Thumbelina

"

"Thumbelina" is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a thumb-sized girl and her many adventures before falling inlove with a flower-fairy prince just her size. Accordingly the tale was first published in 1835 in Copenhagen Denmark.

 As a child I happened to read the story first from comics and brought me to a world of small people. I started to fancy such magical place was mesmerized. As an adult and after reading several other fairy tale stories it was still the first that came to mind when asked to draw an illustration and tell the story orally.

Now in addition to the story I found out the author himself has a very interesting and fairytale-like lifestory. It says Andersen came from a poor family and found a patron in the person of Jonas Colin, the director of the Royal Theater, who, believing in the boy's potential, secured funds from the king to send Andersen to a grammar school in Slagelse. At Slagelse, the seventeen-year-old Andersen joined a junior class of eleven-year-old boys under the tutelage of Simon Meisling, a thirty-five-year-old renowned classicist and translator of Virgil's Aeneid. Short, stout, bald, unkempt, Meisling worked out his frustrations on his pupils and staff. Andersen was a poor Latin student and became the butt of Meisling's scorn, with the teacher telling him, "You're a stupid boy who will never make it." Meisling is believed to be the model for the learned mole in "Thumbelina".

At first Danish critics were not enthusiastic one told him not to waste time writing fairytales.The critical reaction was so harsh that he waited an entire year before publishing "the Little Mermaid" and "The Emperor's New Clothes." Glad he did and proved to be one of the best of his kind.

Now here is half of the illustration I used for my own storytelling: