Excerpt from Fairy Tales From Hans Andersen Among such no name has higher honour than that of Hans Christian Andersen, some outline of whose life, a lovely story, happy and full of incident, as he speaks of it in his delightful, ingenuous autobiography, may fitly preface this selection from his masterpieces. He was born on April 2, 1805, at Odense (so-called as a traditional dwelling-place of Odin - some said that the god had been burgomaster there I), a town on the island of Punen, in Denmark. His parents were poor folk, and his education was so imperfect that up to his eighteenth year he could neither spell correctly nor write grammatically. His father, compelled by family misfortunes to take to shoemaking, was a man of dreamy type, withal a lover of books and of nature. He lived for me, says Andersen, making the little fellow the companion of his rambles, and feasting him on such reading as the slender shelves afforded, chiefly that of the plays of Holberg, a great writer of comedy, and the Arabian Nzg/its. When Hans was eleven years old. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
