Venturing into Parts Unknown

Hans Christian Andersen on Life, Travel and Beyond

Abstract

This article’s main objective is to analyse the way the “vagabond-storyteller” Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) combines notions of mobility, life and death in his oeuvre – notably in his famous fairy tales. The nexus between travel and life is the corner stone in Andersen’s well-known existential motto: “To travel is to live!”, but travel for Andersen is also a means for metaphysical inquiry. Hence the focus of this literary research article is on the question how ‘travel’ and ‘life’ relate to each other and what they convey about Andersen’s ontology and epistemology. An additional issue is how the travel-life nexus resonates with Andersen’s 19th century literary and cultural context. Finally, this article discusses how Andersen deals with the notion of the temporality of life, in particular ‘the afterlife’ or ‘the unknown territory’. For the romanticist Andersen mobility is the a priori ingredient of life itself, as well as a conceptual vehicle to probe into what lies in waiting in the hereafter. This leads to the proposition that there in Andersen’s work are two modalities of mobility and life.