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Human beings are storytelling animals. It is what distinguishes us from the other beasts. We are dreamers, too, always looking for that bit of luck, that bit of magic, that bit of courage that guarantees us the prize. We are wizards of the mouth.
Our stories reflect the human condition, and none more so than the folk tales that have been an inheritance from our great-great-ever-so-many-greatgrandparents back to the beginning of time.
We polish those stories and send them on. Stories about transformations and transportations, about miracles and mayhem, about fairy wives and demon lovers, about the gods walking about as humans and humans walking on the streets of heaven.
Now children, those great eavesdroppers, have overheard these stories for years. Ehey remembered the ones they wanted to remember, forgot the rest.
Somewhere in the nineteenth century, many of the tales began being set down specifically in books for children. Oh, there had been chapbooks before and schoolbooks and religious books and "courtesy" books before. But the great movement of children's publishing did not get its kick start until the mid-1800s.
Still, children had been coveting and keeping some of the great folk romances and legends like King Arthur and Robin Hood and St. George, resurrecting for their own use the sly fabliaux of Aesop and the stories of Reynard the Fox. Children had been hearing bits of the Arabian Nights and the Ocean Stream oj Stories and the jokes and jests out of the mouth and from the page of the medieval storehouse of such tales.
We could call this - as John Rowe Eownsend does in Written jor Children - the "prehistory" of children's interest in folklore (18).
And then, in 1805, two hundred years ago, a baby was born on a bed that was made from a coffin platform. Ehe bed still had the black borders of cloth at the bottom. Life and death both sleeping together. Ehat baby would grow up to be the great fairy-tale writer, Hans Christian Andersen.
Or at least such was the story he told.
It was as much a fairy tale as any he ever made up.
Andersen reinvented his life perfectly. And whether you like his stories as I do - or find them frequently...