Note these are not your childhood fairy-tales. Some are more like horror stories. The Little Mermaid isn't Disney's mermaid, which for me was a good thing because these stories as told by Anderson, have far more originality, heart and substance than anything Disney has ever animated.
The stories are as listed below in order. They're easily looked-up online so I will not detail any of them. For me the most interesting were The Wild Swans, The Little Mermaid, The Pen and the Inkstand, The real princess, aka The Princess and the Pea, but not in a favorable way. Note that chidren's author Sally Huss has a good take on that in her Princess Charlotte and the Pea which I reviewed favorably in September, 2015.
For me the most amusing one was The Portuguese Duck and that was partly because of the story itself, and partly because of the hilarious take on it by the narrator, Eve Watkinson, who read many of these tales (along with another narrator, Christopher Casson). I don't know what accent she was doing, because she used the same one, pretty much, in the very next story set in Scandinavia, but in The Portuguese Duck she had me laughing out loud.
Anyway, here's the list:
- The Flax
- The Daisy
- The Pea Blossom
- The Storks
- The Wild Swans
- The Last Dream of the Old Oak
- The Portuguese Duck
- The Snow Man
- The Farmyard Cock and the Weathercock
- The Red Shoes
- The Little Mermaid
- Buckwheat
- What Happened to the Thistle
- The Pen and the Inkstand
- The Teapot
- Soup From A Sausage Skewer
- What the Goodman Does Is Always Right
- The Old Street Lamp
- The Shepherdess and the Chimney Sweep
- The Drop of Water
- The Swineherd
- The Metal Pig
- The Flying Trunk
- The Butterfly
- The Goblin and the Huckster
- Everything in its Right Place
- The Real Princess
- The Emperor's New Clothes
- Great Claus and Little Claus
