Born on This Day: Erik Christian Haugaard, 1923-2009

Apr13

Born on April 13, 1923 in Denmark, Erik Christian Haugaard eventually made his way to the United States and became a writer, even though he left school at the age of fifteen and left Denmark at the age of seventeen. When the Germans invaded Denmark in 1940, young Erik Haugaard got out of Denmark just ahead of the invasion on the last ship out of Danish waters to the United States. After that he traveled some in the U.S., joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, went to college some during and after the war was over, and then began to write. An editor at Houghton Mifflin suggested that he rewrite a manuscript he had submitted and make it into a story for children. And so he wrote his first book for children, Hakon of Rogen’s Saga, a novel about the medieval ruler, Earl Hakon of Norway.

I have five of Haugaard’s thirteen or so books in my library:

Hakon of Rogen’s Saga and A Slave’s Tale are both set in Viking times, after the Christianization of Norway, but in a time when the pagan gods and customs were still in conflict with the new Christian way of looking at life. Leif the Unlucky, also set among the Vikings, is a fictionalized look at the Greenland colony of Lief Ericksson, an attempt at nation-building that did not turn out well.

Orphans of the Wind is a U.S. civil war sailing story. Haugaard’s books tend to be about young boys or girls getting caught up in the dangers and travails of war.

The Samurai’s Tale is one of three books that Haugaard wrote about ancient Japan and the samurai. The other two (that I don’t own) are The Boy and the Samurai and The Revenge of the Forty-Seven Samurai.

Cromwell’s Boy is about a young man living during the English civil war of Oliver Cromwell’s day. It’s a sequel to the book, A Messenger for Parliament, a book that’s on my wishlist.

The Little Fishes, another war story that I do not own, is set in occupied Italy with a twelve year old orphaned beggar named Guido as the protagonist.

The Haugaard book that I most recently acquired and read is titled Chase Me, Catch Nobody. Set in pre-war Germany and Denmark, Chase Me, Catch Nobody features a fourteen year old Danish schoolboy who must be at least a semi-autobiographical character. Erik Hansen (not Haugaard) narrates this story of a school trip to Nazi Germany in 1937. Erik in the book describes himself in much the same way that author Erik Haugaard reminisces about his younger self in a 1979 interview I read. Erik Haugaard the author and Erik Hansen the character are both from upper middle class backgrounds, indifferent students, ambitious to write poetry, and as adolescents “a bit of a snob.” Haugaard says in the interview that even as an adult writer what he most needs and craves from an editor is praise, praise, and more praise. Erik Hansen is self-aware enough to know and tell the reader that he is somewhat ashamed of his parents and their “lack of imagination” and middle class values, but that he enjoys being wealthy and generous just like his father and that he and his father indeed share share many of the same faults, “which is why we didn’t get along.”

I thought the book, rated YA for some fumbling talk about sex and for the very adolescent attitudes expressed in story, was very insightful as the characters, mostly Erik and his friend Nikolai, gained more and more insight into their own characters and their own ability to act with courage and conviction. The boys are tested by an encounter with a stranger in a grey raincoat who entrusts Erik with a mysterious package to deliver just before the man is arrested by the Gestapo. Then, later in the book, Erik and Nikolai are given another mission to complete that will require them to face great danger in order to possibly save a life. And through the book while Erik and his friend act with courage and determination, they are also typical teens, idealistic, sarcastic, foolhardy, convinced of their own invincibility and at the same time vulnerable and unsure of their own beliefs and convictions.

I was reminded of this book, The Boys Who Challenged Hitler: Knud Pedersen and the Churchill Club by Phillip Hoose, and I think these two books would be quite a good pair to read in tandem for a teen book club or discussion group. I wrote that The Boys Who Challenged Hitler was “an interesting and exciting portrait of youthful zeal and even foolhardiness which can sometimes trump an adult over-abundance of caution and planning” and the same could be said of Chase Me, Catch Nobody. But the discussion could also cover the possibility that such youthful enthusiasm and lack of respect for possible consequences or for the sheer enormity of the evil that was Naziism could bring many lives to ruin, as it indeed did in some places and situations in the Allied resistance during World War II.

I recommend Haugaard’s books for young adult readers who enjoy a challenging story that will cause them to think about character and philosophy and politics and see these subjects through the eyes of different people from themselves. However, as Haugaard says in the afore-mentioned interview it is much easier to see what’s wrong with the world than it is to see what’s right or to find solutions to the problems. Perhaps just seeing today’s political and social problems in a different historical setting such as medieval Japan or a Viking colony in Greenland will make us see those issues in a new way and begin to understand the path toward new solutions.

Erik Christian Haugaard also made his own translation of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories, published by Doubleday as A Complete Fairy Tales and Stories by Hans Christian Anderson, translated by Erik Christian Haugaard. The translation project took Haugaard three years to finish.

“I don’t know whether my own books will survive, but if I have saved any of Andersen’s stories from obscurity, I have made a contribution to English literature. Who Wouldn’t be grateful for having had such an opportunity!” ~Erik Christian Haugaard, interview in Language Arts, Vol. 56, No. 5 (May 1979), pp. 549-561.

Beverly Cleary, b. April 12, 1916

Apr12

Beverly Cleary, creator of Ramona Quimby, Henry Huggins, Ralph S. Mouse, and many other beloved characters, is 102 years old today.

Ramona-isms:

“She was not a slowpoke grownup. She was a girl who could not wait. Life was so interesting she had to find out what happened next.”
~Ramona the Pest

“Words were so puzzling. Present should mean a present just as attack should mean to stick tacks in people.”
~Ramona the Pest

Ramona: “Why can’t we be a happy family?”
Mr. Quimby: “I have news for you, Ramona, we are a happy family. . . No family is perfect. Get that idea out of your head. And nobody is perfect either. All we can do is work at it. And we do.”
~Ramona and Her Father

“Ramona was the sort of girl who was always early because something might happen that she didn’t want to miss.”
~Ramona’s World

Other posts and articles about Beverly Cleary and her wonderful books:
Beverly Cleary, Age 100, The New Yorker.
Beverly Cleary on Turning 100, Washington Post.
Beverly Cleary is Turning 100, but She Has Always Thought Like a Kid, NPR.
If you like Ramona Quimby by Beverly Cleary . . .

Christopher Smart, b. April 11, 1722, d.1771

Apr11

April is National Poetry Month.

Christopher Smart, a 16th century poet and writer of popular songs, was said to be mentally disturbed, confined for some period of time to a mental institution, but nevertheless a talented poet and perhaps just the unfortunate victim of enemies who wanted him out of the way. He wrote a famous free verse poem called Jubilate Agno, part of which is about his cat, Jeoffry, and how said cat worshipped the Lord. The book pictured below is one I have in my library, and it contains the part of Jubilate Agno that is about Jeoffry the cat. Smart also wrote a poem called A Song to David about David and the Psalms and how God speaks through the psalms of David.

Excerpt from Smart’s poem, A Song to David

Glorious the sun in mid career;
Glorious th’ assembled fires appear;
Glorious the comet’s train:
Glorious the trumpet and alarm;
Glorious th’ almighty stretch’d-out arm;
Glorious th’ enraptur’d main:

Glorious the northern lights a-stream;
Glorious the song, when God’s the theme;
Glorious the thunder’s roar:
Glorious hosanna from the den;
Glorious the catholic amen;
Glorious the martyr’s gore:

Glorious—-more glorious is the crown
Of Him that brought salvation down
By meekness, call’d thy Son;
Thou that stupendous truth believ’d,
And now the matchless deed’s achiev’d,
Determin’d, dar’d, and done.

Samuel Johnson on Christopher Smart, from The Life of Johnson:

“Madness frequently discovers itself merely by unnecessary deviation from the usual modes of the world. My poor friend Smart showed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place. Now although, rationally speaking, it is greater madness not to pray at all, than to pray as Smart did, I am afraid there are so many who do not pray, that their understanding is not called in question.”

Concerning this unfortunate poet, Christopher Smart, Johnson had, at another time, the following conversation with Dr. Burney:

BURNEY. “How does poor Smart do, Sir; is he likely to recover?”
JOHNSON. “It seems as if his mind had ceased to struggle with the disease; for he grows fat upon it.”
BURNEY. “Perhaps, Sir, that may be from want of exercise.”
JOHNSON. “No, Sir; he has partly as much exercise as he used to have, for he digs in the garden. Indeed, before his confinement, he used for exercise to walk to the alehouse; but he was carried back again. I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Another charge was, that he did not love clean linen; and I have no passion for it.”

I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else. Indeed.

Julius Caesar by John Gunther

Apr10

Since most of what I know about Julius Caesar comes from Shakespeare (and a little GB Shaw, which I assume is mostly fiction), I learned a lot about the life and times of Mr. Caesar from reading this Landmark history book for middle grade children. Yes, his surname really was Caesar; it became a term for a ruler or king after Julius and Augustus made it famous.

Julius Caesar was a successful and intrepid general and an excellent and shrewd politician; that’s how he rose to the place where he was a threat to the Roman republic and ripe for assassination. I didn’t really realize that he won so many important battles or subjugated so much territory. I also didn’t know about, and still don’t understand, the intricate and corrupt state of Roman politics in the time of Julius Caesar. Caesar had to weave his way through some labyrinthine politics that would challenge a modern American political consultant or campaign manager. And I thought our political system was bad. If Washington, D.C. is a swamp, Rome was a swamp in which people actually died over their failure to back the right candidate for tribune or consul. And that’s before Julius Caesar died for being so ambitious. (Apparently, Sulla was a bad dude.)

I learned or had confirmed a few more things about Julius Caesar:

~ He liked the Jews and gave them special privileges to practice their religion in Rome.
~ According to Gunther, it was on Caesar’s watch that the library of Alexandria burned down. (Although Wikipedia says no one knows exactly when it burned and that there may have been several separate fires over the space of hundreds of years.)
~ Caesar did have a fling with Cleopatra, and she did get delivered to his headquarters in a pile of rugs. (GBS was right about that.) Egyptian politics were just as complicated, devious, and deadly as Roman politics.
~ The Rubicon is (was?) a shallow, insignificant river, but crossing the Rubicon, the boundary of his authority to lead an army, was a momentous decision for Caesar, the beginning of the end for Julius Caesar and for the Roman Republic.
~ Julius Caesar used the phrase “Veni, vidi, vici” in a letter to the Roman Senate after he had achieved a quick victory in his short war against Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela.

Gunther leans heavily on Shakespeare in the concluding chapters of the book, but I think both Gunther and Shakepeare were leaning heavily on Plutarch and Suetonius for the facts on Julius Caesar’s life, his death and the aftermath of his assassination. According to Gunther, “Friends, Romans, countrymen” was an actual speech that Mark Antony gave at Caesar’s funeral, and it was indeed a real barnburner. Portia really did commit suicide by swallowing burning coals (ouch!), and Brutus truly was a noble but indecisive character. According to Gunther, everything went pretty much the way Shakepeare wrote it many years later. (Except for Caesar’s ghost, which probably didn’t appear; I’m not much of a believer in ghosts, and Gunther doesn’t mention any spooks.)

This book would be an excellent prequel to watching Shakepeare’s Julius Caesar. The movie version with Marlon Brando as Mark Antony is an excellent film, even if it is in black and white.

To learn more about the Landmark series of biographies and history books for young people, check out this podcast episode, Parts 1 and 2, of Plumfield Moms, What Are Landmark Books? Why Do They Matter?

Leonard Wibberley, b. April 9, 1915, d.1983

Apr9

So, I’m doing a little research on Leonard Wibberley since it’s his birthday today. I know about his most famous book The Mouse That Roared. I read it a long time ago, and I remember the basic premise: a very small country decides to declare war on the United States, lose the war immediately, and then benefit from the “Marshall Plan” aid that is sure to be extended; complications ensue.

I have in my library Wibblerley’s Treegate series of historical fiction novels set before, during and after the American Revolution, and I have three of the four in his series of historical novels on the life of Thomas Jefferson, but I haven’t yet read the books from either of those series.

What I didn’t know is that he wrote over 100 novels and other books, some for adults, others for children. And he wrote under three pseudonyms in addition to his own name: Christopher Webb (some historical fiction books for children or young adults), Patrick O’Connor (Black Tiger series on auto racing, and others for YA), and Leonard Holton (Father Joseph Bredder murder mysteries for adults).

Some of these and some of the other books he wrote under his own name look interesting. I’m particularly interested in the mystery series, if it’s good. There’s also a series of historical novels for children or young adults by “Christopher Webb”, published by Funk and Wagnalls in the 1960’s:

Mark Toyman’s Inheritance, 1960. “Mark Toyman is an orphan being raised by his uncle and aunt on the Kansas frontier in the early 1850s. A pro-slavery mob kills his uncle and force Mark and his aunt to flee for their lives.”
The River of Pee Dee Jack, 1962. “Fur trapping and fur trading Northwest Passage exploration story.” (Amazon)
Quest of the Otter, 1963. “Young Paul Joplin’s father, a whaling captain, did not return to his home in Mystic, Connecticut from his last voyage. When he comes of age Paul sails aboard another whaling ship, the Otter, bound for the South Seas in search of his father.”
Matt Tyler’s Chronicle, 1966. “Matt Tyler, a simple cobbler’s apprentice in Boston, finds himself caught up in major events of the Revolutionary War from the siege of Boston to the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown.”
Eusebius the Phoenician, 1969. “Eusebius, a Phoenician merchant/warrior from Tyre sails from the Mediterranean Sea to Scandinavia to return the body of a slain Viking warrior to his people and to seek the Holy Grail. The Vikings accompany him on a quest that takes Eusebius to the British Isles where he helps a defeated King Arthur re-establish his kingdom in return for assistance in finding the Holy Grail.”

And just a few of the many others of interest by this prolific author (#readallthebooks):
The Ballad of the Pilgrim Cat. “An endearing story of how a stowaway cat on the Mayflower saves the Pilgrims by protecting their grain seeds from rodents.”
Treasure at Twenty Fathoms by Patrick O’Connor. “Chuck Crawford is learning to dive and has a run in with a shark. Will he be able to overcome his fears or will he have to quit diving?”
The Centurian. Adult fiction based on the life of the centurion who oversaw Jesus’ crucifixion.
Flint’s Island. A sequel to Treasure Island, Wibberley’s favorite childhood book.

Don’t these and others (listed at Wibberley’s website) sound absolutely fascinating? Has anyone read anything by Wibberley other than Mouse books, Treegate, and Thomas Jefferson? Any recommendations?

William Wordsworth, b. April 7, 1770

Apr7

April is National Poetry Month.

Wordsworth on poetry: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” Spontaneous, powerful, emotional, and tranquil—all at the same time? I’m not sure I could do all that together, which is probably one reason I’m not a poet. One of many.

Wordsworth on The Poet: “What is a Poet?. . . He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them.”

Wordsworth on nature study: “Come forth into the light of things,/Let Nature be your teacher.”

William Hazlitt on Wordsworth: “He is in this sense the most original poet now living, and the one whose writings could the least be spared: for they have no substitute elsewhere. The vulgar do not read them; the learned, who see all things through books, do not understand them; the great despise. The fashionable may ridicule them: but the author has created himself an interest in the heart of the retired and lonely student of nature, which can never die.”

As for me, I used to call him “Wordswords” because I thought him much too high-flown and wordy. I still rather think so, but I’m not so sure that it’s a deficit in Wordsworth that I don’t appreciate his poetry more. Maybe it’s a deficit in my ability to appreciate good poetry. Anyway, here’s one that I do rather enjoy, about looking out upon the sleeping city of London:

Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

And another: Lucy II.

Patricia St. John, b. April 5, 1919

Apr5

I’ve been reading An Ordinary Woman’s Extraordinary Faith: The Autobiography of Patricia St. John. IT’s quite a good story, and it makes me long for a time “when life was simple back in the good old days.” She says things that would in our time be taken as evidence of dishonesty neglect, or dysfunction, and as I read, I knew that they were neither. For instance, her mother and father lived apart for many of the years of their marriage, she taking care of the children in England and he traveling the world and teaching the Bible. And Patricia St. John writes that she never heard an argument or even a cross word pass between her parents when they were together. She also writes of her childhood in which she and her siblings were allowed to explore the woods and fields near their country home, being gone all day and only coming home in time for supper and bed. She tells the story of living alone in a Muslim village in Morocco, with no telephone, no English-speaking people living nearby, and very little knowledge of the Arabic language. She fed the beggar children and told them stories about Jesus in broken Arabic. I fear we have come a long way from the 1950’s when Patricia St. Joh was a missionary in Morocco, and even farther from her childhood in 1930’s and 40’s Britain. And I’m not sure that our sophistication and dependence on technology has brought us to a better way of life or of evangelism in many ways.

While Ms. St. John was living in England (during WWII) and in Morocco, she also wrote fiction books for children, books that give a vivid picture of other lands such as Switzerland and Morocco and also a believable and simple vision of the power of the gospel to change lives and comfort the afflicted. The following titles are the ones I have in my library:

Her first book, The Tanglewood’s Secret, was written to comfort and strengthen the girls in a boarding school that Ms. St. John’s family was associated with. Ruth, the main character in the book, lives with her aunt in the English countryside, and although she begins as a rather selfish and unhappy girl, she later comes to know the Good Shepherd who cares for His sheep.

Treasures of the Snow is set in Switzerland, where Patricia and her family spent a year of her childhood. In the story a girl named Annette is filled with hatred for Lucien, the boy responsible for an injury that crippled Annette’s little brother. The bitterness and hatred in Annette’s heart poisons all of her life and her relationships until she learns to forgive.

Star of Light is the first book that Patricia St. John wrote about her mountain village in Morocco. It’s fiction, but based untrue stories of how Jesus and a missionary nurse healed and cared for a blind baby and a beggar boy.

In Rainbow Garden, Elaine is sent to live with a family in the English countryside while her mother goes to work in France. Elaine is selfish and bitter, but she experiences healing and forgiveness in her garden.

Three Go Searching was written while Ms. St. John was a missionary nurse in an Arab village. When Waffi, an Arab boy, and David, a missionary kid, find a sick servant girl and a mysterious boat, and thus begins an exciting adventure.

The Secret of the Fourth Candle, also written during the time in the Moroccan village, consists of three short stories: “The Four Candles”, “The Cloak”, and “The Guest”.

Historical fiction set during the first century, The Runaway tells the story of Philo, a Phoenician boy whose little sister Illyrica is possessed by a demon. Philo finds a way to take his sister to Jesus, the healer.

Twice Freed is the fictionalized story of Onesimus, the runaway slave who returns to his master with a letter, the Book of Philemon in the the Bible.

Patricia St. John also wrote several missionary biographies, including Until the Day Breaks: The Life and Work of Lilias Trotter, Pioneer Missionary to Muslim North Africa, a book I would like to acquire and read someday.

Glen Rounds, b. April 4, 1906

Apr4

Glen Rounds, author and illustrator of over 100 children’s books, both fiction and nonfiction, was born in a sod house in South Dakota and grew up on a ranch in Montana. Most of his books have something to do with the American west or the frontier or the plants and animals of North America, especially the western United States. Mr. Rounds drew on the stories he heard in his youth for his many books, and so he’s something of a cowboy storyteller himself.

A few of Mr. Rounds’ books that are in my library are:

Mr Yowder and the Steamboat, about a steamboat captain, a steamboat pilot, and a card game. Other picture books about Mr. Yowder that I don’t own (but would like to) are Mr. Yowder and the Lion Roar Capsules, Mr. Yowder and the Giant Bull Snake, Mr. Yowder and the Wind Wagon, Mr. Yowder and the Peripatetic Sign Painter, and Mr. Yowder and the Train Robbers.

The Blind Colt, in which ten-year-old Whitey saves a blind colt from being killed, by training the colt to be useful and self-sufficient despite his blindness.

Stolen Pony, a sequel to The Blind Colt. The blind colt is stolen by horse thieves and abandoned to find his own way home.

Blind Outlaw, in which a blind outlaw horse is tamed by a boy who cannot speak.

The Cowboy Trade, nonfiction about the life of a working cowboy.

Swamp Life, an almanac dealing with raccoons, possums, snakes, turtles, hell divers, wood ducks, and others who live in hollow tree and tangled thickets and on how to see and become acquainted with them.

Glen Rounds is one of the many authors featured in Jan Bloom’s first volume of Who Should We Then Read? Rounds’ New York Times obituary (2002) tells the inspiring story of Mr. Rounds’ comeback when he was in his eighties: “In 1989 severe arthritis in his right arm forced him to stop drawing. ‘Rather than take up horseshoeing,’ he said in an interview, he used the summer to learn to draw left-handed and went back to work.”

May we all be so resilient.

George Herbert, b. April 3, 1593

Apr3

April is National Poetry Month.

I’ve posted poems by George Herbert, the seventeenth century Christian poet, on this blog numerous times. If one were to spend the entire month of April just reading through the poems of Mr. Herbert, one a day, it would be devotional enough to last you through the season and to bring you to an awareness of poetry of faith.

Here are some of the posts from Semicolon about George Herbert’s poetry:
Love Bade Me Welcome
The Pulley
Christmas
The Dawning
The Sonne
A Wreath
Easter Wings
Love (II)

Other Links:
More poetry by George Herbert.
The God of Love My Shepherd Is by George Herbert at Rebecca Writes.

Herbert is one of the so-called “metaphysical poets”, along with John Donne and Henry Vaughan. I find all three of these Christian metaphysical poets both bracing and comforting. C.S. Lewis named the poetry of George Herbert as one of the ten works that most influenced his philosophy of life. Richard Baxter, the famous Puritan thinker, said, “Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth in God, and whose business in the world is most with God. Heart-work and heaven-work make up his books.” If you’re ready for some heart-work and/or heaven-work, I recommend the poetry of George Herbert. Prescription for a weary soul: Read aloud one poem each morning and meditate on it. Repeat each evening before bed.

Here’s one for today:

Vanity (I)

The fleet astronomer can bore
And thread the spheres with his quick-piercing mind:
He views their stations, walks from door to door,
Surveys, as if he had designed
To make a purchase there; he sees their dances,
And knoweth long before
Both their full-eyes aspècts, and secret glances.

The nimble diver with his side
Cuts through the working waves, that he may fetch
His dearly-earnèd pearl, which God did hide
On purpose from the venturous wretch;
That he might save his life, and also hers
Who with excessive pride
Her own destruction and his danger wears.

The subtle chymic can divest
And strip the creature naked, till he find
The callow principles within their nest:
There he imparts to them his mind,
Admitted to their bed-chamber, before
They appear trim and dressed
To ordinary suitors at the door.

What hath not man sought out and found,
But his dear God? who yet his glorious law
Embosoms in us, mellowing the ground
With showers and frosts, with love and awe,
So that we need not say, “Where’s this command?”
Poor man, thou searchest round
To find out death, but missest life at hand.

Herbert once said, “Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right’. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.” It was a good thing that he took his own advice, so to speak, since he produced a multitude of poems, proverbs and other writings, all before he died at the young age of thirty-nine. Had he waited for a more convenient or wiser time of life, we would not have the poems and other works he gave us to meditate upon.

Hans Christian Andersen, b. April 2, 1805

Apr2

I would suggest two different ways of getting to know Mr. Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish storyteller who gave us the timeless tales of The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor’s New Clothes, and many more favorites. First, watch the movie Hans Christian Andersen, starring Danny Kaye as Mr. Andersen. It’s a fictional treatment of Andersen’s life, of course, complete with music, song, and dance, but it’s a lovely introduction to the man and his storytelling.

Then second, I recommend the biography for young people, Hans Christian Andersen, Immortal Storyteller by Elizabeth Rider Montgomery. Published by Garrard publishing, the biography is only 138 pages long and it’s written for children, but as a brief introduction to the storyteller and dramatist’s life, this little book is a gem.

Did you know that Andersen himself thought very little of his famous book Fairy Tales Told for Children. He called them “a mere sleight-of-hand with Fancy’s golden apples.”

As for the fairy tale stories themselves, there are all sorts of editions, collections, illustrations, and other versions nowadays of Andersen’s fairy tales. I like this version of The Snow Queen by Amy Ehrlich, illustrated by one of my favorite artists, Susan Jeffers. This edition of Thumbelina, illustrated by Elsa Beskow, is lovely, too. I also have in my library individual volumes of the following tales: The Buckwheat, The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Ugly Duckling, A Gift for Hans, It’s Absolutely True, The Snowdrop, The Brave Tin Soldier, The Nightingale, The Traveling Companion, and What the Old Man Does Is Always Right, plus a couple of collections of Mr. Andersen’s stories.

To read most of Andersen’s 168 tales online in English, you can go to this Andersen website.

My children used to watch this version of The Ugly Duckling in the series Timeless Tales on VHS tape. I wish I had a video or at least a sound recording of my youngest singing this song plaintively and mournfully when she was about three years old. It was indeed timeless.