Fairy Tales - Hans Christian Andersen (translated by M.R. James)

The indelible impression of fairytales.

All those mythic archetypes being smart, helpless, wicked or brave, thwarted, helped or just lucky, firing up the oxygen of imagination in a child and leaving images of meaningful reference all life long.

Take The Emperor’s New Clothes (somebody certainly took his old ones). What stronger paradigm for the small, clear voice of truth amidst the lies? For the foolishness of kings, for blinding by flattery and mass hysteria and the cautionary lesson that the bigger the lie, the more people believe it, for the unmasking and downfall of the powerful and the simple directness of truth.

It was The Tinder Box, though, that made the biggest impression on me, possibly because at my gran’s house in Birmingham was an old clock in the shape of a dog’s head, whose eyes revolved to mark the minutes and hours. It was freakily scary. The three dogs whose eyes were increasingly huge are friendly enough to the solider but the size of them lends an edge of danger to the tale.

Come the end, it’s just extraordinary how the princess is not the least bit bothered that her royal parents are tossed up and broken to bits by the dogs. They wouldn’t be hiding her from suitors again! At her wedding feast, “the dogs sat at table and made great eyes.”

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