Caleb Can't Read
Caleb Can't Read
Episode 88: Hans Christian Andersen
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TW: Child abuse;
Welcome back! To Caleb Can't Read! Join us today as we go over the story of a VERY sexually repressed man. A man so repressed that he probably shouldn't be writing children's stories. But just as cockchafers couldn't stop Hans, you can't stop us from discussing his most famous stories, such as "The Princess and the Pea", "Thumbelina", and yes, "The Little Mermaid"!
Oh, hang on. Uh there we go. Oh, is it recording? Yeah, here we go. Welcome to Caleb Can't Read, everybody. It's been uh like a uh over a year. Partly because we thought it was funny and then it kept going because uh we got busy. You thought it was funny? Yeah, I did. I was giving myself some break time.
SPEAKER_01Oh, the button button.
SPEAKER_06He only did it because he knows I don't like it. Yeah, that's true. Alright, everyone's got their drinks. You got yours? Yes. Alright, how is it, by the way? It's a seasonal flavor.
SPEAKER_01Is it good? Grip.
SPEAKER_06Alright, good response. Sorry, I've been forcing that Pakistani video down her throat for the last several weeks.
SPEAKER_05I'm not familiar with this.
SPEAKER_06Really?
SPEAKER_04Oh, really? Inshallah, he's going to become pilot grip.
SPEAKER_06You don't know it?
SPEAKER_04Uh-oh, and I grew up, I be pilot, and I will free out of Pakistan! The Pakistan pilot grip.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, no, it's great. We're going straight into racist accents, like just out of the fucking gate. Like, Nicole, you're fine. Jordan?
unknownHey.
SPEAKER_05Actually, I don't know if you want to.
SPEAKER_01Jordan is only the only one who can be racist because fully white.
SPEAKER_05That's my heritage. Your heritage is. Yes. Oh man. To be racist as shit. Yeah. I'm sorry, I just wasn't getting that you were like that kind of honky due to the lack of, like, I don't know, fucking Confederate flags in here and shit. Oh, the lack of.
SPEAKER_06You didn't check out my back tat? So, uh, oh, I guess anyway, I'm Jordan Rabel. Um, you are uh Caleb. A Caleb. That's good. I'm Caleb.
SPEAKER_05Nicole.
SPEAKER_01Nicole! There we are.
SPEAKER_05I'm done saying my full name on here as if that's gonna like erase all the what is it like 50 times.
SPEAKER_01You can never erase the past. It will always follow you.
SPEAKER_06Especially not if it's been on a real Nile kick, I guess. Alright, well. Um did uh your parents didn't uh don't um strike me as ones that are real like super familial into like love or nurturing. Did your parents ever uh um read you bedtime stories? Uh really think about it.
SPEAKER_05You know, it's it's been a while since anybody asked me about my childhood. I'm just drawing a blank on everything for some reason.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I feel like you draw a blank on your childhood a lot. You were probably molested. Nicole, did you uh did you get uh read Bedtime Stories?
SPEAKER_01Why, yes. There was uh like my favorite one was from Hans Christian Anderson. Oh it was about a some big guy and some little guy, and they both had the same name.
SPEAKER_06Oh wow, I can't believe that you actually know that one.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, big John or something, big John, little John, and there's like a deacon that is like cheating with someone's wife and well, let's not pretend like you don't know what the uh subject of today is.
SPEAKER_06Continue. No, no, no, no, interrupting women is also my history.
SPEAKER_01No, no, no, no. Yeah, anyways.
SPEAKER_06Well, let's get started, shall we? Hans Christian Anderson was born April 2nd, 1805 in the city of Al Dunse.
SPEAKER_01Is that really how you say it?
SPEAKER_06Yes, I had to write down the phoneticism.
SPEAKER_01All right.
SPEAKER_06Located on the island of Funin in Denmark.
SPEAKER_01Is that really how you say it?
SPEAKER_06I don't know. I didn't look that one up. Buster is also here. Shut the fuck up. Hey, don't talk to her like that. That's my heritage.
SPEAKER_05Maybe if you didn't talk to her like that, she wouldn't fucking act out. You think about that? No. No, you. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Are you going to edit that out?
SPEAKER_05Uh, probably not. I don't know. Now, Hans's mother and Marie. She made a molestation joke. I don't think people care about a dog bike in the middle of it. Like, hang on, no, make sure there isn't an abrasive sack.
SPEAKER_01Are you kidding me? We're going the pedophile in chief just started war in the Middle East to get a big thing. Probably gonna cut that one out. Oh, okay, so that's fair.
SPEAKER_05No, and it's not and it's not that it's bad to mention. It's just that like I had like it was just at a Thanksgiv a Friendsgiving several months ago when that kind of thing was going on, and someone like went off about that in the middle of the dinner. Like, went off about like current affairs in the middle of like us like getting up to some different shit and we had to explain. We're like, hey, you're not wrong. That's cool.
SPEAKER_01But right now we're trying to are supposed to be having a nice time together. It's not like you're having dinner with your family or you want to fight them.
SPEAKER_06I'm gonna start over. Please do. Oh, she uh like not from me, but Filipinos don't believe in that. It's fake.
SPEAKER_01No, I tried going to a counselor once, I did not like her.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, it's fair. You gotta shop around. You gotta try more than once. But that's also fair knowing how much of an uh introvert you are. I almost called you inbred. Uh I mean No, that's your heritage, buddy. It is.
SPEAKER_05That's my like. Oh no, I know. You think you lost all your melodin just not doing that?
SPEAKER_06That's not listen. There's only so many newts in a pond.
SPEAKER_01Everyone bought a banjo.
SPEAKER_05There's only so many newts in a pond. If you leave them there too long, they get scary as blue eyes.
SPEAKER_06So Hans Christian Anderson was born April 2nd, 1805, in the city of Audanza, located on the island of Funen in Denmark. Hans's mother, Anne Marie, was an illiterate washerwoman, and his father, also named Hans, was a cobbler with only an elementary school education.
SPEAKER_01Big Hans, little Hans.
SPEAKER_06Yes. When they married, Hans Sr. was twenty-three and Anne Marie was thirty-four. Now little Hans' grandparents were nothing special either, contrary to what they might tell you and what he was raised to believe. In fact, long ago, little Hans's grandmother had told his father a lie that seemed to stick. And Hans was raised to believe this lie as well. Specifically. Fajitas? Okay, that's a long backstory we're not gonna go into right now about why you were a moron until you were like 15.
SPEAKER_05Because I trusted my family. Sounds like me and this guy got something in common. Alright, what's his lie? All right, what we got?
SPEAKER_06Specifically, that the family was descended from royalty. According to the grandmother, when she was young, she was a noble lady from Germany who'd run away with an actor. And for sure she wished this to be the case, but it wasn't. The Andersons lived in a house with two other families, twelve people in total. And when you look at this place, it isn't a big house. This is like the size of an apartment. But this rumor of past generational wealth was so strongly believed by Hans Christian Andersen that later scholars believed it too. And they would go to great lengths to prove it. For a while, there was a rumor that Hans was actually the illegitimate son of Prince Christian Frederick of Denmark, who would later become the King of Norway in 1814, and then later the King of Denmark in 1840. There's absolutely no evidence to this, by the way, it's just that the king was known to fuck around and had like at least ten illegitimate heirs that we know of, so they figured like, hey, what if Hans Christian Andersen was one too? But he wasn't. We know this. In reality, little Hans's paternal grandfather was a pottery maker who became mentally ill, became a subject of ridicule in town, and died in a poorhouse. And only this little fact about his insanity had made its way to Hans.
SPEAKER_05What's a poorhouse?
SPEAKER_06It's a place that you go when you're poor. You're about to find out in America real fucking quick, actually.
SPEAKER_05No, no, I think that'd be helpful right now.
SPEAKER_06Actually, yeah. Oh my god, were they taking care of their citizens? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
SPEAKER_05Wait, I can go there if I just if I run out of my rent, I don't know.
SPEAKER_06I feel like they would make you pay your money to be in there, which is actually what we're all doing right now in apartment living. Oh no, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_05What now what they do is they send you to prison and then they force you to do labor for free.
SPEAKER_06Yes. But on the upside of things, I'm paying for that too now, so. Excellent. Excellent, everyone. So Hans not only believed that he was descended from royalty, but that madness ran in the family as well. And growing up, Hans didn't really care if he came from royalty, because well, he's poor now. But learning that his grandpappy went nuts gave him a tremendous amount of anxiety through his entire life that he could possibly end up just like him. Now it turns out that Hans also had an older sister, just six years his senior, named Karen Marie. However, she was born out of wedlock between Hans's mother and a pottery maker before she even knew his dad. Karen was given to her grandmother to take care of, but when Hans's parents got married, Karen was kicked out. Placed outside the home was the wording they used. But the grandmother wasn't even living with them. I I don't know. Well, I don't know why this fucking happened. So she had to have been five at best. This little girl.
SPEAKER_01Probably some like a religious fervor of like, oh, bastard child.
SPEAKER_06Could be. It could be. No, the most recent. We also learned from Lord Byron that is also a thing that can happen. Like sometimes a rose is just a rose, Nicole.
SPEAKER_01Sometimes people just weren't meant to have children, and they don't nobody wants to accept that even to this day.
SPEAKER_06I mean, they the parents knew that they weren't supposed to have children because they gave their fucking child, their toddler, to grandma, and grandma was like, I'm not supposed to have kids either, and then just fucking boots her.
SPEAKER_05Guys, maybe it's not that deep. Like, I mean, sometimes you meet a really annoying five year old. That is true. That is true. And this is a time when it's acceptable. I mean, shit. I mean, there's no birth control. How many more of these are you gonna have? You can spare a couple of things. Let's make Denmark great again.
SPEAKER_01Wasn't that like a thing that they wouldn't name children until they hit a certain age? Oh, yeah, because why bother if you're gonna be able to get out of here?
SPEAKER_06Now, the most we know about Karen after this is that she tried reaching out to her brother Hans on two different occasions. The first was when he was twenty two. Karen had become a stowaway on a boat headed for Copenhagen to find him, but he was away, so she just headed back. The second time was when Hans was 37, and she did find him this time, but besides knowing that, there's no indication of how the visit went. All we know is that he ended up giving her a dollar. Hans never mentioned Karen in his memoirs.
SPEAKER_01Denmark dollar into day money.
SPEAKER_05The way it's phrased, let's say it's just like a hundred bucks.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, maybe. Hans never mentioned Karen in his memoirs, and in his diaries, she is only mentioned as quote, my mother's daughter. So anyway, Hans Christian Anderson's father would introduce him to the world of literature through the Arabian Knights, where Hans would fall in love with the fairy tale genre. And it was around this time that Hans Sr. also took over a neighbor's military service, so he could get the payout the neighbor was supposed to get. Basically, this neighbor had been forced into military service, was supposed to get a thousand bucks as a reward, but the law stipulated that you could actually have someone else go in your stead. And that's what Hans Sr. did. I can't tell you how much a thousand bucks would be today, but for a family living with two other families and being poor as shit, just imagine that it would have changed their lives. However, there was a little mix-up in the country's ledgers about who owed what. So Han Sr. didn't end up with a thousand bucks. He ended up with a hundred, which wasn't life-changing at all. And now he was forced to be in the military on top of that.
SPEAKER_01Well government.
SPEAKER_06And now he was forced.
SPEAKER_05I supp she has a lot to say. Buster's a fucking anarchist. She is. Fuck yeah, dude. I raised her. She just cannot get her shit down. She can't close her fucking mouth just like any of the things. But goddamn, does she have the spirit and I love it?
SPEAKER_06So for the long measures of time that Hans Sr. was out of the house, little Hans and his mother would hit the theater. One of the plays he'd see was called Das Donald Weibecken about a mythical sea creature called a mermaid. Little Hans loves the play. I guess it's a German play.
SPEAKER_05I would have to guess. What do they call mermaids in German? Is it silly as shit? Donna Weibecken? I I don't know. Donna Weibecken? I'm I'm guessing. That is an aggressive fucking language. I knew a Donna, Donna Weibeckon.
SPEAKER_01I don't know. It's like what is it, Danish or something, where it's like, I'm clapping me, Papa.
SPEAKER_06Oh yeah, yeah, where it's like sex talking uh in Danish is just clapping my ice in cheeks.
SPEAKER_05I think it's that like Dutch not being real. Like no.
SPEAKER_06It's dude, it does not sound real. Every time I was uh like we went to Amsterdam years ago, and every time we were on the train, I was giggling. It just does not sound fucking real. Guys, I'm sorry, I'm not meaning to be disrespectful. This is silly shit. Yeah, no, if you literally just try to mock them, you're probably saying some words. They're like, about whose aunt? Sorry, I'm trying to hang on, honey, what what who's in trouble? Whoa, whoa, we have a word too, okay? Like, no. Like Schabenbuchendieging. Now, little Hans loved the place so much, he'd wear his mother's apron around the house like a cape and pretend to be a knight. Or he'd swim around on the floor as if he himself were a mermaid. But according to Hans, quote, oh, these scenes otherwise frightened my mother. She forbade me to do so because she often thought that I must be mad.
SPEAKER_01They do have a family history.
SPEAKER_06Exactly. How old is he at this point? About ten, eleven. Actually, when Hans was around eleven, his father finally came back home. However, he was already down with the sickness and died just three months later at the age of thirty-four. But Anne Marie would remarry just two years later, and true to being a stepdad, he told Hans that he would need to help with the family finances and get himself a job. Hans was sent to a school for the poor, where you were essentially just taught the basics like reading and writing, before being kicked out the door to become, say, an apprentice tailor, which is what Hans did. Now, it has been speculated that maybe it wasn't Hans's stepfather that told him to get out of the house. Maybe it was Hans himself that wanted to get out. Some say that the reason he wanted to leave so bad was because he had to watch his mom get fucked by her new husband. I know that sounds kind of this recorded. I know it sounds like I know this, man. Kinda out of left field, but honestly, with the house that small.
SPEAKER_01Maybe he wrote about it like he was for sure hearing it. Very, very traumatized, but like you fucking hear it.
SPEAKER_05You're not special. Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_06Like Dad, the raccoons are back. And as we'll later find out. Everybody okay? Get out! Hans was largely disinterested in sex, and some have theorized that it was because he had to see what his mom looked like as a pretzel. I'm just saying. Now, Hans Jesus Christ, maybe he was just ace, man. Who the fuck are we No, there must be a larger theory at play, please.
SPEAKER_05Don't ruin our heterosexual icons. Maybe this is my fantasy. Maybe he just doesn't like fucking. It doesn't have to be that he watched his mom getting fucking like clapped. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06No easy pre Hans would seek employment as an actor at the age of just 14. Not initially, though. He actually took a boat to Copenhagen to leave behind the life of a tailor to become a carpenter instead. But unfortunately, he didn't last a single day. So naturally, Hans took a look at his soft hands that couldn't lift a hammer and couldn't thread a needle and decided that he was meant for the stage. That sounds about right, honestly. This boy is not meant for blue-collar work. And somehow, he was accepted into the Royal Danish Theatre. I mean, maybe they just felt bad for a kid on his own, you know? Well, there, Hans would be charged twenty bucks for rent, where he was awarded his own unlit room on the first floor of the theater. Not caring too much for his accommodations, Hans sought out his mother's half-sister who happened to live in the area. Turns out she ran a brothel. And of course, anything sex related seemed to scare Hans, so he decided that he'd just as well stay in the shitty little room he had at the Royal Danish Theatre instead. He chose He chose the He chose the closet in the theater rather than the brothel with women. I hope this is foreshadowing for you. I mean, if I could Jesus. I know, right at 14. We all got our preferences, man, but I mean just like fucking game. No, Hans did find learning the tools of the thespian trade for about a year until unfortunately it would be hard to sleep, to be fair. Yeah. Yeah, that is fair. That is fair. Well, he did find learning the tools of the thespian trade for about a year until unfortunately his balls dropped. He was now unable to hit the same notes on stage that he'd been able to before, which led to talk of his expulsion from the theater. But someone Hans had befriended on stage heard of his situation and tried to lift his spirit, saying, You know, I I always kinda figured you for a poet. You can at least find some merit in your writing.
SPEAKER_05They don't just die. They don't just uh give him songs in a that lower range.
SPEAKER_06Oh, they they kind of will, you'll see. And well, I'm sure this guy was just trying to make Hans like didn't kill himself on the way back back to fucking Al Donsa. Hans took the advice very seriously and started to hone his writing craft. Luckily for him, it was this same year in 1820 that a collection called Fairy Tales and Stories by B.S. Ingaman was released.
SPEAKER_01B.S. Ingaman.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, it's not the best. I did know a kid named BJ once.
SPEAKER_01I think it's great.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I know. Oh, he was an asshole. Like he and you know what?
SPEAKER_01Well, he was named BJ.
SPEAKER_06I think it was because of that that he was an asshole, honestly. Like I he was just straight out the gate. Like the first time I met him, I was just like, Your name's BJ? He goes, Yeah, like what I did to your dad. You fucking what you know it was like, whoa, alright. I like ya. Like, come on now. I was just asking. Like just already fucking read. Yeah. Well, it would be one of two whole books on fairy tales that were available in Denmark at the time. And naturally, Hans Christian Nandersen found himself immediately inspired. Now, fortunately for Hans, one person he managed to make friends with at the Royal Danish Theater was the director, Jonas Collin. And Jonas liked Hans well enough as a person that he managed to keep him employed in the plays. On January 25th, 1821, Hans Christian Nandersen would have his first role, the only role he'd ever play, as a walker on. This role had no speaking parts. In fact, his whole purpose was to walk around the stage to make the background seem more lively. Yes, in some performances, he may even be sitting.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_06And he is getting paid for these appearances, by the way, but his name never appears on a playbill except once when he played a troll in a ballet. I mean soda extras. Yeah, yeah. Uh by 1822, at the age of 17, Hans Christian Andersen had written his first play, which was to show off his Danish writing prowess as well as his intellect in German. Because, you know, all the plays back then were in German. It was the high society thing to do. Anyway, the play was called The Wissenberg Robbers. I couldn't really tell you what the play was about because it never saw the stage. Jonas Yeah, more than likely about thieves. Yes. Good, good, thank you. Jonas colour than me, I'm not gonna lie. It's a six stage name. Uh Jonas called and declined the manuscript, saying the play was lacking, quote, even as far as skills in the mother tongue. So not only was Hans's German bad, but his Danish was bad too. However, the theatre did admit that Anderson had what it took as a writer as far as the plot was concerned. And as such, Anderson's first published work was a scene from the Wissenberg robbers, published by a magazine called Harpen on August 9th, 1822. Now even though he was told that his play was shit, getting published seemed to really brighten Anderson's spark. It wasn't long after this that Anderson would put out his first short story called The Ghost at Palinatok's Grave. The problem was, it wasn't Anderson's story. He had read a book called The Heart of the Midlothian by Sir Walter Scott and decided to plagiarize it as anywhere after that. You know what?
SPEAKER_01So he didn't have tweets to I mean look, you need money, then you can get away with it.
SPEAKER_05I mean, he's 17 and he's living in a closet in the theater. I would I would probably do the same thing, yeah. 17, you have the brain in your head that's telling you to not live in the you know what I'm getting at here.
SPEAKER_06This is called Angry Max. It's a movie I made about driving real fast. This is Angry Mike. And this was not some unknown novel, by the way. Was released in Denmark in 1820, just two years prior to his story. He is dumb. Like that's that's just poor. It was a bad idea. Simply put, Anderson's first book, not a success.
SPEAKER_05Everything he does is gonna be suspect to me because I feel like it's like, okay, this is your first attempt, you failed, you probably learned later. Right. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_06But you know, just establishing something.
SPEAKER_01Did he at least improve his German and Danish grammar?
SPEAKER_06Oh, I'm sure he did. I mean, he lived to an old age, but it we kind of talked about this with like I've known a lot of old people that are stupid as shit.
SPEAKER_05Oh, yeah, no, please don't get me wrong. And don't learn anything.
SPEAKER_01Like he's still got a lot of writing left to do. Yeah, yeah. So I'd imagine. We got about 15 more pages here.
SPEAKER_05Oh, he has 50 years' experience. Were they all fucking stupid? Yeah. Like, that's not mean anything.
SPEAKER_06I mean, I'll put it this way. So put it into some context, Percy Shelley's, I think, first published work or like second published work was like a bunch of poems with his sister, and one of them found out to be plagiarizing. He blamed his sister for it because she's a stupid woman. And so, like, that was just that, and everyone was just like, Oh yeah, no, she'll never make it. How's your career doing, Percy? But like, the thing is, is like Percy was plagiarizing like a very unknown story from like 10 years ago that somebody happened to find, and he was like, Fuck, this guy is basically taking something written by like a well-known author from two years prior, and was like, it's a story all on my own. Like, half of you haven't fucking read it.
SPEAKER_05The only thing I will possibly give him is like maybe he thought I could just get a check before anybody figured it out. That's that's you know, like fair, fair. You know, like maybe he's like, sick, Red's, I don't got the 20 bucks. Don't let the poor house. Like, maybe, like, fuck, like, I don't want to be in the brothel because there's a bottle of really fucking shitty men there and I can't sleep.
SPEAKER_06It's funny though, because like I back then, I'm sure they're just like, Can you pay us back the 20 bucks you got from us? No, I spent it already. All right, well, these two guys are gonna kick your ass illegally. Yeah, like I don't know.
SPEAKER_05Anyway, go on. We'll we'll we'll pass judgment later.
SPEAKER_06And and when the publishers couldn't sell the copies of his book, they sold the whole stack to a booksteller who tore out the title page and renamed it to something else to try and trick people into buying it.
SPEAKER_02Nice.
SPEAKER_06And when that didn't work, he just burned the whole fucking pile. Today there are so few copies that exist that I could only find traces of their existence, because they are often bought by rare booksellers who hold on to them very fucking tightly. Well, even though the book was just a copy, Jonas Collin could see that Hans was quickly becoming proficient with literature, but Jonas thought he had what it took to really be something. So sticking his reputation with the royals on the line, Jonas Collin asked King Frederick VI, the same gu guy that uh some people assume to be Hans Christian Andersen's real father to fund Anderson's schooling with a focus on literature. Turns out Anderson was not a good student. I I mean that he was kind of uh that was kind of a stupid risk for Jonas Collin to take in the first place, honestly. But I won't place the entire blame on Anderson alone. You see, with Hans going outside of Copenhagen to study literature, he would be roomed with the headmaster of his new school. The headmaster, it turns out, thought beating Hans would, quote, improve his character.
SPEAKER_01Man, we're getting a little That's really Dickensian.
SPEAKER_05It is, yeah.
SPEAKER_01The fuck.
SPEAKER_05I was gonna say Abstinian.
SPEAKER_00Um I mean, he hasn't been ditted yet, as far as we know.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, but no, beat him often he did. Uh strangely, the headmaster also thought writing was kind of dumb and openly discouraged Anderson from doing so.
SPEAKER_05So I'm not gonna teach him how to write and I'm gonna beat the fuck out of him.
SPEAKER_06Which, you know, maybe Colin should have checked into this guy's resume a bit before rooming a writer with him.
SPEAKER_05Oh yeah, uh he sleeps with me. Why? Uh he just sleeps with me, don't worry about it. It's for warmth. Okay, that's it's cold. Dude, I I can't feel bad for this little dude now.
SPEAKER_06Like, well, not only that, but because Anderson had never technically graduated from elementary school, this fucking 17-year-old kid was sat in the back of the class with a bunch of 11 and 12-year-olds. Like Billy fucking Madison.
SPEAKER_05But with no confidence and a lot of anxiety, I'm assuming. Yeah, he didn't look near as good as Adam Samuel.
SPEAKER_06He's not fucking just like taking kids out with dodgeballs. Like, this is this is depressing. Like, this is I want to say that he actually graduated with this same class too. So when they all graduated, he was like the oldest kid there at like 22.
SPEAKER_05Going through the recorded graduation ceremony for 11-year-olds as a 22-year-old man.
SPEAKER_06They're doing all the little fake acceptance things, like Mother, I'm sending you four stickers that the teacher has graciously placed upon me.
SPEAKER_05Oh my god. You know, like in like kids, like kids are mean. They're mean in ways they don't even understand they're being mean.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Like, cause you you know they were just ripping into his ass, which is honest questions. Oh, Jesus. Well, luckily the headmaster wasn't.
SPEAKER_06Uh well, either way, Hans Christian Anderson would go on to say that his school years were the worst years of his life. But one good thing he could say about it was that the school specialized in writing romanticism, specifically modeled after the author B. S. Ingaman, the guy who wrote that book of fairy tales that inspired Anderson. Well, it turns out the person's B.S.
SPEAKER_01method.
SPEAKER_06It turns out the person teaching B.S. Ingaman's work was none other than B.S. Ingaman himself. So, of course, yeah, Anderson stays. So he got to learn from the master himself about romantic language and all this other thing.
SPEAKER_01With all the kids.
SPEAKER_05Man, it would be I would turn into such a horrible person if my job was to teach my own work.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. In a way, you kind of do, don't you? No.
SPEAKER_01A bad man?
SPEAKER_06I haven't researched him yet.
SPEAKER_01Well, he's still alive, isn't he? No, no, no, no. Ray Barbery's dead. Yeah. Oh shit.
SPEAKER_06Dead as dreams, Nicole. But he was, he was a uh he was a teacher too. Yeah. Well, in 1825, Anderson's senior class is taken to watch the execution of three murders. Senior class? So 12-year-olds and 22-year-olds? No, no, no, no. So he was with this okay, so 12, so they were like 17, 16 years old, and then this one 22-year-old guy. Oh, okay. No, he was 22 when they were like 11. No, no, he was 17 when they were 11. But then when he graduated at 22, that means that five years later, they were they were around 16, 17 years old.
SPEAKER_05So we had to go through it like really fast.
SPEAKER_06He wasn't No, he didn't get to go through it fast like Billy Madison. He had to go year by year with these fucking children. Can you imagine, dude? You're like crushing on one of the girls, too, and you're like, this is weird. Oh no.
SPEAKER_05No, that is getting weird. Why did you take it there? What the fuck is wrong with you?
SPEAKER_06Oh, you're right. He's asexual. So anyway, so so they would they're taken to watch the execution of three murders. And this apparently affected Anderson greatly. As he's no shit. What the fuck? I don't know why he was such a pussy about it. As he's Hey, watch the life leave someone's body. He soon writes to his old benefactor Jonas Collin, quote, Into the stream of time crashes everything mediocre. Only the extraordinarily great can continue to exist. I'm not entirely sure what he means by that. It sounds like a crash out if I ever heard one.
SPEAKER_01Was it a hanging?
SPEAKER_05I couldn't find anything. Let's just be glad that man was learning how to write. So we had some kind of an outlet. If there's the history of like mental illness there in the family and he didn't have a way of expression there, let's not think about what would have happened after.
SPEAKER_06This guy could have really been the Daniel Johnson of his day, you know? Like give him a little fucking electric piano and a recorder. He would have been great. Yeah, that's where I was going with that.
SPEAKER_01But um I was thinking of the plane crash.
SPEAKER_05What?
SPEAKER_01Oh Daniel Johnson. Okay, yeah, that was a that was a dad was really excited for him to be recognized or get an award or something.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, Daniel Johnson was going to like a um was going to like a uh festival, like a music festival when he was first starting out, and his dad was a pilot. So his dad rented a little Cessna or whatever it was, and Daniel Johnson had a freak out in the middle of the flight and believed that he was Casper the Ghost, so he forced the plane to crash land. Everyone survived fine.
SPEAKER_01His dad was just excited for him, you know?
SPEAKER_05And then I didn't expect you to bring out that deep cut of music history. God damn it, that's a funny tragedy. I'm I'm fucking I'm gonna live sorry!
SPEAKER_01Well, it's you're a I mean I know I know I know you know, well, yeah.
SPEAKER_05If you're a fucking pilot and then you fucking have a fucking emergency crash landing and shit, and then it's like what happened is like my son thinks he's cast of a ghost. Because he's a very serious stop laughing, he's a very serious mental illness. No, it's not fun.
SPEAKER_06No, it was just I don't know. I mean, if anybody hasn't seen The Devil and Daniel Johnson, great documentary.
SPEAKER_03It's not funny! I thought I was going to die.
SPEAKER_06But uh what I didn't know going into that movie was that they had actually recorded, like with the video camera, his freak out at Metallica, which I'd only heard about. What? Yeah, he Metallica was so but uh no, was it Metallica? It doesn't matter. I'm gonna say Metallica. No, no, no, it was the butthole surfers of thing. So no, it was the butthole surfers really wanted him on their label. I feel like that tracks. And they were just like, dude, what's wrong in like a parking lot? And he was like, No, you're all agents of Satan, you know, and was just like freaking out at them. They had it recorded, it was great.
SPEAKER_05Anyway. Man, do you see how much the energy rises in the room when we're on a topic that we gave a fuck about? That fucking wild man.
SPEAKER_01I want you to know I am genuinely interested in the side. I know you are, that's why you're here.
SPEAKER_06No, it's from this point that Anderson is constantly sending letters to Colin, mostly dealing with his fear that the headmaster of the school, Simon Meesling, was going to kick him out.
SPEAKER_01That's his only fear that the head of this is a headmaster is going to expose this is a long quote.
SPEAKER_06I'm gonna read it quick, but this is how his fucking letters go. Quote Since you wrote to Meesling, he hasn't been so hard on me as before, but his manners against me is getting more cold every day. Helsingor is an expensive place to live, and everything is therefore more and more restricted. Every day at noon, I'm at the school reading until the afternoon where education starts, and thereby save warming up my stove in my room. Every evening I get five pieces of wood. My room is pretty tall and my stove is so big that the three pieces is half burned when I, a little after five o'clock, return to my room with the last two pieces. I can't stand the cold until nine o'clock, and I can't get more wood. The girls sometimes slip in some wood to me in my room, but this can't happen every night, so the other night I had to go to bed a little past nine o'clock. I couldn't stand this. I if I saw a friendly face every once in a while, but nothing is more rare. Last Sunday my stove was warmed up at six o'clock in the morning, but at nine o'clock it was almost burned out. I therefore asked the girl to ask him for a few pieces of firewood, because I was going to stay at my room all morning. I got about three pieces, but as we sat at the dinner table, the whole family, the new teacher and hebraic and his brother, and I talk about rooming and things like that, Meesling turned to me and said that I have asked for wood today and that I shouldn't expect to get wood next time I asked for it, since the payment I gave him was not enough. But that you in town paid for this, that and the other for dinner, but I only paid $200 for everything, and he was losing money in having me. You probably understand how painful this was for me, dear benefactor, and that his thinking of me is very bad since he sees me as a burden. I truly live as limited as possible. I look very modest, and I am very tolerant despite the circumstances.
SPEAKER_05So was there no punctuation, or did you just make it sound like that?
SPEAKER_06There's punctuation, but it's all over the place in places that don't make fucking sense. Kind of McCarthy'd it. I think he like this dude is neurotic.
unknownThat's fine.
SPEAKER_06By April of 18th. Like that sounds.
SPEAKER_05Well, so what? It just sounds like a drunk text I'm getting from a situation at fucking like four in the morning that I haven't heard from for a month.
SPEAKER_06Like So those people slipping you wood? What does that mean?
SPEAKER_03Like, what the f- What is the chase scar!
SPEAKER_06By April of 1827, Jonas Collin relented and took Hans Christian Anderson out of the school. It wasn't seeming great for anyone who bothered to help Hans. He was kind of insufferable and a huge fucking wimp. And in an effort to kind of keep him out of the way, the next two years went spent on Colin's time while just hoping that Anderson might publish something worthwhile. Well, during this time, Anderson had actually published well over a hundred poems, but nothing was gaining him any notoriety. Luckily for him, it would finally happen in 1829. Hans Christian Anderson would publish a walking tour from Holman Canal to the eastern point of a Meyer in the years eighteen twenty-eight and eighteen twenty-nine.
SPEAKER_01How old is he at this point? Old enough to know better.
SPEAKER_05He's about twenty-four. Sure. I mean, how much actual you know opportunity for growth has this individual had though? He has had the king be like, yeah, I'll give him free tuition. Yeah, free tuition to go and live in a strange room with a nice and would not let anyone.
SPEAKER_00What's wrong?
SPEAKER_06You were paid for in your s abusive stay with a weird guy, like I thought the king paid y for you, for me. Oh wait, you're s oh okay. No, yes, this already sounds super exciting, but the book was essentially about Anderson's nightly walks down the street where he would encounter mythical beings such as St. Peter and Death himself. And the people fucking loved it. This would mark the first success in Anderson's career, so much so that when a publisher told him he'd pay 70 bucks for the rights to his next book and Anderson turned him down, the publisher ended up paying him a hundred bucks just to have the rights to print the second edition. And with the success of a walking tour, newspapers everywhere started publishing Anderson's shit, both new and old. Among the most popular was a poem called The Dying Child, something which Anderson had written while he was undergoing his worst abuses at school. Let me repose upon thy bosom sick. But promise me that thou wilt leaf off weeping, because thy tears shall uh fall hot upon my cheek. Here it is cold, the tempest raveth madly, but in my dreams all is so wondrous bright. I see the angel children smiling gladly, when from my weary eyes I shut out light. Mother, one stands beside me now, and listen, dost thou not hear the music's sweet accord? See how his white wings beautifully glisten? Surely those wings were given him by the Lord. Green, gold, and red are floating all around me. They are the flowers the angel scattereth. Should I have also wings while life has bound me? Or mother, are they given alone in death? Why dost thou clasp me as if I were going? Why dost thou press thy cheek so unto mine? Thy cheek is hot, and thy and yet thy tears are flowing. I will, dear mother, it will be always thine. Do not sigh thus, it merrith my reposing. But if thou weep, then I must weep with thee. Ah, I am tired, my weary eyes are closing. Look, mother, look, the angel kisseth me. I prefer Danzig's Mo That was stupid. One stands beside me now. With all this success, Anderson gets the funds to start travelling the rest of Europe. And honestly, Hans Christian Andersen starts to get a little cocky. He was insufferable before when he was being kind of a pussy, but now he's insufferable because he thinks he's hot shit. Quote A lady who, of her own accord, expresses her love for me would, in my view, certainly be less worthy. Neither do I care much for the illustrious ladies, however much they might be smitten with me.
SPEAKER_01That schoolteacher didn't beat him hard enough, though.
SPEAKER_06I also just want to point out that in my research, I came across a town in Denmark that Anderson visited called Middle Fart. Fart apparently means speed in Danish. Fart boy, Fart.
SPEAKER_01So speed racer would be fart racer.
SPEAKER_05Dude, okay, no, that's pretty good, but I bet you it's fucking funnier if we know what the word for racer is in Danish, honestly. Like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_06That's only halfway there. Like, I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_01My phone is charging, otherwise I'd look it up.
SPEAKER_06So, anyway, it was during his journey that Anderson would fall in love with a lovely lady named Riborg. However, Shush, these are my people. However, she was she was already engaged. And this sweeps Anderson into a great depression where he writes, quote, unsurpassable obstacles separate us forever. Oh, God has tried me harshly, almost too harshly. She is the most innocent, delightful creature I know, but engaged. The bride of another. Should all this be necessary to become a great writer? Oh, and I would almost rather not have been at all.
SPEAKER_05Man, if only there were only like all the other women in the world.
SPEAKER_06If only there was like at least half a dozen more. Just six more, and I'm sure you'd find the right one. And I'm gonna tell you crazy about like the mile radius we're in right now. Singles in my area?
SPEAKER_01I mean, don't you know there's a male loneliness epidemic?
SPEAKER_06Oh, yeah, it's because they're all weird and listen to Andrew Tate. So then he fell in love with a friend's sister named Henrietta. But when he found out that she too was engaged, Anderson wrote, quote, Almighty God, you are all I have. My fate is in your hands. I must submit myself to you. Grant me a livelihood, send me a bride. My blood craves love, as does my heart. Like he did just like it's just wild to be like, Oh my god, I'm so in love with you. I'm married. This is the second drink we're having. Fuck! You know, like just calm down, dude. You know.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, this is not this is thirst on levels that even back then was acceptable. Yeah, it's not a good thing.
SPEAKER_06Like it's this is not this seems a bit aggressive. But it's after this incident that Anderson starts writing not about either Henrietta or Reborg, but Reborg's brother. Oh quote, the one I feel closer to than anyone, it is as though he has bewitched me. I do not know why I care so much for him. It was after this that Anderson writes to a friend of his. Edward Collin, the son of his benefactor, Jonas Collin, was a few years younger than Anderson and a very active pen pal. But in a letter dated May 19th, 1831, Hans Christian Anderson asked Edward Collin if they could stop using the formal day when writing each other and instead use the formal do, you know, the difference between formality and friends. Nine days later, Edward would send his reply asking that they still use the formal day instead. Whoops. Anderson took this rejection extremely hard, calling it the informality incident and being plagued by its shame for many years to come. Still gonna keep calling me dude instead of.
SPEAKER_01I would be the same way if I like tried being friendlier with someone and they said, actually, no, we're not we don't know each other that well, and then it would just plague me for the rest of my life, and like That's true.
SPEAKER_06I see why you wanted to sit in on Hans Christian Anderson now.
SPEAKER_01It's so relatable.
SPEAKER_06Still, didn't really stop Anderson from letting Edward know how he really felt. Quote, I languish for you as for a pretty Calibrian wench. My sentiments for you are those of a woman. This is why we are more than like, no.
SPEAKER_05This is why I am stating in writing that you are not a friend.
SPEAKER_06Okay, like just so you know, bro. My sentiments for you are those of a woman. I do like that. I I wish I could say that to you. Oh, Nicole, I love you as if you were a woman.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_06But of course, Anderson did st uh did still understand that being gay anywhere in the 1830s wasn't exactly the best way to have a long life. So he follows that up by begging Edward, quote, the feminine feminimity take a deep breath and go after it. The femininity of my nature and our friendship must remain a mystery. Then stop bothering your fucking friend. Like, hey, can you keep this on DL? I just won't s I want to smell it. You know, like just okay, then leave him alone, dude.
SPEAKER_01Like, what if his friend was just real just that attractive?
SPEAKER_06He says, he says, I I I I get it. Okay. Look at Caleb over here. Yeah, for real. To just like follow up that writing with like, okay, so we can't use the formal document. I understand. I want to fuck you like a woman. You know, just like that's please don't tell anyone. I would start telling people like that's weird.
SPEAKER_05Like, man, okay, that's oh man. That would have actually come after the stop. The question should have come after the can we be more informal and can I just call you a friend? Right, right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06But to follow it up with that, like, I just want to lay all my cards on the table. No, don't. I thought it was very clear. No, no, no, we're not playing the game. Bro. And there are, of course, those pesky old critics who say Hans Christian Anderson was nothing but a pussy loving heterosexual. Which is funny, considering the large amount of evidence we have to the contrary. Just like Walt Whitman, just like Emily Dickinson, just like Willa Cather, now Hans did love women, yes, but he also loved men. He was largely disinterested in the act of sex altogether, but he was really into kissing and cuddling. Now when he was a student, Hans Christian Anderson would frequent a different friend's house once a week. For instance, uh on Mondays he visited a man named Wolf. On Tuesdays it was at Jonas Collins' place, etc.
SPEAKER_01Collect and collect and then select.
SPEAKER_06Okay, yes. Good advice, you whore. And back then it was just a family motto.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it seems like on my dad's side, weirdly enough.
SPEAKER_06And back then, it was just because everyone knew that Hans was a poor little dork that couldn't really do anything for himself. But as his notoriety grew, it actually became an honor to have him over every week. The only person that didn't really give two shits about his newfound fame was his mother. Hans would send his mother Anne Marie food often, knowing she was still a poor washerwoman, but she'd always write back like, How about you send me the money you spent on the food instead? And Hans just wouldn't budge on this subject, which drove both he and his mother fucking crazy. I agree with Hans on that one, honestly. Like, no, no, this way you can save your money for green. The money? I don't know.
SPEAKER_05There might be. I don't know. Whatever the equivalent was at the time.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I'm nodding them. Also, uh well, actually I fucking maybe, dude. She's poor. Of course she's gonna have a vice, whatever it might be.
SPEAKER_01She needs some Siggies.
SPEAKER_05You're being like, send me some fucking money. I would have used it better to get more food that would have gone me a longer ways than this.
SPEAKER_01At the same time, that's true. What if he's like sending her fruitcakes and shit where it's like this is not nutritious enough? This is junk food. Why are you sending me takis when I need vitamins?
SPEAKER_06It's just fucking family-sized bags of hot cheats. Son, could you please send me those Chinese cigarettes I see on Instagram all the time?
SPEAKER_05But at the same time, like I see why he's gonna be a good one. I totally get it.
SPEAKER_06I don't think they're gonna talk it out though. No, no, no. But due to the success Hans has gotten from his book, A Walking Tour, it allows him to throw his first successful play, The Raven, with the Queen of Denmark in attendance for her birthday. Anderson uses this opportunity to gain an audience with the king after the show, where Anderson presents him with a collection of his new poems. He then immediately puts the king in an awkward situation by being like, Hey, do you think you can fund a soul searching journey for me? So after his first trip around the continent, Anderson gets the immediate funds for a second. It was around this time that yet another girl that Anderson is interested in gets engaged. And he awkwardly writes about how the tears in his diary are making the pages stick. 100% because of my tears. He says, quote, Oh my god. Quote, there are pages in the diary of the heart which are so thoroughly stuck together that only our only our lord can open the mouth.
SPEAKER_00Oh my god, he's Tina Belcher. You have an erotic friend fiction.
SPEAKER_05Bro, tears don't be drawing like that. Like that's not that's not I mean I don't want to get into hell, no. But like that's I wouldn't know.
SPEAKER_06No, I think unfortunately for Hans, a worse tragedy than Sticky Hands was about to befallen. While he was in Rome on October 7th, 1833, his mother Anne Marie passes away at the age of 64. No more for he would not find out until two months later. But Anderson was not deterred by bad news. During his tour of Europe, he actively promotes sections of his newest play called Agnet and the Merman. That is The Merman? The Merman! Dude! Whoa, dude.
SPEAKER_05Get a fucking couple writing jobs and you're not squirming around on the floor in a mermaid anymore.
SPEAKER_06You're a f it's a fucking merman now. That's not my mother's apron, that's my apron. That is, until he receives a letter from Edward Collin telling him the promotions they've been reading and performing back home have not been going so well. Quote, Edward informed me that my honor was now tainted. Agneta was disastrously misshapen, a mediocre mismash. This shook my soul deeply. I was so overwhelmed that all my emotions were in turmoil. My belief in God and man. A dude he took a criticism so hard he started questioning God. But 1835 is the year that would skyrocket Hans Christian Anderson to start him at just 30 years old. His first major success that year was a novel in the same style as A Walking Tour. Fair, fair. It was called The Improvisator. It was a fictional autobiography where we follow our hero Antonio on his life's journeys through poverty and lost loves. Everything that Hans Christian Anderson was going through, except it's based in Italy instead of Denmark, so it's totally not real, guys.
SPEAKER_05At least he said it's totally not real instead of just bullshitting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And making a bunch of stuff about his life. Like we've gone through I think I feel like we've gone over writers that have done something similar. Oh yeah, but not bad.
SPEAKER_02Oh, the idea of it.
SPEAKER_05A bit, a bit, yeah.
SPEAKER_06You know, like interestingly though, the impavisator ends with the main character Antonio happily married, something that Anderson quite clearly wished for himself. But as critically acclaimed as this novel was, nothing would be more inspirational and captivating for future generations than the other book Anderson would publish that year called Fairy Tales Told for Children.
SPEAKER_00Yay!
SPEAKER_06Among these stories Among these stories were fables that would live on in the collective consciousness forever. The Princess and the P, Thumbelina, The Emperor's New Clothes, and The Little Mermaid. Now, granted, practically everyone knows these stories, or a piece of them at least. But the original tales that Anderson. What? What?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it does. Hell yeah, brother.
SPEAKER_06Pony Ponyo. Oh fuck, yeah, no, you're right.
SPEAKER_00Silly little thing.
SPEAKER_06You know who animated the waves himself, brother?
SPEAKER_03All that fucking water, all that beauty, he made sure. Mikazaki's a goddamn genius. It's fucking wonderful.
SPEAKER_06Stepped up, took his hands in the dirt, animated him himself. We're just talking about uh tattooing a hidden pano on Caleb's body. My favorite movies. It's beautiful. I was really sad in my last trip. I didn't look especially hard, but I really wanted to like magically find you like a theater poster of Panio to like frame and bring back more plates. All I found were Panyo trading cards, and you were like, yeah.
SPEAKER_05It was my day for a while, dude. Like just get home after a bunch of grueling blue-collar labor, crack a beer, open up a pack of barbreds, and then pano pano by the scene.
unknownLike, yeah.
SPEAKER_06That was Pano does love ham. Anyway, little mermaid. So I'm just gonna go over a short summary for each of these stories. And while usually this would be a good time to go over Anderson's writing style, it really isn't needed because he writes his fairy tales in the same way that everyone does. It's simple and direct. Because you know, it's for a fucking child. So anyway, what is Panyo a child's movie?
unknownNo.
SPEAKER_05Ponyo is for everyone. It's for all ages, can't be a good one. Actually, no. So, like, okay, how much how much is the Little Mermaid matchup with I will get into that one? Okay, cool.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_06So The Princess and the P is about a girl arriving to castle gates asking for entry. She says she's a princess that's become lost. Well, the queen doesn't believe her, so she secretly puts her to a little test. She grants the princess entry and says, You can spend the night in our guest bedroom. Twenty mattresses should be good for a princess, right? I mean, you know how us royals are. We we only have the softest of accommodations. However, what the princess doesn't know is that the queen has devilishly placed a single uncooked pee. No, that this is it. Uh she's put a single uncooked pea between the mattresses. So the next morning, the queen asks her guest, so how does she sleep? Yeah, it's a small tale. It's a paragraph.
SPEAKER_01It's almost done.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, thank you, Nicole. And to her surprise, the princess is like, ow, my fucking back! And then the queen now believes the girl is a princess, so as only royalty could be so soft as to notice something so small as a pea beneath 20 mattresses. Look at royalty and tell me the motherfuckers don't have swear sets. Fuck off. The end. Okay, yeah. Well, that's because of the inbreeding.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
SPEAKER_06Thumbelina is about a woman who yearns for a child. So a witch gives her some barley and tells her that it'll grow into one. Lo and behold, come harvest, a child is found growing out of the stock through though no bigger than the woman's thumb, hence Thumbelina. Thumbelina sleeps beside her mother each night on the windowsill while inside of a walnut shell, and one night is stolen away by a frog that wants to marry her off to her son. Thumbelina escapes, but ends up lost in the wilderness, where she makes friends with forest animals such as a mouse, a butterfly, and a doodle bug, which I didn't know are also apparently called cock chafers.
SPEAKER_01God in j just in general, or is this like a Danish thing?
SPEAKER_05No. I don't know if I don't know. I just need to give me another give me another. I don't know, dude. Like I don't know if that's actually sillier. A cock chaser than being like, dude, what's wrong? What why'd you have to go to the clinic? Doodle bugs. Like that's kind of like that's clip of this girl and just got fucking doodle bugs.
SPEAKER_06Fucking doodle bugs, man. Like okay, I'll say this. I we I cock chasers is aggressive and serious. Doodle bugs is funny. Not this great uncle. Um give me doodle bugs. No, no, his his legal name was Dude. Uh his name was Dude Birmingham, I think.
SPEAKER_05You just gave his D-U-D-E. Yeah. Damn.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. And so everyone called him Doodle Bug. And like, you know.
SPEAKER_01Now, had I known this while he was still alive You'd call him Uncle Hey Cockchaefer, how's it going? That's not my name.
SPEAKER_05That's right, my name's Dude.
SPEAKER_06That's also funny.
SPEAKER_03That's funny.
SPEAKER_06Um anyway. So anyway, uh Thumbelina befriends a bird who takes her to marry a fairy prince, and they live happy happily ever after the end. Uh I am curious, though, marrying a frog for Thumbelina. I wonder how big a frog stick actually is. Relative to a thumb. I guess, yeah. No, there's no way. Well, because sometimes they got those things.
SPEAKER_01I mean, if you want to get really technical about it, there's no way they'd be able to like introduce children. Like, you need to be somewhat compatible. I was more worried about her entire family.
SPEAKER_05It's probably more of a status thing, man. I wouldn't I guess, yeah.
SPEAKER_01In the movie, it was because they liked her singing voice.
SPEAKER_05Oh, yeah. For sure, for sure. Yeah, me too. Uh you're the one getting all hentai with it.
SPEAKER_00Don't act like we're fucking making you uncomfortable. Don't act like you're cooler than me.
SPEAKER_06Like oh no, no, please. I'm I'm a I'm a mana culture, I understand. Now, as far as the Emperor's New Clothes went, I figured that this is what they based the 2000 Disney film The Emperor's New Groove on, but they're totally different. No llamas in the story whatsoever. Instead, it's about an emperor who's known to spend lavishly on new clothes at any given moment. So much so that he's known far and wide across the kingdom for his extensive wardrobe. Well, one day, two guys show up saying that they're famous tailors from a far-off land, and they'd like to offer the emperor a chance for them to uh make him a suit made from the rarest materials. For a price, of course. Well, the emperor naturally hires these men and over the coming weeks sees them working diligently on his machines, but with no threads connected. So he's like, What is this shit? And the two guys are like, Oh, it's a it's a rare thread that's only invisible, the dipshits. You can see it though, can't you? And he's like, Oh, right, carry on. And even the emperor's servants don't want to say anything because they don't want the emperor to think they're dipshits too. So when the time comes and the two tailors have made off with their money, the emperor holds a whole procession through town wearing his new threads. But as soon as he steps outside, some kid yells, Look, the Emperor's naked! And everyone joins in on the ridicule. But the Emperor marches through town proudly, believing this just makes him the smartest guy in town.
SPEAKER_05Anybody who isn't an idiot shouldn't be seeing my penis right now.
SPEAKER_01Well, I mean, he didn't wear underwear.
SPEAKER_06I mean, more than likely had undergarments or some shit. I just like to think that he was flashing everywhere.
SPEAKER_05Probably not. I think he was just cock out. I think he soft cocked through that time. And that's rough, dude.
SPEAKER_01Like that's just really wanted to feel confidence special fabric.
SPEAKER_05You know, with full confidence. Like, if I was gonna walk through a crowd of people naked, I'd give it a couple smacks. Well, if you were fully clothed though, you know. But if I thought I was fully clothed because I was a dumbass, like I'd be like, no, I'm fine, I'm good.
SPEAKER_06Like I will say, this tale had apparently not been made up by Hans Christian Andersen. It was a little known tale in Spain, but Anderson is the guy who widely popularized it.
SPEAKER_02Okay.
SPEAKER_06Which is going to be the case for a lot of these stories. Some of them dabbling in the little plagiarism. Well, uh no, these they're not well known stories, but he's retelling. Oh, wait, so he just got better at plagiarism. He's doing covers. Yeah, basically. He's doing covers. Oh, he didn't learn from his lesson. He got better at his bad behavior. That's what happened. Caleb, these are the first time they're being translated into Danish, you see. So this is Oh, motherfucker. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's not no, no, no.
SPEAKER_01That's that's He's making fanfiction. Spanish fanfiction. Sure, sure, sure. Spanish Empire fanfiction. No, it's plagiarism.
SPEAKER_06I have Spanish Empire fanfiction. Don't have to.
SPEAKER_01That's true. If you make money, then it's plagiarism.
SPEAKER_06Well, finally, there's the little mermaid. Now, for the most part, this tale is on cue with the Disney film, so we can skip most of it. No. How yes, however, there are some weird differences in how it ends.
SPEAKER_01Thank you.
SPEAKER_06Okay, so long story short, the mermaid still falls in love with the prince, right?
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_06Well, the mermaid learns that when humans die, they go to heaven, but mermaids just turn into sea foam. So basically, the mermaid tries to come up with a plan where she can go to shore and become human, so she cuts a deal with the sea witch that says in exchange for her voice, she'll give her human legs. The thing is, the pain of losing her tail will never leave her, and every time she takes a step with her new human feet, it'll feel like she's stepping on knives. No. What the fuck?
SPEAKER_04Like Jesus Christ, but I want to go to heaven.
SPEAKER_06No, no deal. What more do you want from me to make this like what the shit? Like But the mermaid goes through with it anyway, and soon finds the prince along the beach. The mermaid's mute, of course, so she basically just becomes someone for the prince to see. Some about this woman. Oh my god. It's like she's stepping on knives. She's so she's so cute and she doesn't talk. She's the perfect woman. And sadly, the prince likes to watch her dance.
SPEAKER_01Oh no.
SPEAKER_05No, I just thought it was weird. Go faster. I thought it was weird that like he had all that shit with uh he had like issues where he kept getting like um What in the Disney movie? No, no, no, no, no. The fucking writer guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The writer guy kept having issues with like he was, you know, falling in love, quote unquote, with women that were already like engaged. Yeah. Or like promised. Which really could have asked straight off the bat. And he was like dealing and torn up with about that. Which is kind of what's going on with Little Mermaid. But then also like the fact that he would flip around like a mermaid on the floor when he was a small boy.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. There's a lot going on with this movie when he was a little merboy. A little merboy. Um The thing is, unless the mermaid can get the prince to declare his love for her, she will never have a piece of his soul, so she won't get to go to heaven regardless. So when the prince announces that he's marrying someone else, oh look, he was already fucking engaged.
SPEAKER_05I bet you he was just flopping around on the floor with some weird little contraption he made to make himself look like a mermaid, and his mom came in and was just like his mom came in and was just like, you know you're only going to be seafoam if you're a fucking mermaid, like you don't go to heaven.
SPEAKER_06Like So when he finds out that the prince announces that he's marrying someone else, the mermaid's sisters swim to shore in the night and toss her a dagger, telling her that if she kills the prince and washes her feet in his blood, she can turn back into a mermaid and come live with them again.
SPEAKER_04Yay! Yay!
SPEAKER_06Redemption arc. The mermaid can't bring herself to do it. Instead, she drowns herself in the sea, where she becomes a water spirit instead of seafoam, doomed to live as such for the next 300 years, where she will then be granted entry into heaven, the end. Punga's a lot better, dude. Less blood, though.
SPEAKER_05I mean, actually, when you read it out that way, the only parallels are just that there's a fish lady.
SPEAKER_06Look, yeah, exactly. I don't doubt Miyazaki to be just like I don't fucking know. But cool story. What if we didn't do anything that was that gross? What are your actual inspirations in terms of the original Lil Mermaid story? I didn't fucking read it. I got waves to draw.
SPEAKER_05It was just like, what if what if we made this actually wholesome?
SPEAKER_06What if you know what? What if Liam Neeson's the dad again? You know?
SPEAKER_05Yeah, no, no, fuck the English dub, dude.
SPEAKER_06Even going through the dub.
SPEAKER_05French dub is where it's at. Lepogno. No, I'm just like, I prefer a language where I can't understand who the actor is immediately because it takes me out of it. That's fair. Yeah. Where I'm like, oh hey, that's Liam Neeson. I'm like, Wasn't the mom someone too?
SPEAKER_01I don't know. Maybe who cares? Kate blinkers.
SPEAKER_05I think the worst defender is probably like Princess Mononoke.
SPEAKER_06Okay, look, I think the dubbing on that is great, but I can tell that's Billy Bob Thornton.
SPEAKER_05And it takes you out of it.
SPEAKER_06And as it's not, but I'm also like, if Billy Bob Thornton lived in that world, that's exactly who he'd be and how he'd look. Yeah, I know. I'm just like, that's him. 100%. But it just I know, I know, but god damn it, still my favorite one. What can I say? Yeah. Actually, is it? We'll have this discussion later. Like, you know, we I do like Porco Rosso quite a bit. He he does fight against fascists. Haven't watched it. What really? Yeah. Damn, dude. Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, it's pretty good. It's fun. It might not be for you. It's okay. It's okay.
SPEAKER_05I don't know. There's a hog. He fights fascist. I'm here.
SPEAKER_06He's crankin'. Yeah. Whoa. Alright. Now, since its publication, Fairy Tales Told for Children has, of course, been an inspiration to bedtime stories everywhere. But when it was first published back in 1835, people kind of fucking hated it. Nowadays there are scholars that actually debate over the philosophical and even religious implications in the ending to The Little Mermaid. I know. But back then, critics were tearing these stories apart. They basically hated that there were no morals to them. Like, why would children ever like a story that's just supposed to be fun? And we talked about this once before in our Charles Dickens episodes, but Hans Christian Anderson could not handle criticism. We'll get to that particular incident later. But just know that anytime someone said something negative about Anderson's work, well, he was a bit of a crier. I do remember this though, like I do really like a lot of the a lot of the modern children's books, like this is so weird. This sounds creepy, but like there's a lot of artists that I follow who will make money in children's books, so I'm just like, oh fuck yeah, and I'll get that children's books, like John Classen. He was really good before he uh got that book, like uh Someone Stole My Hat or something like that. There's no moral to it. And it's wonderful. Great art, it's silly, kids will enjoy it. I hate the fact that they're always Like, no, no, no. Dr. Seuss had a moral behind this. Like, communism is bad.
SPEAKER_01But is it the moral one fish, two fish, blue fish, bitch, bitch.
SPEAKER_06Uh, it's about AIDS. So I don't know. Man, absolutely right. AIDS, it's eight, yeah. Rap it beat. It's about the Reagan administration. Um, but you know, it's like these fucking children's stories don't need morals. Kids don't are not figuring out what the moral even movies, dude. There's no moral that they're following. No kid is watching the lion the warch the warch and the war drops and being like, But in storybooks and movies and TVs don't teach our kids morals.
SPEAKER_01That means parents will have to parent.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, exactly. Kids not gonna watch that shit and be like, you know what? I think Christianity's right. You know, they're not doing that shit. It's the same argument that they're like, oh, there's a gay kid on Glee that will turn our kids fucking gay. Like, no, it's not. Him watching you kiss Uncle Jerry is making him gay. Like I mean, there is generally a message. Yeah, there's a message, but kids are not picking up on it, is what I'm saying. Kids generally are not like, oh, this is what it means. They don't care. They just want to see silly animation. Regardless, Anderson would put out the second installment of his fairy tales the next year. Again to bad reviews. So he just kind of gave up on fairy tales for a while. Instead, he would release his second novel after the improvisatory called OT, which stands for Aldonsa Tochthus. Tohthus means prison. And this prison is where the main character is born. And granted, this is coming from someone who didn't necessarily read the novel, but that description alone tells me that Anderson was already inspired by Charles Dickens' work. Regardless, OT was completely sold out by June two months after its release. And later the next year, Anderson's third novel, Only a Fiddler, was released to likewise success. But not everyone was a fan. Thank you. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who I did not know.
SPEAKER_01Oh, he's got a first name?
SPEAKER_06Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I only know that.
SPEAKER_06I also thought he was from the 1900s, but either way. I didn't know he had a first name. That's fucking I had no idea. He wrote a whole ass book in 1838 called From the Notes of One Still Living. That was just about how much he hated Hans Christian and his work. In response, Anderson wrote a fairy tale called The Snail in the Rosebush about a beautiful, innocent rosebush that's just sitting there, not hurting anybody, and a dumbass snail that just won't shut the fuck up.
SPEAKER_05I would have hated him somewhere for this.
SPEAKER_06I would have written a sequel. I might have strangled him. The story ends with the snail dead and forgotten, and the rosebush remains as beautiful and alive as ever. I would have strangled him with a rosebush. As active as Anderson is in the coming years, from getting into short stories and then slowly making his way back into fairy tales, he still has two worries on his mind: money and marriage. Quote, I need a thousand dollars a year before I may permit myself to fall in love, and fifteen hundred before I dare marry. And by the time this almost impossible wish comes becomes a reality, the young girl will be gone, swept away by someone else, and I'll be an old, dried-up bachelor. Such sad prospects. No, I'll never be rich, never satisfied, and never in love. He also started learning how to swim at 33.
SPEAKER_05Some pretty fucking serious interviews.
SPEAKER_01It's never too late.
SPEAKER_05Sometimes it is, and you need to get the fuck over it. Yeah, uh sometimes.
unknownYeah, that part, yeah.
SPEAKER_06Well, it wasn't until about 1843 that people were all of a sudden giving Anderson's fairy tales good reviews, much to Anderson's surprise as well. And over the coming years, we would end up with stories like the steadfast tin soldier, the ugly duckling, and some tale I'd never heard of before called The Wicked Prince, about a guy who's so mad that priests won't put up statues of him in their churches. So he builds a rocket to overthrow God.
SPEAKER_01And as far as the themes of his stories go, they had the concept of the rocket.
SPEAKER_06Rockets was like an ancient Chinese thing, as far as I remember. Oh, okay. That's where we get fireworks from.
SPEAKER_01I'm sorry, I'm still thinking about space.
SPEAKER_06Well, as far as the themes of his stories go, yeah, a lot of these stories deal with children dying. Uh, one of Hans Christian Anderson's most famous during his lifetime was one called The Angel about a kid's soul being brought to all his favorite places before being sent up to heaven. Another popular one from this time was the story of a mother about a mom chasing death after he takes away her child's soul. The little match girl is just about a kid freezing to death. He just couldn't stop killing kids. Well, from his first bit of success in 1835 until ten years later in 1845, Hans Christian Anderson just keeps growing in popularity around Europe. However, back in his home country of Denmark, most of his popularity is still coming from his old novels, not his new fairy tales. When someone does review his fairy tales, it's still negative, and it's always the same complaint. But what's the moral? But while he's out and about in, like, say, France, he's dealing with new translations of his past work coming out all at once. So everyone sees Anderson's work as a whole. The people of Denmark, on the other hand, they see his past success as old news. So when he hears reviews coming out of Denmark about his new work, namely his terrible plays, he dismisses it all with the belief that the Danes are just a stupid group of people. As he puts it, quote, they only live to find pettiness and failures at any prominent personality.
SPEAKER_01How very embers, new clothes.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, a bit. And I'm not quite sure where to place this, but whenever Anderson traveled, he would make sure to bring a length of rope with him because he was scared that he'd be trapped on the top floor of some hotel during a fire and he'd never make it out.
SPEAKER_01Okay, because I was thinking of something else.
SPEAKER_06Well, can you imagine some dude with a penchant for crying just showing up to the front desk with some fucking rope like one room, please?
SPEAKER_05Well, I mean, you wouldn't need that much.
SPEAKER_01You wouldn't need a lot, but like you wouldn't need enough to get well, no, he's a drama queen, so maybe he he just, you know, is over.
SPEAKER_05It's because I'm tall. It was part of a thrill. Like, you'd need less if you were tall.
SPEAKER_06On one of his many tours across Europe, Anderson would visit Germany in 1844 and fall in love with Charles Alexander, the Grand Duke of Sax Feimer Eisenach. Quote Sax Fimer? Oh, sexcrimer. Uh quote, the her the hereditary Grand Duke walked arm in arm with me across the courtyard of the castle to my room, kissed me lovingly, asked me always to love him, though he was just an ordinary person, asked me to stay with him this winter, fell asleep with the melancholy, happy feeling that I was the guest of this strange prince at his castle and loved by him. It is like a fairy tale.
SPEAKER_01Is it like a fairy tale, or is this more like Jane Austen thinking that that lawyer was going to propose and run away with her?
SPEAKER_06Um Yeah, no, there's no way that he's going to just room up a a a fairy tale author. A mistress. Yeah, a mistress. Yeah. They don't really do that right now. Uh the Grand Duke had been married two years earlier to his cousin, and they just had their first child together. Uh, regardless, Anderson would go on to write the Duke for several years with the relationship uh with the letters. No. Uh with their with the letters, of course, being held a dear secret to him. But for Anderson, he was all too happy to admit their relationship was a romantic one. Quote, I quite love the young Duke. He is the first of all princes that I really find attractive.
SPEAKER_01Wait, the young Duke? What was the age gap?
SPEAKER_06I want to say same age. If I don't put it in here, then it's like the same age, like by plus or minus. So the gap wasn't like big enough to be It wasn't like his mom and dad, where I had to be like, by the way, she was like ten years older.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_06His diary entries around this time also mention concerns about penis pain and a fear of mental illness, both of which are believed to stem from jerking off. Yes, back in those days, it was believed that jerking it could literally lead to a man being driven insane. With it was penis it was penis pain? Yeah, dude, fucking spit on it, you know?
SPEAKER_05No, I mean I mean, no, no, no, no, no. There were complaints about penis pain, and you just took that as cranking hog and moved along. Well, no, no, no. Do you want to learn more about this man's penis pain?
SPEAKER_06That is all that he would Do you think how who do you think I am, sir? Of course I looked into his penis pain. It was just from this letter, but apparently madness was thought to be like stemmed from like jerk in it. Well, and penis pain would have been from the same thing. I think he's just rubbing it raw.
SPEAKER_05I mean, that's the fucking cranky, but like, you know. I hey cranky. Look, man. Well stupid. Witty.
SPEAKER_00You're laughing. It's Fenny.
SPEAKER_05Look, man, dry beater over here.
SPEAKER_06Hey, same. I'm fine. You know? No, no, no. I get it. I get it.
SPEAKER_05I'm just saying, he was like uh as far as my records of like how many in a day sesh, like if I'm Oh, you you're yeah, you're a sprinter, you know.
SPEAKER_06You go for marathons.
SPEAKER_01A farter?
unknownWhat?
SPEAKER_06Sprinters don't go for marathons.
SPEAKER_01Fart means speed.
SPEAKER_05Oh, right. I forgot about that. Like it. I'm just saying it would have to be, you know, maybe it had something medically going on. I don't think it was just the hog.
SPEAKER_06It's about fart. It's about power. It's about sitting in your shower. Uh anyway. Well, well, during this trip to Germany, who should the 39-year-old Anderson run into but the 59-year-old Jacob Grimm, the eldest of the brothers Grimm, the king of German fairy tales, meeting the king of Danish ones. And both near the top of their careers. Now, unfortunately touch peen. Jacob Grimm had never heard of Hans Christian Andersen, so their meeting was kind of cut short. Yeah. But it wasn't all fun and games during these trips. Uh I'm Jacob Grimm.
SPEAKER_05My dick hurts. Alright. Cool. So I'm gonna cut this short.
SPEAKER_06Uh, I tried that too. It hurts more. It wasn't all fun in games during these trips. On the nearly 200-mile journey from Ancona, Italy to Rome, Hans was stuck in a stagecoach with some Hungarian guy and an Austrian count who together concocted a fairy tale that they tried to convince Hans would be better received than his other ones. Because you see, this one wouldn't just be some silly fable, it would have morals about liberty, the constitution, freedom. From what Hans Christian Andersen could recall, it was some half-baked story about a hen yard. And writing close behind their stagecoach was the ire of Anderson's existence. A Polish princess. No, that wouldn't be funny though. I'm after you, bitch. A Polish princess that was staying at the same places the other three were along their journey and who always wanted the best room, which Anderson was also trying to claim. And wherever Anderson would go A woman. Like, oh and where wherever Anderson would go, there would be artists and sculptors that wished to make a portrait or likeness of him for their collection. And every time when the work was finished, Anderson would bash these guys about how ugly they made him look. And like the dude, he uh he was ugly, and he knew it too. As a matter of fact, before he bothered to turn it into a fairy tale, Hans Christian Anderson had named an autobiography he was working on, the ugly duckling.
SPEAKER_00Aww.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Regardless, Anderson's quick success soon led to a collection of his stories being printed in English for the first time in 1847. The moment was so monumental that an official autobiography of Anderson called The Fairy Tale of My Life was released at the same time, eight years before it would be released in his native Danish. This is not the same one that he was working on that would have been the ugly duckling, by the way. This was one that treated him with much more compassion. But it was during this tour in England, on July 16th, 1847, that the now forty-two-year-old Hans was attending a soiree when he should who should he r run?
SPEAKER_00Fuck! Who should he run into Jordan?
SPEAKER_06Who should he run into Jordan? Charles Dickens.
SPEAKER_01FUGINE! Did he show him his Raven? It was a Raven, right?
SPEAKER_05Did he show him his chafed up penis?
SPEAKER_06Now at the time, Charles Dickens was in the middle of his serialized story, Dombey and Son, and had just gotten back from a world tour. So he hasn't reached the absolute godhood that he will when he writes David Copperfield, A Tale of Two Cities, or Great Expectations, but he does have the fame from writing a Christmas Carol and Oliver Twist on his shoulders already. When Hans Christian Andersen met Charles Dickens, he told Charles that he was, quote, the greatest writer of our time. And in response, Charles Dickens sent a package containing a dozen of his own books to Anderson's store. And a Raven. Over the next ten years, Hans Christian Andersen would continue to send letters and books to Charles Dickens, with Dickens never really being more than just polite.
SPEAKER_01You know, that's better behavior than I expected given what you've told me about Charles Dickens. The stripper really likes me.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Well, no, I think Charles Dickens was uh really rude to his family. Yeah. So that's where he got out of the system. Could be, you know what I mean? From what I remember.
SPEAKER_01The Bing Crosby treatment.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Professional in every other aspect, and then it's like, oh boy, it's hot. Oh boy, here we go. Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_00Something bad happened to me today, I'm gonna hit my wife.
SPEAKER_06My kids are all named something stupid like Skittles. Yeah. Some shit like that. Like Ghost Captain or some shit. Like But in 1857, at the request of Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Anderson arrives to Gadshill, the Dickens estate. Anderson was initially supposed to stay with his hero for a few days.
SPEAKER_01Oh no.
SPEAKER_06He ended up staying five weeks.
unknownOh no.
SPEAKER_06And he knew the Dickens family was kind of not hot on his being there, but he figured it was fine since Charles had asked him to stay. And who can say how long a stay is supposed to be anyway? The host. He really should have stepped up on this one, honestly. Like that's kind of yeah. Well, Anderson had a few gripes of his own. First off, he thought it was weird that Dickens didn't have a maid service. Like what? He was just expected to just make himself a sandwich?
SPEAKER_01Does Charles Dickens beat him like his old schoolmaster?
SPEAKER_06Or how about the fact that Dickens didn't have someone to shave Anderson daily? I want to be hairless. That's not my problem. Yeah.
SPEAKER_05Wait, this guy would shave daily?
SPEAKER_06He wanted a daily shave on his face? On his face, I'm assuming. I'm assuming.
SPEAKER_01Logically, it should mean face, but I don't know my my first thought was just full body.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, no, I thought I mean honestly. That was like that was immediately to this man's freaky ass behavior.
SPEAKER_06Like, yeah, no, Hans told Dickens, and I don't know how true this is, but he did tell Dickens that it was customary in Denmark for you to get a daily shave. I didn't bother to look it up, but I can tell you right now that's probably bullshit. Well, Anderson did what he could to survive at Gads Hill. He made himself food, uh food? He made himself food if he couldn't find Dickens' uh wife or kids to do it for him. And he had one of the Dickens boys give him his daily shave, which Dickens was understandably weirded out by, and soon set up daily appointments for Anderson at a nearby barber shop. I would have done the same. It's just like okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_05If you're not gonna do it.
SPEAKER_06Can you stop using my son? That's weird as shit.
SPEAKER_05To shave your face? This is pretty strange. But during his visit, also the kid's like six, and you're putting a razor in his hand like this is just a big thing. You know what? This might actually solve two problems at once.
SPEAKER_01He is a learning a trade, Caleb.
SPEAKER_05Like liability-wise, I'm a little I'm a little concerned.
SPEAKER_06But during his visit, Anderson received a poor review on one of his works. And despite knowing entire rulers and royal families of countries from around the world because of his work, he still took bad reviews extremely fucking seriously.
SPEAKER_01Is that how it turned into a five-week stay?
SPEAKER_06I don't know. Anderson cried face down in the dirt at the Dickens estate. Well, the Dickens family just kind of watched. Alright. It weirded everyone out.
SPEAKER_01At least he's not having the kids shave him anymore.
SPEAKER_06Is this funny? He's just like in the lawn, just like it's just, you know. But Anderson's stay was soon to come to an end. And forever afterwards, Hans was confused as to why his letters to Charles Dickens always went unanswered. There is a theory that Uriah Heap, the villain of Dickens' novel David Copperfield, was based on Anderson, but I honestly doubt that. I'd believe it if David Copperfield came out after Anderson's visit to Gads Hill, but the novel was released seven years prior when Anderson and Dickens were perfectly nice to each other as Pentacles. But regardless of how his strained relationship with Dickens was, Hans Christian Anderson's success would continue to grow. To give you an idea of how big he was at this point, he had two different translators attempting to scam him at the same time. One of them, a woman named Mary Howitt, basically starts reneging on her deals with Anderson when she sees how much money he's making. All of a sudden she's looking for a bigger cut, saying the stories are only popular because of how she's translating them. Kind of like what he was fucking doing, honestly. She says she's rewriting the stories to make them sound better. And when she and Anderson couldn't strike a deal, Mary came out with a book that was about the history of Scandinavian literature, describing every book that Anderson ever released that wasn't translated by her as quote unquote failures. Meanwhile, another of Anderson's translators just starts making pirated copies of his work to sell on the side. A lot simpler of a scam, if you ask me.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I like that better.
SPEAKER_06And this translator's name was Charles Boner. Well, as the years go by, that's all that I have for that one.
SPEAKER_01The end.
SPEAKER_06I felt like it's getting to be said. Well, as the years go by, Hans Christian Anderson starts acting erratic. He's still living in fear of becoming insane. His ups and downs are changing so often that no one is quite sure how he's going to act on any given day. When he's touring across the country, he starts staying in haunted castles. Equally terrified of seeing a ghost and not seeing one. He even thinks he sees one during one stay and surprisingly decides to rush it. Only f only to find out that it was moonlight shining on shit in his room and casting a weird shadow. He becomes self-aware to an almost tragic level, once becoming distraught about being the only person at a party who wore black gloves. He starts seeking religion more and more. He wants to believe in God. He sees Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as quote, concepts, not persons or bodily figures. But he definitely thinks that he shouldn't join a church until God decides to come to him. And sadly, he seems to think that God is just ignoring him, and he doesn't understand why.
SPEAKER_01Well, he's still unmarried, you know.
SPEAKER_06I didn't I haven't been ignoring him at all. I give you a shit, childhood. I did that on purpose. You were beaten. I had that guy fuck your mom.
SPEAKER_05You heard it and everything. It bothered you.
SPEAKER_06And since we're talking about what Hans Christian Anderson believes in, he did not think of black people as a lesser race. It's kind of nice, right? Especially for the time. Yeah. He did believe Jews were, though. So anyway.
SPEAKER_05I mean, it had to be something, right? There had to be something.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I'm not gonna not bring it up.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_06So anyway, to have some semblance of happiness, the 52 year old Hans Christian Andersen begins dating a 21 year old ballet dancer by the name of Harold Scharf. But their public relationship is cut short because it's pointed out by Anderson's friend Edward Cullen that the people think less of him for being openly. Gay. Instead, Hans and Harold would have to continue seeing each other in private. Maybe it was just the age gap they weren't okay with. What if people thought they were father and son?
SPEAKER_05Like that is quite age gap. I think that's what it was. Probably not. Fair enough. Like now. Yeah. Like it was a good idea.
SPEAKER_01Sorry to say it was the Hanson.
SPEAKER_05Also kind of silly to even be like, oh no, just don't be out in the open with it. It's fine. It's like, no, it's already out in the open.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, yeah. Like don't but in 1861, Anderson's old mentor, Jonas Collin, Edward Collins dad, passes away at the age of 85. The next year, Anderson's old teacher and inspiration, B.S. Ingaman, passes away as well. As much success as Anderson is having in life, with his work now being sold in America and becoming a sensation the world over, he seems to be letting his mortality show a little more. During the night I thought about my so-called want of faith, whether perhaps a ghost might appear and punish me by frightening me. But then I thought, these are creatures from a higher sphere than us. They would not carry with them the chill and horror of the grave, but rather joy and light. So it's 1863. Hans is fifty-eight years old, and he voices his concerns about his life through his diary, stating that he's traveling constantly to quell boredom. He'd usually write fairy tales or short stories while on his travels and get them published locally, but even now he's been writing very little. He's reading even less, and he feels that his life has become incredibly unbalanced. He's also drinking more than just his usual stouts. He's drinking anything that's handed to him. Eventually the ballet dancer Harold Scharf stops coming around. Nothing is really said. He just stops showing up. And at first Hans doesn't really seem to care. But about a month later he writes, quote, I am not satisfied with myself. I cannot stand the loneliness. I'm tired of life and living. Even when he receives a standing ovation for his work at a public reading, he states that he quote Thought about all my human weaknesses and felt that it was almost a joke.
SPEAKER_05It's meaningless without the twink beside me.
SPEAKER_06Well, you know, and what's funny about him saying that he doesn't really care, I this is a rumor. I don't know if it's true, so I didn't put it in here really, but he wrote this like 10 page or this uh 10-chapter like novella called like the Ice Queen or something. And it I think it was kinda like what Frozen was based on, a little bit. No, no, no. He made a different one called The Ice Queen. But this is supposedly that story. Yeah, but supposedly this might be based on Harold Sharf, his twink. And it's just like, but nobody knows for sure. It's just like, yeah, so around that time he just wrote something about a total fucking bitch that needed to die. You know, it's like that might have been about Harold. I don't know. In 1866, Anderson is awarded the title of Commander of the Order of Notre Dame de Guadalupe by the Emperor of Mexico, Maximilian I. Yeah, as far as I know, Anderson never met the Emperor of Mexico. It was just something he liked to do. The next year in 1867, the Emperor of Mexico is killed, and someone finds it in their heart to send Anderson a letter telling him that if he wears the medal he received from the Emperor while in Mexico, that he will be shot. And he's just like, okay. Alright, alright.
SPEAKER_03As you do, as you do. I'm not even involved.
SPEAKER_05Why? Alright, I will do that. Alright, man, not gonna be an issue.
SPEAKER_06So Anderson goes on another trip through Europe, and while he's in Portugal, he rooms with a banker who tells Anderson that he needs to go to Lisbon to quote unquote screw. Honestly, not bad advice.
SPEAKER_01They do have good food.
SPEAKER_06But Anderson sits on this recommendation till he's in Paris. Quote, during this entire trip, I have been urged to seek out a prostitute. However tired I was, I did all the same decide to see one of these creatures. I approached a house. Alright, man. There appeared a woman I don't think you needed to use that word even at time, but okay. There appeared a woman in the business of selling human flesh, and four prostitutes paraded for me. The youngest was eighteen or so, they said. I asked her to stay. She wore almost nothing but a shift. I felt so sorry for her. I paid five francs to the madam, gave her when she asked me for it, five francs, but did nothing. Merely looked at the poor child, who undressed completely and seemed surprised that I merely looked at her.
SPEAKER_05I got a lot to say about this. Yeah, feel free. Okay. Okay. But also, like, just like him needing to write this out into something published is like, yeah. What's going on with your guilt there? Yeah. Well, she looked at teen to me. She looked at teen to me. It was like no one even asked.
SPEAKER_06I don't even think that was an issue. I don't think there was an age. I don't like legally background.
SPEAKER_05I know, I know. But but just like, well, she looked old, she looked old. No, everything's fine. Let's uh it is strange.
SPEAKER_06It's like, bro, why are you telling us this right now? Well, according to Anderson, he never engaged in sex with prostitutes. He just paid them to hang out. Which, sure, maybe he did. But you need to pay a prostitute for that. Well, I can't tell if he's like jerking off while he's talking to them or if he's just killing time to make it look like he fucks women. I don't know.
SPEAKER_01Cause he is lonely and they are women, and you have said that he most of his meaningful romantic relationships, in his at least in his mind, are all men.
SPEAKER_06I feel like he just wants to cuddle and cry. He doesn't want to write that out and make that, you know, forever.
SPEAKER_01So he just writes, we hung out for sure. He does have We talked about our favorite fairy tales.
SPEAKER_06Well, he does have friends that like would like prod him to go along. They're like, oh man, oh, so great hanging out. Let's go fuck women. Or maybe girls, hard to say. And then they'd like bring him to a prostitute house or a brothel, and he'd just be like, Can I just stay for a bit? You know? Like he's just shouting through the walls, oh boy, there it is.
SPEAKER_03That's my wiener, you know.
SPEAKER_05My chafed wiener.
SPEAKER_06But Anderson does kind of get a taste for brothels at this point, going back multiple times the following year. Quote, after having dinner, I walked about an unfulfilled desire, then went suddenly up to a shop which traded in human beings. That's such a creepy way to fucking. Uh one was painted with powder, the other plain looking, a third quite a lady. I spoke with her, paid twelve francs, and left without having sinned in action, but probably in thought. She asked me to come again. Said that I seemed to be very innocent for a gentleman. I felt so light and happy when I emerged from this house. Many would call me a spineless fellow. Am I this here? No, I think you're a liar. On February 10th, 1868, Anderson finds out that his old boyfriend, the ballet dancer Harold Schaff, is to be married to a woman. And to Anderson, he sees this as a true end to his younger days. Like all the times before, when Anderson sits in for another portrait painting, he finds the final result ugly. But this time it's because he realizes he's just as old on the outside as he feels on the inside. Quote, the portrait does not show the expression that I had wished. The hair has also been made more grey. Moreover, he has painted a grease stain on my clothing. Which admittedly, painting a grease stain on a client's portrait is kind of a shit move. That's not very cool. Why'd you make my eyes go in two different directions? I thought you just are stupid, so I just wanted it to look that way. In the fall of 1869, a ten-volume set of almost all of Hans Christian Andersen's work is released in America, marking the 50th anniversary of his writing career. The entirety of Denmark celebrates Andersen's life, appointing him commander of the Order of Dannebrog, and later gaining audience with the king and queen. So he's like at the top of his career now, right? But this motherfucker just keeps getting stranger. He's greeted by some representatives from the local school who bring a couple of kids with them to like welcome him to this banquet that's being put on in commemoration of his entire career. And according to this Danish radio program in 1950 that managed to interview one of these kids from the school, they were like Wild. Yeah, right? They were like, Yeah, he was really weird. He showed up in these bell bottoms, and for some reason, once our teacher was done welcome welcoming him, he was like, mm-hmm mm-hmm, watch this. And then he did a kick over this little girl's head.
SPEAKER_01It could have been worse.
SPEAKER_06I mean, I guess he could have kicked her in the head, but he's just like, check this out. And everyone's like, was there really in bell bottoms?
SPEAKER_01Is that really what they said?
SPEAKER_06Yeah, they said it's so bizarre. I do remember there's like an old black and white like TV show that was like, guess what I what I've done in my life? And somebody was like, You're an old man. I don't know, you could have done a lot of things. And it turned out that he was a little boy who witnessed Abraham Lincoln's assassination. And it's like, it's crazy because it's like that was also in like the 50s or 60s or something, but it's like Yeah, like one of those TV shows. On June 9th, 1870, Anderson learns of Charles Dickens's death, saying, quote, So we'll never meet again on earth, never speak together. He'll never explain to me why he did not answer my most recent letters. What a mystery. Guess we'll never know. Maybe it was that I was a little freak on his property.
SPEAKER_05I cried into his ground and the grass died. His ground. I asked his son to shave me.
SPEAKER_01Is this customary in fucking Dutch whatever?
SPEAKER_06Shaving my cheeks is customary in Denmark, boy. In the winter of 1872, Anderson comes down with a serious illness and thinks, This is it. I'm about to go insane. But of course, that's not what's really happening. From the sounds of it, he may have had liver cancer, which the doctor tried to cure with a series of laxative and chamomile tea treatments.
SPEAKER_05That's all it takes? Yep. Interesting. Everyone drives the channel. Dr.
SPEAKER_06Phil said the same thing. I knew it.
SPEAKER_03All you gotta do is have some laxative and chamomile tea treatments and shove them up your ass. Pretty good. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01Is that Dr. Phil or were you doing another one?
SPEAKER_03No, that's right. Okay.
SPEAKER_05100% Dr. Phil. Don't listen to it.
SPEAKER_03Well now, what you gotta do is take that laxative and chamomile teal, you shove it right up your ass. I'm sure you can.
SPEAKER_06Oh fuck. Listen. I mean, it was a good thing.
SPEAKER_05Like, I'm not gonna fucking lie.
SPEAKER_03That camel teal did not go inside my ass.
SPEAKER_05Alright, so anyway. I'm not gonna hear anything more about Bill Clinton than asses for the rest of my life.
SPEAKER_03That's completely fair.
SPEAKER_06Anderson writes his final fairy tale in December of this year called The Flea and the Professor. On January 19th, the following year, he loses his final tooth. No idea how long that was going on for, but he did end up with dentures shortly after the city. I don't know what was the final tooth.
SPEAKER_05He just decided to write one of the front ones.
SPEAKER_06Now Hans Christian Anderson is very much considered not poor. He hasn't been in poverty for like 40 years. But for some reason in America it's believed he is. So some schools are that.
SPEAKER_01I'm sorry. Really? Yeah. Like, I I think I remember when I was younger and at first into him, like, oh whoa, what's what's more about this life? And I read something that was like, he's poor. He died poor.
SPEAKER_06Weird.
SPEAKER_01He died super poor.
SPEAKER_06So that's always just been a thing here. So some school kids held a benefit for him and ended up sending him like 200 bucks. Which saddened him in two different ways. One, because people out there really believe he's hurting, and two, that they were only able to scrounge up 200 bucks. That's America. Regardless, he does not accept the money. What's the matter? You don't donate when you're done with the fucking grocery store? No. Now, when Anderson finds that the government plans to unveil a statue of him in Denmark, he's eager to see the mock-ups. When he sees that they plan to have children climbing on his back and sitting on his lap while he reads, he's beyond pissed. He's like, my fairy tales are for everyone, not just children, goddammit.
SPEAKER_00He wants grown men on his shoulders. Sitting in his lap women at his knees.
SPEAKER_05Also, you made me ugly. Not gonna fucking lie, dude, if I spent time like doing serious writing and then everyone is like, dude, our kids love this and be like, what the No! I don't know.
SPEAKER_01To be fair, this is actually the first I'm hearing that he's written um novels for adults, not fairy tales.
SPEAKER_06Well, nobody knows them though. That's a thing. Yeah. People don't give a shit about that.
SPEAKER_01They care more about the fairy tales. Surprise, surprise, they don't have morals.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. And they're so sandwiched. Yeah, I'm sure his novels probably did. They probably did have morals, and then look at what fucking happened. Nobody read them. Nobody knows about them.
SPEAKER_05Probably good in his case.
SPEAKER_06Honestly, yes. On July 5th, 1875, Anderson composes one last poem on his deathbed called Funen and Switzerland, which to be honest, I couldn't actually find a translation of. But regardless, I'm sure it was nice. And it would have been even nicer if this was the last thing Anderson would dictate to those beside him.
SPEAKER_05You trying to pronounce it.
SPEAKER_06Not in like the whole thing. What do you mean the whole thing? Yeah. That is it. What, you mean like the untranslated poem?
SPEAKER_01I mean Switzerland.
SPEAKER_06Fuck no.
SPEAKER_05That's what I that's yeah, that's exactly what I mean.
SPEAKER_06I'm not gonna go on Google Translate and fucking Yes. No.
SPEAKER_01What does you know what? How do they spell Funin? Motherfucker, I said the untranslated.
SPEAKER_05I said it would have been funny to watch you. Oh man, here we go. Now we're doing it.
SPEAKER_01How do you spell it?
SPEAKER_05I got it.
SPEAKER_01Cool.
SPEAKER_06I don't e I can't even find that.
SPEAKER_01Huh?
SPEAKER_06I can't find it.
SPEAKER_01What does it say?
SPEAKER_06I don't give a shit.
SPEAKER_05No, it doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_03Fine.
SPEAKER_05I wanted to hear his beautiful words as it was meant to be heard in his language.
SPEAKER_03Fart further fate.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I looked it up by the way, it would say it's it's fart renner. Fartrenner? Jeremy Renner.
SPEAKER_01Hey, Fart Renner. That's exactly what it is.
SPEAKER_06So again. Funen in Switzerland. It would have been nice if this was the last thing Anderson ever dictated to those beside him. Instead, as he slowly faded away over the course of the next month, he lay awake detailing sporadic memories of women he wished he'd fucked.
SPEAKER_01Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_06And so it was. On August 4th, 1875, Hans Christian Andersen would pass away five minutes past eleven at 70 years old. There are a lot of different quotes that claim to be his last words, but in truth, his last words were never recorded.
SPEAKER_01It's Mambo number five. I would fucking hope so.
SPEAKER_06He's buried, he's buried at the church of Our Lady in Copenhagen beside his friend Edward Collin, who became the executor to his estate, and his wife Henrietta, who would later join the spot. However, when it came to light that Edward was kind of shitty to Hans, there was a movement that called for the Collins to be moved from Anderson's plot. The cemetery moved their headstones for a little while until the controversy went away. Yeah, they just put it back. It worked. Now back in 1832, when he was just 27 years old, Hans Christian Andersen was working on the aforementioned autobiography that he planned on calling the Ugly Duckling, before abandoning it altogether, and then releasing a more alluring one 15 years later. Well, the manuscript for the original was found in the Royal Library in Copenhagen by researcher Hans Bricks in 1926, while he just so happened to be doing research conducting a biography on none other than Hans Christian Andersen. In 2012, a manuscript was discovered in a suitcase at the Danish National Archives in Funen. The document was called the Tallow Candle and appears to be Andersen's first ever fairy tale. Written sometime in the 1820s while he was still in school. It's about a candle who finds that he has no meaning in life. So it would actually kind of be on par for him to write this around this time. But according to Christian Graugaard, a sexologist at Alberg University.
SPEAKER_01A sexologist?
SPEAKER_06Yes, Caleb, you were in the wrong career. Anderson's fairy tales often have underlying sexual themes. He says that the candle is obviously a penis and the melting wax is pre-cum. According to Growgard, the tallow candle can best be described as, quote, a literary cum shot.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, no, that's not no one no one should be a sexologist.
SPEAKER_06That man got paid to write those words. In the 150 years since his death, there's been a Hans Christian Anderson museum that opened in his hometown of Al Donsa in 2020, as well as one that opened in the town of Solvang, California in I think 2011. Jean Renoir, the director of such films as Rules of the Game and La Grande Delusion, precursors precursors to the French New Wave movement. Precumors to the French New Wave movement of the 1950s, directed his first ever adaptation of Anderson's work in 1928, The Little Match Girl. This was followed shortly after in 1931 by Walt Disney with their own animated short of The Ugly Duckling. Since then there have been a multitude of Anderson's works adapted to screen, mostly between Russia, Japan, and the United States. The most famous, of course, being Disney's 1989 version of The Little Mermaid, which they had planned to make since their production of Snow White all the way back in 1937. Indeed, there is no one that can say that Hans Christian Anderson hasn't earned his spot alongside the Brothers Grimm, or even his earliest inspiration at the Arabian Knights, as a godfather of the fairy tale genre. Finally, in 2017, a letter Charles Dickens wrote stating that Hans Christian Andersen spoke French like Peter the Wild Boy, English like he was from a school for the deaf and dumb, and didn't know how to pronounce the name of his own book, The Improvisatory, sold for 4,600 pounds. It was Dutch. So my sources today. Fairy tales by Hans Christian Anderson, translated by Tina Nunale, Penguin Books 2006. Anderson.sdau.dk uh Jenny or G-E-N-I.com. How guest Hans Christian Nanderson destroyed his friendship with Dickens by Vanessa Thorpe, 9th of September 2017, thegardian.com. New Hans Christian Nanderson fairy tale is a literary cum shot by Gregor Slows and Morton Arung, DR.dk 21st of September 2012. I hope now that when you look back on, you know, Walt Disney movies, you just think, wow, that man was really sexually oppressed, and he listened to his mother get fucked by a strange man. What's your takeaway? My takeaway?
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah, what's the moral? Motherfucker, I'm tired of Sunday night. What's the moral?
SPEAKER_01What's the moral?
SPEAKER_05Uh we we learned about a strange, creepy man who used to be a boy who wanted to be a mermaid.