Anna Skyggebjerg

The fantasy tale is a genre which can be traced back to the last century. In children’s literature E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Das fremde Kind (1817) [The Strange Child] and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (1865) are two of the earliest and internationally best known examples of fantasy tales. The two works show the beginnings of the genre in partly a Germanic and partly an Anglo-Saxon tradition. Both Das fremde Kind and Alice in Wonderland have had tremendous significance for Danish fantasy tales as sources of inspiration in structural and thematic areas. In both works there is a discussion about the relationship between magic and reality, the visible and the invisible; and this discussion is continued and developed in later works within the genre.

In my paper I will try to illustrate how two modern Danish children’s books, Louis Jensen’s Skelettet på hjul [The Skeleton on Wheels] (1992) and Knud Holten’s Flamme-Øglens Tåre [The Lizard’s Tear] (1999) are both traditional and innovative within the genre of fantasy tale. The reason I have chosen these two authors is that they deal with the traditions of the genre in a very original but different way. At the same time both authors are inspired from Hoffmann and Carroll. In general the two Danish examples point to a high degree of awareness of genre in the authors. The analysis of the books can be seen as a general example of how innovation in recent Danish tales of fantasy lies in taking tensions to extremes and in paying special attention to language.

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