Reinvented Or Invented Johan De Mylius the Hans Christian

Orality – Reinvented or Invented

Johan de Mylius The Hans Christian Andersen Center at University of Southern Denmark, Odense.

In principle the concept of orality implies quite different things when speaking of the folk tale tradition and when speaking of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales and stories.

In terms of folk tales, orality primarily refers to the way in which a story is transmitted from one person to another, from one culture or one age or one part of a population to another. Secondarily it may also refer to the way in which a story is told or phrased, since this is or may be essential to the spreading and distribution of such a story.

Orality implies linguistic as well as narrative formula and structures. But essentially orality is identical with the existence and transmission of the text as such.

When we – or for instance an author like Hans Christian Andersen – meet a text rooted in oral tradition, but now in a print version, like the folk tales published by the brothers Grimm at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this text does not necessarily appear in a form, which bears traces of orality as such. Written down and published in a book, this kind of tale has become a literary text. This fact is even more obvious in the case of the earlier German and French editors of folk tales such as Musäus or la comtesse d’Aulnoy or Charles Perrault. Orality is not an inherent feature of the story as such. It is the story’s mode of existence up to a certain point.

Realizing that the simple oral-like texture of stories rendered by the brothers Grimm was a construction, a literary form made to simulate folk-spirit in the Romantic sense, folklorists of the twentieth century have made an effort to restore true orality to the folk tales by tape recording the last tellers of folk tales, old people of rural origin with wavering speech and memory, whispering their more or less inconsistent stories through their few remaining teeth. Book versions of such story-telling, faithful to every detail of the actual performance, are regarded as testimonies of true orality. Andersen’s fairy tales and stories are in no way attempts to imitate or preserve an oral tradition. Whatever sources Andersen had for his stories, his tales are literary products, in style and intention submitted to a literary strategy. This is not only in the self-evident meaning, that his stories are invented, written and published within the cultural circulation of book products, but in a sense, which has not been obvious to most of his foreign readers, that they are the core of Andersen’s poetic ambition, a frontline for his strife as a poet in and beyond his time.

However, orality is a term often used in connection with Andersen’s stories. Although misunderstandable, and in fact misunderstood, the concept of orality makes sense, when used properly defined.

Let us examine three possible applications of the term for possible use in case of Andersen’s stories.

First: Orality meaning already existing oral tradition as one of Andersen’s sources. Second: Orality meaning the narrative mode, the telling of stories. Third: Orality in the sense of linguistic proximity to spoken language.

The first issue, Andersen’s use of oral tradition, has been investigated often and thoroughly. Most recently in the folklorist Else Marie Kofod’s book De vilde svaner og andre folkeeventyr. Sidestykker til syv af H.C. Andersens eventyr (`The Wild Swans and other folk tales. Parallels to seven fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen’). The seven tales referred to here are the same ones, which Georg Christensen already singled out in two articles in Danske Studier (Danish Studies) 1906: `The Tinder Box’, `Little Claus and Big Claus’, `The Travelling Companion’, `The Wild Swans’, `The Swineherd’, `Simple Simon’ and `What the Old Man does is Always Right’.

2 These are stories, which Andersen may have heard as a child back in the slums of provincial Odense, stories told by the old women in the almshouse. The total agreement as to the limited number of stories relevant to a comparative study of Andersen and oral tradition (limited, since Andersen himself published 156 stories in all) conceals the fact that this question of intertextuality is far more complex.

The definition of oral tradition here apparently implied means stories, which Andersen once in his youth has met in actual oral presentation. That means stories, which can still be identified in Danish folklorist collections. Not taken into consideration then are stories from oral tradition, but written and published by German editors like the brothers Grimm. Andersen has not heard these stories, and so they are not taken into consideration.

Apparently the investigations of intertextuality conducted by Georg Christensen and Else Marie Kofod also tend to exclude stories, which do not belong to the genre fairy tale. A broader definition using the term folk tale would also have brought a text like `The girl who trod on the loaf’ into focus.

And then what about a story, which Andersen may or may not have heard as a child, but of which we with absolute certainty know that he has read it in a book- version? I’m referring to `The Wild Swans’, as Andersen calls it, the story which has provided the very title of Else Marie Kofod’s book. Andersen has stated in his so-called `Remarks’ for the Fairy tales and stories (1863 and later), that he read this story in the first Danish collection of folk tales, Mathias Winther’s Danish Folk Tales (1823), where it is called `The Eleven Swans’. The story is also known in a Grimm-version: `Die sechs Schwäne’, and in a Biedermeier-version by Ludwig Bechstein, `Die sieben Schwanen’.

Anyway, regardless of definitions and through that the number of relevant retellings which are to be considered, Andersen holds a unique position among literary fairy tale authors in the period of late Romanticism and dawning Realism. He has by social origin been confronted with genuine oral tradition.

3 The question, however, is: how far can he be said to be an heir to this tradition? And in what sense can orality be ascribed to his stories as a significant feature? All difficulties in answering these questions – or at least most of the difficulties – can be illustrated through taking a brief look at Andersen’s earliest published fairy tale, `The Dead Man’, published 1830 as the final part of his first collection of Poems.

`The Dead Man’ has never been translated into English. The reason for this is that it is an early version of a well-known Andersen tale, `The Travelling Companion’ (published in the second volume of Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. ` Fairy tales, told for children’, 1835). The subtitle of this story (1830) is `et fyensk Folke-Eventyr’ (`a Funean folk tale’), and in a short introduction Andersen wrote:

Som Barn var det min største Glæde at høre Eventyr, en stor Deel staae endnu ret levende i min Erindring, og nogle af disse ere kun lidet eller intet bekjendte; jeg har her gjenfortalt et, og dersom jeg seer det optaget med Bifald, vil jeg saaledes behandle flere, og engang levere en Cyclus af danske Folke-Eventyr.

(As a child I took great pleasure in listening to fairy tales, and even now I still have a live memory of them, and some of them are either unknown or only scarcely known. Here I have retold one of them, and if I find that it is received with acclaim, I intend to treat more of them in this way and once publish a whole cycle of Danish folk tales).

The story about `The Dead Man’ or `The Travelling Companion’ is well known in international folk tale tradition, going back to what may be its oldest known source, Tobit’s Book, one of the Apocrypha among the Old Testament books. So when Andersen calls it a Funean folk tale, it can only mean, that it has actually been told (or retold) in Funen, more specifically in Odense in the days of Andersen’s childhood there. It doesn’t mean a tale of Funean origin. This is only worth noticing since Andersen localizes the story to start at a certain place near the small manor house, Elvedgaard, on Northern Funen, not far from Bogense. Also, since it has a long and widespread tradition, it cannot be true of this story, when Andersen counts it among folk tales now only little known or completely unknown.

4 According to Andersen’s introductory words he has heard the story, he still has a vivid memory of the version he has heard maybe fifteen years or more back, and now he is retelling the story he then heard. And in addition to this folklorist aspect he adds, that he may continue publishing a whole collection of Danish folk tales (meaning tales, which have actually been rendered in local tradition).

But at the same time he says something completely contradictory. In a motto on the title page he quotes two verse lines by Goethe:

Märchen noch so wunderbar, Dichterkünste machen’s wahr.

Meaning, that the folk tale or fairy tale – belonging to what aesthetic theory of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century in Germany (and Denmark) called `das Wunderbare’, the non-real, the imaginative (French: `le merveilleux’) – will be made true, i.e. receive a higher kind of reality through the art of the poet.

The Goethe quotation contradicts the impression, which the reader might get from the small introduction, as it defines `The Dead Man’ as a `Kunstmärchen’, a fairy tale of art. The original folk tale receives its justification not by being simply retold, but through a transformation into literacy. `Dødningen’ (`The Dead Man’) is in fact as far from the style and intentions of the folk tale as possible. Not only is it localized to a place in the real world, it is also localized in time, since it takes place in medieval, Catholic Denmark. But this is only a start. The protagonist Johannes and his companion set out on a travel, which leads them beyond the ocean to a foreign country with high mountains and on the other side of these mountains the two travellers arrive in the `world of imagination’, where the ruling king is the playing-card `king of hearts’, a relative of Silvio King of Aces from Carlo Gozzi’s fairy tale drama The Three Oranges.

This sounds all but folk-tale-like, and so it is. It is a tale of art, the theme of which is the voyage of a young man from home into the world, accompanied by a dead man, who more or less is a replacement for his deceased father. A dangerous

5 voyage from reality into sexual fantasy and imaginative fascination, a deadly threat to the young man’s personal development.

Not a fairy tale for children and certainly not simply a retelling of a story out of oral tradition. The latter is also obvious from the style of the text. Andersen has told his story in an ironic and highly literary style, not far from the style of Musäus in his Volksmärchen der Deutschen.

Andersen scholars have often recurred to `The Dead Man’ and `The Travelling Companion’ as exemplifying how Andersen moved from an early, immature style, which was in no way his own, to his own style, the simple, oral-like storytelling aimed at children (and at adults as well). Personally I would prefer to see these two texts – as I have argued in my recent book, Forvandlingens pris. H.C. Andersen og hans eventyr (`The price of transformation. Hans Christian Andersen and his fairy tales’) – not as two versions of the same text, different only in style, but as two independent stories, each with its own theme and with its own style. Two totally different stories, each in its own right.

Be that as it may, the Andersen tradition claims that `The Travelling Companion’ and with it all the early, well-known Andersen stories, are written in an oral style. This, however does not bring along a contention that Andersen as a story teller imitates the style af the fairy tales in the oral tradition. Or does it? At any rate, in the first place the claim is, that Andersen in his `real’ stories so to speak returns to his own, personal origins, that he more or less writes these stories in the way, he would have – or actually has – told the stories to children listening to him in family circles.

Orality here means a prose style close to oral speech. Andersen’s friend and heir, Edvard Collin, has in his book, H.C. Andersen og det Collinske Hus (`Hans Christian Andersen and the House of the Collin family’, 1882) rendered a situation typical of Andersen telling something for cildren of the Collin family and doing it in a very lively and dramatic style far from normal prose style. Edvard Collin then claims, that this was the style, that Andersen later on tried to reshape in the prose of his fairy tales.

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And Andersen himself has led his readers on the same track. In the so-called `Remarks’ or comments on the fairy tales, which Andersen published in an edition 1863, we find the following words:

Man skulde i Stilen høre Fortælleren, Sproget maatte derfor nærme sig det mundtlige Foredrag. (In the style one should hear the story teller, accordingly the language must approach the oral discourse.)

As described here by Andersen himself as well as by Edvard Collin orality has nothing to do with an imitation or reshaping of the original oral tradition of the folk tale, told by illiterate, common people in their staggering way of expression, perhaps told to children, but more likely told to other adults as entertainment in leisure hours.

Orality as described by Andersen and Collin refers to a completely different situation. An adult addressing children, trying to attract and keep their attention by means of language and style. A situation not without complexity, since this adult story teller has a double existence. The story teller is Andersen and now and then he even explicitly appears in the text as Andersen himself. But at the same time his part is in the text and in the intended situation of reading aloud taken over by parents or other adults, readers in other words, reading the story aloud and thereby replacing the implicit author’s voice.

What characterizes this oral style has often been described in the literature about Andersen’s fairy tales. The first one to do so was Georg Brandes in his famous article on Andersen as a writer of fairy tales, published 1869 in Illustreret Tidende, and reprinted many times since.

Let me quote from Brandes, who begins his essay with some examples of Andersen’s very unorthodox way of writing, and then says:

The construction, the word order in each sentence, all of it is in conflict with the simplest rules of syntax. `You couldn’t write like that.’ That’s true, but you speak like that. To adults? No, but to children, and why should one not

7 be allowed to write down the words in that order, in which you say them to children? You replace the normal standard by another. Not the rules of abstract written language, but the child’s comprehension is here determinative. There is a method in this disorder [...] Replacing the generally accepted literary language by the free spoken language, replacing the adult’s more stiff way of expression by the one used and understood by the child, this will be the purpose of the poet, when he decides to tell `fairy tales for children’. He has the bold pretension of expressing himself orally, although in writing, he won’t write, he will speak, and he would wish to write like a school child, if only he thereby avoids speaking like a book [...] What lucky poet isn’t Andersen! What kind of poet has an audience like Andersen’s? [...] No author of any kind has an audience as fresh and bright as the one, which is truly his. His fairy tales are the only book, which we have spelt, and which we still read. [...] Here is a whole chain of peaceful and idyllic sceneries. Stories are read aloud, and the children listen with grave attention, or the small one sits with both elbows on the table, absorbed in reading, and the mother passing by reads as well, looking over her child’s shoulder. Isn’t it worthwhile writing for such an audience, and would one ever find an audience similarly untouched and with a more willing imagination? There is none. And you only have to study the imagination of the audience in order to acquire a knowledge of the storyteller. The origin of his art is the child’s play, which is able to make anything out of everything [and so forth – and so forth]. What determines this kind of language [i.e. Andersen’s in his fairy tales] was from the very beginning the childish tone. In order to be understood by readers so young as those, whom he addressed, he had to use the most simple words, recur to the most simple concepts, avoid all abstracts, replace indirect speech with direct speech. But aiming thus at the naive he finds the poetically beautiful, and attaining the childish, this childish appears to be the poetical. For what is intelligible to all, the naive expression is more poetical than what reminds us of industry, of history, of literature. The concrete fact is at the same time more vivid and more transparent than what is rendered as a proof of a certain sentence, and the unsophisticated speech directly formed by the lips is more characteristic than pale print. [My translation, JdM]

This extensive quotation from Georg Brandes’ 135 year old essay on Andersen’s fairy tales illustrates what is at stake here, when ascribing orality to Andersen’s stories as an essential characteristic. Since Georg Brandes’ essay holds a kind of model status within the tradition of Andersen scholarship, and since his ideas never have been questioned, but always have been and still are referred to with acclaim, it is most informative to examine, what exactly the term orality involves when as here applied to the the Andersen-texts.

Brandes finds what he is looking for. He has an idea of Danish Romanticism as a naive period in literary history – compared to the intellectual and critical realism, which he himself as a crusader for modernity propagated. He sees Andersen not as a modernist for his time, a forerunner of a literature at his time hitherto unseen,

8 but as a Romanticist. His fairy tales are in his view typical of this now [i.e. 1869] long surpassed period. `Told for children’ means to him exactly what the subtitle says, although he is ready to admit that there is an everlasting wisdom in Andersen’s stories and a sublime poesy. Therefore orality in this context is equalled with the unsophisticated, the naive, the childlike or even the childish. Andersen addresses children and does it in a way never seen before in literature, in a language, which by Brandes is opposed to literacy.

Although Brandes acknowledges Andersen as a highly original author, and for being an author who is capable of addressing children, but at the same time being an author of universal validity, he all the same makes Andersen more simple, more unsophisticated – and more childlike or childish than he ever was. Georg Brandes, and several others with him, here forgets, that orality in this sense is only one of the many strings on Andersen’s instrument in the fairy tales and stories, even in those from his production in the 1830s specifically named Fairy Tales, Told for Children. The literary style he describes so well is, of course, an eminent and characteristic feature of Andersen’s work, because it is so conspicuous and so different from the style of any other children’s literature at that time and equally different from adult literature and the rules of normal good writing in general. And if you only look at stories like `The Tinder Box’, `Little Claus and Big Claus’ or `Thumbelina’ and `The Ugly Duckling’ you would find Brandes’ characterization completely justified.

But at a closer inspection one would find that Andersen’s style is not one and only one, not even within the same text. In stories like `The Little Mermaid’ or `The Wild Swans’, not to mention `The Garden of Paradise’ or `The Flying Trunk’, one finds beside the childlike tone completely different modes of style. Above all the descriptive style used for his `paintings in prose’, of which not only his novels, his travelogue and his early autobiography from the 1830s are so abundantly ornamented, but also the tales. There is nothing oral at all in these elaborate paintings.

All down through the first decennium of his production Andersen – just like a few other Danish poets like Christian Winther and Emil Aarestrup – had the ambition

9 of being painters in their poetry and their prose. And in Andersen’s case this was from the very beginning, and that means here his first travel book Shadow Picture (1831), as a formulated aesthetic program, for which he was recognized and acknowledged by his contemporaries, such as his friend and mentor, the phycisist Hans Christian Ørsted, who once called him a painter with the pen.

So this was a highly modern feature of Andersen’s style, a feature, which can be interpreted both as an inheritance from Goethe and the Romanticists and at the same time as an early approach to a kind of realism. Features of genuine literary style far beyond the level of a children’s audience can also easily be found in the fairy tales. That means both words and construction of sentences.

And let us not forget the humoristic, ironical or even satirical style with puns, allusions, twisting of words and imitation of social conversation. Then also the highly conscious and literary use of metaphors and symbols, allegories etc. In short, looking at orality as the predominant feature of Andersen’s style, we are misled to reduce the span of his genius, reduce the complexity of his art into the skills of a children’s author – instead of recognizing that Andersen was an adult author, who also wrote fairy tales, some of them for children, but most of them using the set-up of a fictional children’s audience as a literary masquerade.

Speaking of Andersen’s fairy tales, orality is not just what it looks like. Definitely it doesn’t come from the oral tradition of folk tales, which Andersen himself was familiar with from his Odense childhood, and admitted to have been inspired by. He took over some of the stories and some of the formula. But not features of the oral tradition as such.

Andersen’s so-called orality is part of a quite different literary scenario, an author writing stories to be read aloud, not told, but read aloud to children, but at the same time with a glimpse in the eye to the adult reader and incorporating layers of existential interpretation and of symbolic meaning only accessible to the adult. For in most cases Andersen’s stories do not deal with children or children’s experiences, their world or their play. They deal with the world and the

10 experiences of adults, transformed and compressed into a form creating the illusion of being something like children’s literature.

The orality ascribed to Andersen’s fairy tales, then, is a literary orality, an illusion among so many others in the textual masquerade called his fairy tales. Having read an early story like `The Flying Trunk’ and a very late story like `The Flea and the Professor’, an Andersen-reader should be warned sufficiently against taking anything in his literary strategy for what it looks like. The artist is, as Andersen would have it in these highly modern stories, a shrewd illusionist, not to be trusted, and certainly not when he appears as the harmless, unsophisticted story teller for children.The famous example of Andersen’s rewriting `The Dead Man’ into `The Travelling Companion’ is therefore not to be interpreted as a return to the origins, a revival of an old oral tradition in the age of sophisticated literacy, nor as a return to Andersen’s own oldest experiences of stories told to a given audience. It is a literary construction, a literary masque, behind which a sophisticated author hides his face.

In 1837 Andersen wrote a short introduction to the third volume of Fairy Tales, Told for Children. In this introduction, titled `To the Older Readers’, he sums up the contradictory reactions from critics and other readers on his first two volumes, confides to the readers his doubts about publishing `The Little Mermaid’ among stories for children, and finally says about the folk tales he knew from his childhood, some of which he has used himself:

I have retold them in my own way, allowing myself any change, I found suitable, letting fantasy refresh the fainted colours of the pictures.

Almost the same words were used by the leading Romantic poet, Adam Oehlenschläger, in his epilogue to the epic fairy tale drama, Aladdin or the Magic Lamp (1805) -- by the way Andersen’s model-text in his life and in his works. In the epilogue of Aladdin the fairy Phantasia steps forward on the stage and interprets the whole drama and ends up by saying:

Receive from my hands the old painting, which used to hang only in the servants’ hall

11 half way deleted by dust and tobacco smoke, illuminated only by the dip in a simple iron candlestick. There my son saw it hang in his childhood, and the cover of dust, the faint light from the dip produced the same effect in his soul (unfamiliar with the glory of this world, but closely related to its mysterious nature) as the temple’s twilight veil does on the sanctuary.

Since ancient times this wondrous poem, transferred to us from the Far East, stood badly handled on the travel, re-dressed from an Arab into a Gallic clothing, put away in our memory’s distant corner. Now he has, to the best of his ability dusted it, refreshed the colours, bestowed on the whole picture the meaning, which the fainted reminiscence seemed to suggest – and put all of it into a better frame. (My translation, JdM)

Oehlenschläger here invokes a Romantic idea of high origins deleted by time and literacy, but accessible to the poet born with a sense of the inherent mystery of nature and the world and therefore capable of interpreting the hieroglyphs and recreating original creation., restoring the long forgotten meaning of the old signs.This is of course far from Andersen, who never looked back in regret of Paradise Lost, but was keen on his own time and on being a forerunner of the future. But apart from Romantic ideology, Oehlenschläger and Andersen basically allow themselves the same artistic freedom in relation to the already existing material. In Andersen’s terms: No less than three things have to be considered in his treatment of the old stories.

First: He has told them in his own way. Meaning, that he in no way feels obliged to recreate the oral form of the folk tales. Second: He has allowed himself any change, that he might find suitable. Which means change of the contents, of the plot, the characters, the ending etc. Third: He has let fantasy refresh the fainted colours of the old pictures. Meaning, Andersen is a poet, not a reteller of a given story. He creates in recreating.

If so is, where then would one likely find the true sources of the orality so often and in a certain sense rightfully, ascribed to his fairy tales, if not in oral tradition

12 and only partly in an actual situation of a story teller addressing a children’s audience?

My answer to this is: the theater. Andersen the storyteller is a truth to be accepted only with considerable reservations, as I have demonstrated in my latest book, Forvandlingens pris (`The Price of Transformation’). Not only is he also to a high degree a painter with the pen – and painting in words has always aesthetically been regarded as a delay of the story as such, thus an anti-epic element – but in most of his stories there is much more dialogue than you would ever find in stories rendered in oral tradition. Normally the folk tale has very little dialogue, simply because it is too difficult to remember and pass on from one story teller to another and again and again, if there is too much dialogue. Normally there are only rather few lines, and they are intimately connected with the progress of the action. Questions are asked and answered, predictions and promises are given.

But in Andersen’s case dialogue is a very prominent feature of his stories. In a short story like `It’s perfectly true’ (`Det er ganske vist!’), there is very little storytelling. Almost everything is given through dialogue, which means, that when actors `read’ this story, they don’t actually read it aloud, they act as if it were a stage play. A fairy tale like `The Wild Swans’ is in Andersen’s version about ten times longer than in the folk version, from which he has taken it. He read it – titled `The Eleven Swans’ – in Mathias Winthers’ collection of Danish Folk Tales (1823), where it only takes up one and a half pages. In Andersen’s version fifteen big pages. The extra volume comes from descriptions (paintings in words) and from dialogue.

Andersen’s stories are in many cases like theatrical pieces in prose. The fairy tale was his stage, his puppet theater, his `Schattenspiel an der Wand’ or even a substitute for the real stage of the theater. His form is scenic, dramatic. Not only because he presumably tells stories for children, but foremost because he among other things is a playwright.

In this respect Andersen very much resembles the impressionist novelist and short story writer of the 1880s and 1890s, Herman Bang. Bang too had a passion for the

13 theater, but only successfully realized his theatrical skills in his prose, where he happened to revolutionize Danish literary prose through his scenic-dramatic impressionism, not without inspiration from Andersen.

Andersen was, as we all know, from early childhood and right to the end of his life deeply fascinated by the world of the theater. The fact that Odense, his native town, was the only town outside Copenhagen, which had a theater building and that Andersen there met actors from the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen doing their private summer tour, was decisive for his whole future and his social career. This, among other things, inspired him to leave Odense at the age of fourteen to seek his fortune in the capital – hopefully as a dancer, a singer or an actor at the Royal Theater, in the end also as a playwright. And from his debut on, in 1829, he was constantly writing for the theatre: opera librettos, vaudevilles, comedies, serious drama, dream plays, all genres, to a total of about thirty play productions. And he went to the theater at home and abroad as often as possible, in periods almost every evening, and was therefore a great connoisseur of the European theatre world.

The scenic-dramatic presentation in his fairy tales and stories is always ascribed to an intention of addressing a children’s audience. This is true, but it is a truth, which needs to be modified. Andersen’s dramatic skill so evident in these tales does not grow out of a strategy of communication. He wasn’t so revolutionizing in his prose, because he had the intention of communicating in this or that way. Nor – and this is the other, traditional explanation -- because this was his nature, because he himself was childlike, or had more direct access to the sources (social, personal, traditional) of his childhood than others might have.

No – Andersen simply had the theatrical skill ... from the theatre, or rather, from his lifelong passion for the theatre. In his case a passion only to be successfully and revolutionizingly lived out in the more or less self-created form of the modern fairy tale, mostly staged in a contemporary world with recognizable figures and patterns of speech and action taken out of real life. The life he himself had observed and suffered from.

14 Orality therefore in Andersen’s case is a distinctive feature intimately connected with the tendency towards scenic presentation in his stories. Andersen goes far beyond telling a story. He sets up a stage and presents his figures – as he did it in the opening story of his first volume, 1835, of Fairy Tales, Told for Children. `The Tinder Box’ begins like this:

`Left, right! Left, right! ... Down the countryroad came a soldier marching. Left, right! Left, right! ...’

This is absurd! No one, not even a soldier would walk that way down the country road all alone, marching, left, right! left, right! But in a puppet theater this would be a natural thing – bringing a figure on stage, illustrating his identity in this way.

Or opening a story dramaticly with dialogue like in `Little Ida’s Flowers’:

`My poor flowers are quite dead’ said little Ida.

The stage is set, and Andersen presents his figures. They act, they speak on his command, and we recognize all of it as a live world, a world of our own. Andersen’s passion for the theater is the true and everlasting source for what bears the name of orality in his highly original prose.

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