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I had a book of HCA fairy tales, so I liked them, although perhaps didn't fully understand them.
It's curious that you mention The Little Match Girl, which is essentially a tragedy about a child dying of cold (and hunger and neglect), which is not exactly what most Americans hope for in a fairy tale.
When I was in middle school I would read The Little Match Girl over and over and cry every time I read it. I'm sure it was just an emotional release for all of the pent-up adolescent angst and served some therapeutic purpose.
I loved many of the stories in my Hans Christian Andersen hardback anthology, but The Little Match Girl and Thumbelina were my favorites.
Yes! Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales are wonderful, so imaginative and heartbreaking, they have charm and irony and sometimes wisdom. Who could forget such timeless classics as the Emperor's new Clothes, the Ugly Duckling or the Princess on the Pea. I have to re-read them again!
As a child however, I did not really enjoy these tales. They are not as straight-forward as the Grimm Brother's fairy tales, but darker and more complex. I did not understand them and found them sometimes chilling and unsettling. Like the story of the Snow Queen where Gerda found Kai almost frozen to death in the middle of a lake of splintered ice. Or the story of the Wild Swans, where the princesses has to weave eleven coats out of a poisonous nettle until her fingers are blistered, to turn her brothers back into human shape - but before she succeeds, she is almost burned as a witch. Spooky stuff for a child's imagination - well, at least back then when we didn't have all those movies yet...
Did these stories not sometimes scare you as a child, lillyflower?
Yes! Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales are wonderful, so imaginative and heartbreaking, they have charm and irony and sometimes wisdom. Who could forget such timeless classics as the Emperor's new Clothes, the Ugly Duckling or the Princess on the Pea. I have to re-read them again!
As a child however, I did not really enjoy these tales. They are not as straight-forward as the Grimm Brother's fairy tales, but darker and more complex. I did not understand them and found them sometimes chilling and unsettling. Like the story of the Snow Queen where Gerda found Kai almost frozen to death in the middle of a lake of splintered ice. Or the story of the Wild Swans, where the princesses has to weave eleven coats out of a poisonous nettle until her fingers are blistered, to turn her brothers back into human shape - but before she succeeds, she is almost burned as a witch. Spooky stuff for a child's imagination - well, at least back then when we didn't have all those movies yet...
Did these stories not sometimes scare you as a child, lillyflower?
sometimes. lol
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Hans Christian Anderson's fairy tales are wonderful, so imaginative and heartbreaking, they have charm and irony and sometimes wisdom. Who could forget such timeless classics as the Emperor's new Clothes, the Ugly Duckling or the Princess on the Pea. I have to re-read them again! 
