Hans Christian Anderson: "A Young Boy's Fairy Tale Life"

The famous fairy tale writer, Hans Christian Anderson was born in the spring of 1805 in Denmark. He came from a poor family, the son of Hans Anderson and Anna Maria. These people who raised him and other family members, had the most influence on how Hans Christian becomes the famous storyteller in the 18^th century. From his mentally insane grandfather, delusional and imaginative mother, and his grandmother who took him to work at the mental hospital.

There were many interesting characters in Hans Christian’s life, including his whimsical mother and senile grandfather. Everyone around the town knew that Han Christian’s grandfather was mentally ill, “he would take long lonely walks in the woods, and when he returned home, he would often be wearing a wreath of flowers on his head” (Varmer, Hjordis 8). Whenever his grandfather would brave the town’s streets, people would laugh and run after him. Hans Christian did not speak of his grandfather because he was “afraid of the eccentric old man, and he worried that one day people might call him mad, as well” (Varmer, Hjordis 8). This is what began Hans Christian’s introverted personality, opening up solely through his “stories and make- believe".

His mother was also an eccentric influence in his life. During their family’s outings to the woods, his mother would gather branches from a beech tree and decorate their home. Some would go as far to say she may have been insane too, “she also hung a plant called orphine, or livelong, that she used to predict the future, she claimed that the herbs could tell her how long the people she knew would live” (Varmer, Hjordis 8). Many of his family members would be thought as “crazy”, but this craziness did him well for his later career, sending him into an alternate reality and sparking his creativeness.

Another family member who inspired Hans Christian was his grandmother worked at mental hospital, where Hans Christian’s story telling began. He would play in the hospital garden and some of the patients would come to see him. The patients would tell him stories of their lives, then he would tell stories and sing for them in return. Hans Christian loved to talk and tell them the stories he would remember from his parents, and if he could not remember them he would just make up his own.

Clearly Hans Christian Anderson’s tales are influenced by the mentally insane, and the fanciful world in which he was raised. His parents helped him realize his love for writing and reading, grandfather and mother gave him his distinctive voice and his eccentric style, while the mental hospital revealed his passion of story telling. All these events that marked his life growing up paved the way for him to write world renounced fairy tales like the Thumbelina and the Little Mermaid, for other curious and imaginative children to read and watch.