Andersen's Fairy Tales

The company is wide and strange. A poor prince disguises himself as a swineherd to test a princess who prizes clever toys over a real rose and nightingale. A young fir tree, forever wishing itself older and taller and elsewhere, lets the present slip past unnoticed. A splinter from a wicked mirror pierces the boy Kay's eye and heart, and little Gerda sets out alone in a boat to find him, trading her red shoes to the river and bargaining her way through one enchantment after another. A scholar, on a whim, sends his shadow across the street to explore a house that seems inhabited yet never shows a soul.

Andersen writes with a storyteller's warmth and a knowing wink, addressing the reader outright, letting a tale close by admitting it "might not be true at all." The prose can turn suddenly luminous: a teapot sprouting into a living tree mid-sentence, a struck match blooming into a whole world of warmth and light. Underneath the whimsy runs a tender moral current: that sincerity outweighs status, that memory is a kind of grace, that wishes are most dangerous when the wisher isn't ready for them.

These are tales that have kept their strangeness and their kindness for generations, small enough to read one at a time by a lamp, deep enough to stay with a person long after. An emperor's foolish procession on one side, a girl and her matches in the snow on the other, and everywhere the quiet insistence that the heart sees truest.