense of the unfolding revelation combined with a sense of anticipation. The story starts at the ocean floor; one immediately gets the sense of the distance between the world of the merfolk and the sun far above. The Little Mermaid is not allowed to see the world above yet is immediately interested by it. She has to hear about it from her grandmother and then her sisters. With each tantalizing new detail from their various encounters, you see from the sheer diversity of the world above and are further intrigued and interested. I remember the icebergs, seasons, rivers, animals - like birds, “the fish of the air” - etc, and one feels, with the Little Mermaid, the beauty of this world and one also feels the sensation of longing for encountering it directly. This sense of revelation only grows throughout the first half.

Truly, this setup is the key difference between this and the other stories. The setup is so beautiful that it makes the rest of the actions plausible, almost inexorable. Unlike in all the other tales, where suffering happens to the main character almost immediately, for the first half of this tale, the Little Mermaid has not suffered much except the suffering of longing. Instead, she delights in the beauty of the world above, and this delight propels her to willingly undergo the trial of suffering to marry the prince. Because of this being a choice willingly made by the Little Mermaid and because it was done after introducing the beauty she will be suffering for, the reader is able to see some reason for it. Is this suffering disproportionate, sadism? It is more than your average fairy tale, but, it reminds me of the suffering of Odysseus on the Odyssey, which is a type, maybe an archetype, of the fairy tale.

In the consolation, the lifting in the air means no more pain. The feet won’t step anywhere.
In spite of the Little Mermaid’s trials, her plans are foiled, and she is given the choice to kill the prince and return to her family or simply die the night of her prince’s marriage. The choice is made difficult because her family show that they love and remember her. After her transformation, the Little Mermaid sees them gazing at her from the sea, and, on the prince’s wedding night, her sisters sacrifice their most beautiful possession, their hair, for the Little Mermaid to return to them. But, to return to the merfolk, the Little Mermaid would have to kill the object of her love in the world above, the prince. Though she hesitates, she chooses rather to die than to commit that fate. That choice does not strike me as being morally driven, but rather, torn between two loves, she ultimately cannot bring herself to kill the man she loves. This just seems in keeping with the thrust of the story, the choices she made already to, out of love, forsake her family, even to the last. I am in fact struck with awe by this moment.

Admittedly, the following coda where the Little Mermaid is transformed into a spirit is imperfect. But, here again, this story gains in comparison with his other tales. In the Steadfast-Tin Solder, the quest he undergoes ends in heartbreak and unrequited love, and there is no consolation; here, there is a consolation, and it is even in keeping with the story of revelation. When the Little Mermaid makes the fateful decision to forsake her family for the world above, it reads, “she could not forget the handsome prince and her own sorrow at not having, like him, an immortal soul” and she soon says to herself, “I would risk everything to win him and an immortal soul!” The two, then, are combined in her mind. While she could not achieve the immortal soul by marrying the prince, nonetheless, because she did not kill the prince, she may still obtain the immortal soul. This new route is revealed to her to do this. Unfortunately, it is spoiled a little by the purgatory-like moralism of the spirits and the exchange for good or bad deeds which could shorten or lengthen her time before she enters this kingdom. Thankfully, it is a brief.

I concede that Anderson may have achieved this scucess by accident, given that I agree that virtually all the other tales he has done contain some spectrum of sadism and vapid moralism, or are simply boring. Nonetheless, an accidental achievement, is still achieved.

[Ángel Páramo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Los cuentos de Hans Cristian Andersen son historias universales que nos trasladan a nuestra infancia y a otra época.

Los cuentos están escritos de una manera poética, con gran belleza, y narran historias fantásticas en general con principios morales. La narrativa se caracteriza por una atención a los detalles, y por tramas ágiles, en ocasiones con cambios vertiginosos. En la colección hay historias de distinto tipo, algunas recuerdan a las 1001 noches como la caja de cerillas, pequeño y gran claus, the swinheard o el baul volador, otras son cuentos de fantasía como la reina de las nieves, valdemar o el obispo de borglum, hay relatos cortos como los zapatos de la fortuna, y están los cuentos más típicos de Anderssen, que destacan sobre el resto.

Son los relatos clásicos los mejores de la colección, así cuentos como la princesa y el guistante, la sirenita, el traje nuevo del emperador, el patito feo, el soldadito de plomo o la cerillera son simplemente magistrales. Sin algún defecto tienen son la carga de tristeza que llevan, posiblemente poco aptos para niños, y desde luego duros para los adultos. El final de la sirenita, la cerillera o el soldadito de plomo dejan el cuerpo invadido de tristeza.

Algunos relatos que desonocía y me han resulado preciosos son los cisnes salvajes, la vieja casa o la buena por nada. Otros relatos desgraciadamente no me han resultado tan atractivos como Valdemar, el obispo de Borglum o los zapatos de la fortuna. La reina de las nieves ha sido otra pequeña decepción, un relato de relatos que para mi no consigue captar el miedo y la intriga que causa la simple mención de reina de las nieves, apenas protagonista del cuento.


En resumen, los cuentos de Anderssen son variados, donde mientras los cuentos más clásicos son de una lectura bellísima, aquellos más desconocidos tienen una calidad desigual.

[Charles Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had this collection when I was a small child, though I think I never got further than the first two stories. His image of three dogs with increasingly large eyes stayed with me for the next half century though, and I'm glad to have finally revisited "The Tinder-box".

I had thought these would be stories for small children (as presumably had whoever it was gave me a copy of this book all those years ago), but that was completely wrong. There is much charm and wit and even satire in these stories, which would be unnoticed by most children. My favourite example was the good fairy who "had got an honest man a greeting from a well-born nonentity."

"The Sweethearts" is possibly the story I liked best: simple, yet elegant and telling.

[Erika Bookshelfwarriors · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ktorá z rozprávok od H.Ch.Andersena je vaša najobľúbenejšia a prečo? 🧚‍♀️

Hans Christian Andersen je svetoznámy rozprávkár, ktorý tvorí tie najpravdivejšie rozprávky všetkých čias.
Osobne milujem Malú morskú pannu. Skvelé sú tiež Dievčatko so zápalkami a Snehová kráľovná.
Ako malá som počúvala všetkých tieto rozprávky na CD prehrávači a poznám ich naspamäť. Napriek tomu mi dobre padlo pripomenúť si tieto rozprávky opäť a dokonca v angličtine. V knihe sa nachádza zbierka rozprávok a mnohé z nich sú mi známe i keď niektoré vôbec. Čítanie som si však veľmi užila a úplne som sa pri tejto knihe zrelaxovala.
10/10🌟

[Salli · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the tales very hard to get into and I was heavily reminded of the dreadfully boring style of the writer of The Wizard of Oz. I don't know if this is a product of the time in which they were written I just got fed up with the stringing together of lots of episodes that didn't necessarily link or carry a story forwards. The underlying tales are often very good but you have to strip out a lot of material and overwriting in a "sweet childish" manner to get to the story.
I did get into the style in the end but do not find myself glued to the page still and feel like I am reading for research and not pleasure.

[David McGrogan · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars. Andersen's writing, translated very nicely and readably here, can be stunningly beautiful, and some of the tales are extraordinarily moving. At the same time, though, the earlier works in particular can come across as inconsequential (and are often self-contradictory or badly plotted, as though the author submitted a first draft without re-reading). "The Snow Queen" is worth the price of admission, though, and I also really like the different translation of "The Goblin and the Grocer", which has another title in this collection.

[Mark Clar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finally, I finished this book!

I thought this book was just a children's fairy tale story, but to my surprise, it wasn’t. The stories are dark and some have gruesome endings. This is a type of story that you will never tell and read to your children.

But, despite of that I have 6 stories that I love much (#1 the best and #6 least fav):

1. The Travelling Companion
2. The Wild Swans
3. The Little Mermaid
4. The Snow Queen
5. The Tinder Box
6. The Emperor’s New Suit

If you are reading this as an adult you will definitely enjoy this book.

[Roberto D. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book 144 out of 200 books
"Selected Fairy Tales" by Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen's most well-known children's stories are collected in this Collins Classics volume titled "Selected Fairy Tales".

MY THOUGHTS:
I liked "The Nightingale" story in this book, it is my favorite. This is the type of book I'd read to my future children. But also, Andersen remains monumental in the foundation of Danish literature, as well as children's literature.

[Claire Ingram · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
A collection of some of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales
In this collection you get

Princess and the pea
The tin soldier
The ugly duckling
The little mermaid
The matchstick girl
Twelve swans
Thumbalina
Snow queen
The nightingale
The will of the wisps
The thistle bush
Luck
Days of the week

Some of these tales I have heard before, some I had heard/seen retellings, and some were completely new
Cute easy stories

[Michael Prendergast · Rating 5 out of 5]

Far superior selection of fairy tales than the Grimm Brothers. There were one or two tales I didn't like but the vast majority I really enjoyed. My favourite story, by far, has to be the Steadfast Soldier. This story almost made me cry with it's ending. A good selection and one I would read again

[Anders Twetman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I somehow got it into my head to read some of the most well known fairy tales. I think I had some kind of idea of comparing them to the stories I had heard in my childhood. This little project of course included the brothers Grimm, Arabian Nights and finally H.C. Andersen. I hadn't actually heard any of his fairy tales as a child, I just knew of them, so I didn't know what to expect. Despite that, I was kind of disappointed; the stories in this book were not particularly interesting for me, but I was somehow expecting them to be more exciting. Maybe fairy tales are not my thing?

[Chriss Corkscrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for an English Literature course and must say that I found the stories weird, wonderful and often tragic.

There's a strong Christian message running through many of the stories, but my favourite was The Goblin at the Provision-Dealers which was about the importance of art.

[Sokcheng]

I just cannot bring myself to finish this book. no interest or whatsoever in the theme, content, and writing style. Maybe some time in the future? Right now, I'm gonna give up at the Little Mermaid story.

[Joyce · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tawdry, sentimental, saccharine and dully moralising. Made more powerful by the excisions of my childhood editions. And knowing even a little of andersens biography the wish fulfilment is odiously blatant

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Mr Andersen has no idea how to end off a story. Great setup but no catharsis or moral. Although my favourite story was The Shadow.

[Arthur Ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another one for the collection. Most tragic one is The Little Match Girl.

[Monika Skopalová · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tahle knížka mě vrátila zpátky do dětství, spoustu pohádek už jsem znala, ale i tak jsem si to moc užila.

[Alicemarie Colburn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A

[sash]

*for uni*

[JeLo Guevara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Revisited my childhood with fresh new eyes...

[Timea Neupauer · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5/5