The Ugly Duckling
12 min read ages 5 and up
Danish tales
14 tales
The Princess and the Pea
3 min read ages 4 and up
Thumbelina
14 min read ages 5 and up
The Red Shoes
8 min read ages 8 and up
The Little Mermaid
16 min read ages 6 and up
The Snow Queen
16 min read ages 6 and up
The Emperor’s New Clothes
9 min read ages 5 and up
The Nightingale
12 min read ages 6 and up
The Steadfast Tin Soldier
6 min read ages 6 and up
The Wild Swans
16 min read ages 7 and up
The Little Match Girl
3 min read ages 6 and up
The Fir Tree
9 min read ages 6 and up
The Tinderbox
9 min read ages 6 and up
The Swineherd
9 min read ages 5 and up
Andersen and his Copenhagen tales
Hans Christian Andersen wrote his fairy tales in Copenhagen, and the first booklet of them appeared in 1835. Unlike the Grimms, he was not collecting stories he had heard. Most of them he made up himself, The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling among them.
Some of his tales, like The Emperor’s New Clothes, are now so familiar that people forget anyone wrote them. The Princess and the Pea takes about three minutes to read, short enough to finish before a small child has settled under the covers.
Andersen did not mind a sad ending. The Little Match Girl, The Fir Tree and The Steadfast Tin Soldier all end in loss, and children often want to talk about them afterwards. They suit an older reader, or a parent ready for the questions.
The Snow Queen is a long journey north to Lapland and the Snow Queen’s palace of ice, with the northern lights over it. Thumbelina, The Tinderbox and The Wild Swans are here as well. Reading them costs nothing, and each is retold in today’s English from an old translation now out of copyright.