The Fairy-tale Paradigm: Contemporary Legend on Hans Christian Andersen’s Parentage

Kirsten Møllegaard, English

In spite of the vast amount of biographical, historical, and literary research devoted to the Danish poet, playwright, novelist and fairy-tale writer, Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), contrary beliefs about his parentage continue to keep both scholars and the Danish public engaged in debating who his real parents were: was he, as one tenacious legend persists, the illegitimate lovechild of a prince and a noblewoman? Or was he really, as the official version maintains, born in great poverty to a washerwoman and a cobbler?

    Legends are belief stories and therefore part of large-scale social processes that perpetuate cultural values and desires. By taking a cultural-studies approach to this phenomenon, my discussion of contemporary legend on Andersen’s parentage will focus on the cultural significance of the debates that circulate in the popular Danish media: what function do they have in terms of cultural reproduction and representation? How is their ideological discourse structured? Which symbols are used? And, significantly, what is the paradigmatic influence of the fairy tale as narrative structure?

    In Denmark, the statue of Andersen’s Little Mermaid is a tourist symbol, which represents the country as a fairy-tale kingdom. At the same time, it is periodically vandalized to debunk such representation. The cultural values and desires invested in the legends on Andersen’s parentage thus tie in with the ways in which the fairy-tale paradigm functions ideologically to structure national self-representation and cultural continuity. Both narratively and ideologically, contemporary legends and symbolic action empower the fairy-tale paradigm against the hegemony of positivism.