However, due either to his shyness or his unusual looks, he never experienced happiness in love. He was in love sever- al times, he loved girls, but his love was unrequited. One ballerina he adored told him that of all the Danes in the world she would always choose him to be her broth- er. And that’s roughly his story. Perhaps it mirrors the tale of the Little Mermaid about the girl who dreams of a prince she will never have because she swapped her voice for legs, so she cannot tell him she saved his life and is the girl from his dream. The prince will marry another, and our mermaid will again return to the blue depths until the end of the world singing, to enchanted sailors who hear the sad- dest sounds from the depths. She has been immortalised at the en- trance to the harbour, to greet those arriv- ing in Copenhagen, a city that offers remind- ers of Andersen around every corner. From Fairy-tale House beside the city tower, to the beautiful, colourful Nyhavn, where he lived for a long time at number 20 and wrote his first fairy tales. The mermaid looks over the Danish capital, where, after many voyages, Andersen also resides as one of the most celebrated and worthy Danes.
ile children’s souls with monsters and su- pernatural beings. The most beautiful are perhaps those in which there is almost no fantasy, such as The Princess and the Pea, The Little Match Girl or The Emperor’s New Clothes. Andersen also had a habit of bring- ing ordinary things to life, and with him even a lead soldier can suffer from his sol- itude. Sadness is ubiquitous, irony seeps through the stories, but nobody remains indifferent to these fairy tales, which are not only for children. There is barely anyone today, two centuries later, who has not heard of or read at least some of them. Apart from the aforementioned works, there are al- so The Tinderbox, The Swineherd, The Steadfast Tin Soldier, The Snow Queen etc., fairy tales alongside which genera- tions have grown up, which have been translated into 40 languages, performed in theatres, adapted for the big screen, converted into cartoons... Andersen’s life ended up actually re- sembling one of his beautiful fairy tales. He died in his 70 th year, on 4 th August 1875, wealthy and content with a life he could only have imagined as a boy in the poor town of Odense.
Muzej u Andersenovom rodnom Odenseu čuva sve detalje njegovog života The museum in Andersen’s hometown of Odense preserves every detail of his life
The beautiful Copenhagen was, never- theless, too narrow for someone as imag- inative as Andersen, so he devoted many years of his life to travel. He most enjoyed spending time in Italy and Germany, but visited a good part of the world and was even a guest of Charles Dickens in Eng- land. On his journeys he wrote, first nov- els, then stories and tales that gave birth to the most beautiful fairy tales. Swedish critics of the time complained that he was overly sentimental, but he was just roman- tic and poetic. He lived on paper what he didn’t have in life, and his fairy tales are specific because he doesn’t frighten frag-
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