Abstract

The goal of this study is to compare selected fairy tales of O. Wilde and H. Andersen. Moreover, to know more about Oscar Wilde and Hans Andersen and. The comparison is done through the analysis of finding differences and similarities between authors and fairy tales named «The Nightingale and the Rose» and «The Snow Queen».

Introduction 

All people from early childhood love fairy tales. Thanks to fairy tales, we get a unique opportunity to plunge into the magical world, adults remember their childhood and plunge into joyful memories. Getting acquainted with the magical world of fairy tales, we cultivate a love for the word and an interest in reading.

Fairy tales for children carry in themselves, in addition to purely entertaining, also an educational element, because they:

- develop coherent speech, hearing and pronunciation;

- form the concept of "good and evil";

- instill respect for themselves as individuals, but also for elders;

- contribute to the development of memory and enrich vocabulary.

The purpose of this project is to know more about Oscar Wilde and Hans Andersen and to analyze differences and similarities between authors and their works, especially fairy tales named «The Nightingale and the Rose» and «The Snow Queen». 

                                       The theoretical part

Fairy tales are the most ancient creations of the human spirit. Fairy tale is one of the most popular and favorite genres in folklore and literature. We did not know how to walk yet, but we had already heard fairy tales from our mothers and grandmothers.

How many fairy tales have already been heard and read by us since early childhood?  Russian and English, French and Polish, Danish, Swedish and Spanish. There are none of them that we do not like. There were fairy tales that were similar to each other and not similar, there were funny and sad, long and short. However, the boring and stupid ones have never come across!

Growing up, we read fairy tales ourselves and will read and study them for a long time. While reading, we always immerse ourselves in their fantastic, magical and at the same time such a living and real world. Each fabulous image comes to life in the imagination more vividly than movie or television footage. This is not accidental. After all, a fairy tale is a perfect work of the folk spirit, honed for centuries or even millennia.

Fairy tales have always existed. They reflect folk wisdom and experience accumulated over the centuries. In fairy tales, there is always a struggle between good and evil. 

There are folklore and literary fairy tales. A folklore fairy tale is a prosaic oral story about fictional events in the folklore of different peoples. A literary fairy tale is a work closely related to a folk tale, however, unlike it, belongs to a specific author.

Fairy tales are divided into genres. There are household, magical and animal fairy tales.

Fairy tales about animals are a set of works of fairytale folklore in which animals, birds, fish, as well as objects, plants and natural phenomena act as the main characters.

At the heart of the plot of a fairy tale is a narrative about overcoming loss or shortage, with the help of miraculous means, or magical assistants.

The household fairy tale is firmly connected with reality, the main character is an ordinary person from the people's environment, fighting for justice and achieving his goal with the help of ingenuity, dexterity and cunning.

                                    The Practical Part

In the practical part, I will compare two authors and their fairy tales. The difference between two authors is given in the table below.

Both writers' fairy tales are based on a life subtext. However, the main thing that is in each of them is compassion, devotion, courage, kindness and love.

Of all the writers that were influenced by Andersen specifically, Oscar Wilde is perhaps the most obvious and notable; his fairy tales are filled with themes and motifs from Andersen’s stories.

Both Andersen and Wilde seem to condemn certain traits that they find especially in people of higher classes. This mainly concerns vanity and pride, a theme which is found in the fairy tales of both authors. Both of them were well educated and close to important contemporary thinkers.

In the fairy tales of both authors, we can find motifs like love, friendship, vision vs. reality, dream, devotion, selfishness, death and afterlife, pride and religious motifs. This work is going to deal with the religious motifs (sacrifice, repentance, love, good and evil) in this part.

If we say about similarities between both fairy tales, the characters in Wilde´s and Andersen´s fairy tales sacrifice their lives for love and friendship.

What conclusion does the reader of this fairy tale make? He thinks about how beautiful the Nightingale is, who did not spare his life for Love. He realized in his life what he sang about, what he dreamed about. His values are love, self-sacrifice, beauty, action. He wanted to help people to know this happiness at the cost of his life. However, the person turned out to be deaf to the beautiful, in real life, it turns out, and there are other values. As a result, the Nightingale dies, a small gray bird that is ready to be selfless for the sake of the present in life. People often create a system of false values, considering them important, and do not care that there is something in the world that is worthy of human attention. What prevents them from seeing Beauty? There is an answer to this question in the fairy tale. Own pride, selfishness, unwillingness to think and be attentive. The hero is left alone with dusty books, the heroine with expensive stones, and the little bird becomes immortal. For what is immortality granted? For the fact that you really lived for the sake of people and goodness and did not feel sorry for yourself.

The motive of sacrifice is closely connected with the image of Gerda. Her first voluntary sacrifice is new red shoes, which she gives to the river to tell her where Kai is. Interestingly, Gerda remains barefoot, despite the fact that the prince and princess give her warm boots. First, a little robber takes them away, and then forgets to give the Fink. Therefore, the sacrifice must be permanent.

The main characters of the fairy tales Gerda and the Nightingale were both on the side of love and in the name of love they went to feats. However, if Gerda survives in the end of the story, the nightingale remains without reward for his sacrifice. The rose for which he gave his life, disappointed by the rejection of the Professor's Daughter, the Student simply throws away.

It is on the basis of contrast that the writer shows the beautiful inner world of his characters and the ugliness of external reality.

 Conclusion

A fairy tale is a special area of verbal art that has a huge impact on the education of the moral principle in a person. The harmonious correlation of the fantastic and the real contributes to a deep understanding of the meaning of fairy tales. In the author's fairy tale, the disclosure of the idea and the instructive component completely depend on the talent of a particular writer.

The originality of O. Wilde’s and H. Andersen’s fairy tales is due to the aesthetic ideas of the writer, his perception of the surrounding world. The main moral problems touched upon by them in fairy tales are the problem of self-sacrifice, the problem of the interaction of heroes with the outside world and the problem of the correlation of external and internal beauty.

Through comparing selected fairy‑tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Oscar Wilde and their lives, I found existing differences between the authors and their stories. As I mentioned above, they have different social status and there is a difference in the number of written fairy tales. Moreover, if O.Wilde had an own family and children, H. Andersen did not. 

The first difference between fairy tales is that the main character of O. Wilde’s fairy tale is a bird which is nightingale and the main character of  H. Andersen’s fairy tale is human who is Gerda. Secondly, if Gerda survives in the end of the story, the nightingale remains without reward for his sacrifice. Finally«The Nightingale and the Rose» is a sad story and «The Snow Queen» is a story with a happy end.