Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish writer active during the 19th century and best known for his incredible and vast number of fairy tales. In total, Andersen wrote close to 3381 works, and over the years his fairy tales have been translated into roughly 125 different languages. And while some of us may remember the Disney versions of these tales, such as “The Little Mermaid”, “The Snow Queen”, and “The Ugly Duckling”, in reality, these stories were written with seriously dark undertones we will be examining a bit later in the podcast. Andersen was revered in his home country of Denmark, becoming a celebrity author in the height of his career on an international level, and the Danish government even paid him an annual stipend for being a “national treasure.” Furthermore, it is essentially cautioned by many historians and biographers not to cover a man like Hans Christian Andersen for this type of thing, because they claim his life was relatively uneventful and “vanilla”; however, if you know anything about me, I like a challenge, so I did some digging on this Danish hero, and turns out like so many things that look squeaky clean on the outside, what lies underneath is a whole different story altogether…and to be honest, I should have expected a certain level of strangeness from a guy who spent his whole life writing such fucked up fairy tales for children.
Anyway, let’s get rolling here and dive into the dichotomous life of Hans Christen Andersen.