scholarly journals Biographical Introduction, Interpretation and Summary of Contents

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Franziska Runge

The eighth volume in the series derives from an MA course in Scandinavian literature entitled ‘Dem Polarlicht auf der Spur. Wissenschaftshistorische und kulturwissen­schaftliche Erkundigungen’, given by Marie-Theres Federhofer at Humboldt University Berlin in 2019. Course participants wrote content summaries of selected texts as part of their exam, some of which were selected for the Aurorae Borealis Studia Classica series. The first student text edited and adapted for publication in the series is by Franziska Runge. She has written about one of the most cherished fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Sneedronningen (The Snow Queen), first published in 1844 and then reissued with illustrations by Thomas Vilhelm Pedersen in 1849. As demonstrated in Runge’s introduction, Andersen was well aware of the theories of electromagnetism promoted by the physicist Ørsted at precisely this time. Although a Romantic author, Andersen not only endows the aurora with a symbolic role in the narrative, he also alludes to contemporary scientific debates regarding the properties and origin of the phenomenon.

Author(s):  
Bartłomiej Bednarek

In his seemingly innocent fairy tale Thumbelina, Hans Christian Andersen makes two allusions to Aristophanes. One of them is quite explicit, as the author makes a toad produce the sound co-ax, co-ax, brek-ek-eke-kex, which is a quotation from the Frogs. The other allusion is less conspicuous. In one of the first sentences of Thumbelina, an object that a woman needs in order to beget a child is referred to as a barleycorn. As I argue, even though on the surface it can be explained in terms of magic typical for fairy tales, it can be also understood as an obscene allusion to the sexual act. This results from the ambiguity, well-known in Andersen’s time, of the word κριθή, which in Aristophanes’ comedies can mean either barleycorn or penis.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-126
Author(s):  
Sandra Magdalena Kocha

In the article, the author discusses the “path of love” and “the path of the cave,” using selected works by Hans Christian Andersen. The Danish fairy tale writer masterfully shows how heroes anchored in a sensual world go a long way to find a world that escapes rational cognition. Most of his charac­ters can easily be described as dynamic, because they change under the influ­ence of powerful experiences. Those who attach more importance to beauty closed in a form devoid of deeper content are condemned. Andersen’s fairy tales have two audiences, children and adults. The former will understand the anecdote and the latter will see the metaphor. The works of the fairy tale writer show autobiographical threads, including his attitude to the Christian religion, in which the triad of truth, good, and beauty turns out to be extremely important.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Corinna Hoffmann ◽  
Lea Meissner ◽  
Per Pippin Aspaas

The twelfth volume in the series consists of Norsk Høifjeld, a work of prose and poetry written by Theodor Caspari and illustrated by Theodor Kittelsen and several other artists. In the various editions of the work, the aurora borealis figures in Caspari's text as well as in some of Kittelsen's illustrations. The introduction derives from an MA course in Scandinavian literature entitled ‘Dem Polarlicht auf der Spur. Wissenschaftshistorische und kulturwissen­schaftliche Erkundigungen’, given by Marie-Theres Federhofer at Humboldt University Berlin in 2019. The introduction has been written by the student Corinna Hoffmann, the student Lea Meissner, and Per Pippin Aspaas from UiT's University Library. It consists of a brief biographical sketch on Theodor Caspari, an introduction to Theodor Kittelsen's illustrations, and an interpretation and summary of contents of three of the altogether five editions of Norsk Høifjeld that were issued in Theodor Caspari's lifetime.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 52-94
Author(s):  
Hans Christian Andersen

This is an extract of Eventyr (fairy tales), written by Hans Christian Andersen, illustrated by Thomas Vilhelm Pedersen, published in Copenhagen in December 1849 (official year of publication: 1850). The extract contains the fairy tale 'Sneedronningen' (the Snow Queen).


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Kocha

The article aims at analysing the motif of dream and its function in fairy tales and stories by Hans Christian Andersen. The Dannish author wrote during the Romantic era when the unconscious was of great interest to the creators of all kind. It was widely acknowledged then that dreams are a gateway to a hidden reality, and therefore, they constituted a great creative material. In Andersen’s work, the oneiric narrative abounds, for instance in Little Ida’s Flowers and The Little Match Girl, and dreams perform multitudinoulsy functions, from familiarizing children with death, to unveiling fears. The examples of dreams presented in the article indicate to the fact that Andersen’s oeuvre was addressed not only to children, but also adults.


2021 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 439-458
Author(s):  
A. V. Markov ◽  
O. V. Fedunina

The film Yorinda and Yoringel by Bodo Fürneisen, created on the basis of the recordings of a folktale by the Grimm brothers, shows an affinity for both a literary fairy tale and romance traditions, including a post-modern novel with a hero’s free choice of identity as the basis of the plot movement. To analyze the film, we relied on the methodology of psychoanalytic cinema science by Slavoj Žižek, supplementing it with the achievements of fundamental plotology from Freidenberg and Propp to the present day. At the same time, the nature of the film as a screen medium showed how the need for a more flexible plot development scheme, including compliance with changes in the character of the hero or his specific phenomenon on the screen, is not just one option for the development of actions, but a whole fan of the possibilities of such development. It is proved that the screen medium, which requires to monitor not only the correspondence of the hero’s adventures to expectations, but also the unexpected phenomena of the hero, demanded to modify the plot, which acquired not only the features of a psychological and adventurous novel, but also a computer game. At the same time, Fürneisen’s experience requires adjusting the psychoanalysis of cinema, supplementing the study of the effect of reality with the opposite effect of thought. The cinema allows you to demonstrate how not only the hero’s intentions change, but also the content of thoughts that are relatively autonomous from intentions that belong to the hero’s existence. At the same time, the existence is realized unexpectedly, so that the magical item is modified into a McGuffin, and the hero himself can repeatedly pass the fabulous test, while such a repetition will not be a way to correlate imagination and reality, as in a book narrative, but a way to once again appreciate the wonderful character of the hero. In the course of the study, it was possible to establish that the literary (Hans Christian Andersen), stage (Richard Wagner) and cinematic (Fürneisen) variations of the fairy tale plot do not simply subordinate it to some rules of the novel, in accordance with the prevailing tastes in society. Most of the changes are secondary to the change in the general concept of the hero, when the scenarios of existential choice are put in place of the test scenario and their uniqueness is defended. The structure of the on-screen memory and on-screen attention accelerates this design of the hero, although it does not completely determine it. Then the function of all the fabulous elements changes, moreover, the plot itself turns out to contain variability. In place of the usual separation between the world of sleep and the world of reality comes the existential test of both worlds. Thus, such processing of fairy tales is productive for the development of virtuality in art and for dialogue not only between different arts, but also art and various social practices related to information technology, from computer games to blogging.


Romantik ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Karin Sanders

Romanticism and surrealism shared a fascination with the fairy tale. Yet each was beholden to specific historical moments and particular aesthetic demands. What they wanted were not the same. This article considers  how the romantic fairy tale nevertheless functions as a ‘seed’ for surrealists. Contagions, commonalities, and contrasts between the two movements are briefly outlined. A selection of fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen is used to demonstrate how a host of visual reinterpretations including lithographs, photo-collages, and video art by twentieth-century surrealists like Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, and twenty-first-century avant-garde artists like Åsa Sjöström, have reinterpreted the latent possibilities of non-sense in the fairy tale: the marvelous, the absurd, and the dream-like. The article demonstrates that by evoking the dark-romantic sides of Andersen’s works these avant-garde reconceptualizations in visual media predominantly point to shock, violence, war, and ecological disasters.


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