Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales

This is a good, sturdy hardback edition, suitable, in my view, mainly for adult readers. The font is tiny, closely spaced, and could intimidate younger readers. The paper is rough and of poor quality; the illustrations are very -- very -- few and far between, black and white, small, and in my opinion, not particularly good. There are also a few punctuation errors, which, while they don't distort the meaning overly, are nonetheless annoying.
Nevertheless, it's good to have Anderson's tales in one durable volume, faithfully translated.

Fully Illustrated..? (69/69 people found this helpful)

I purchased this book to read to my two young children but was disappointed when I received it. The text is extremely small and the illustrations are few and far between. The front cover states 'fully illustrated' but this is not the case.

The stories are the ones we all remember but with no colour illustrations and the text being so small it is not suitable for younger children.

*A NATIONAL HERO* (21/24 people found this helpful)

Hans-Christian Andersen and his wonderful stories and fairy-tales are famous all over the world! He is proberly one of the greatest authors from Denmark, and we are very proud of him! You proberly know the stories by heart (I know I do), so I'm not going to go any deeper in them, but next time you read one of the amazing stories think of the moral to them! Because HC Andersen always had a moral when he wrote the stories! This book is a very beautiful edition of the fairy-tales, so even if you've already heard the stories I can highly recomend it! And if you don't know the stories I only have one last thing to say: GET STARTED WITH THIS BEAUTIFUL BOOK!

A deleciously delightful book for children at heart (18/20 people found this helpful)

Hans Christian Andersen aretfully spins tales of love, adventure and comedy in this easy to read collection. His stories are a treat to read- no matter what age you may be- he's able to weave something in for everyone. His stories, which have been made into everything from disney movies to sculpture, have been able to endure the passing of generations. This is a book I would highly recomend to anyone who'd like to recapture a bit of that whimsical fatasy that made childhood so precious.

The Magician from the North (26/32 people found this helpful)

It ought to be a source of some astonishment that the writings of Hans Christian Andersen have triumphed over the passage of time as they have. Who is more stolidly nineteenth-century, more bourgeois, more moistly sentimental, than this ever-lonely Danish poet and fabulist? Yet the continuing stream of translations and adaptations of his work--of which Disney's diluted and distorting version of his great "Little Mermaid" is only the most famous recent example--testifies to the ageless qualities of his genius. He often represented himself as the mere mouthpiece of traditional lore, the transmitter of the folk wisdom of his nurses; in our day he is tucked away with Mother Goose rhymes and other noncontroversial literature. Neither mode of understanding fully represents him. He belongs to that remarkable category--small even among great writers--of myth-makers, whose characters have come to assume near-archetypal significance. The little mermaid, the dauntless tin soldier, the ugly duckling are no longer simply memorable: they are continuing analogues for the developing self. He is a writer for children only in the sense that children deserve the best literature. His stories offer nothing easy, and little that is sweet: they puzzle and trouble; they take root in the imagination, and childhood is only the beginning of our long relationship with Andersen's haunting images. Is it joy or sorrow that first makes us weep for Elisa and her unlucky brothers in "The Wild Swans"? Who but Andersen could have dared to make the inanimate fixity of the tin soldier an image of the steadfastness of deep love in adversity? Who could forget the robber girl in "The Snow Queen," gruffly loyal,never sleeping without her knife? He wrote his tales with the colloquial humility of the storyteller, spiced with wit and homely details that give his great themes a distinctive flavor:the oysters clamped to the royal merfolk's tails in "The Little Mermaid," or the puppet queen offering her cr! own to the wandering friends in "The Traveling Companion." Andersen's sway over the writing of literature for children is well known, but more could be said about his deep influence on psychological theory, and the fascination he has exerted on contemporary writers, from Ursula Synge and a host of other fantasists to poets such as Marilyn Hacker and Anne Sexton. He importantly anticipates, and may have influenced, writers as important and diverse as Isak Dinesen, Franz Kafka, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. With a writer as rich, as pleasing, as rewarding, as Hans Christian Andersen, it is never too soon to commence reading his tales, and it is never too late to read them again.

Complete Hans Christian Andersen Fairy Tales

H.C. Andersen

Reader Reviews:

An adult edition? (27/28 people found this helpful)

Fully Illustrated..? (69/69 people found this helpful)

A NATIONAL HERO (21/24 people found this helpful)

A deleciously delightful book for children at heart (18/20 people found this helpful)

The Magician from the North (26/32 people found this helpful)

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