The Biblical motifs in Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tales

摘要

In this thesis, we deal with biblical motifs in the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. In the theoretical part, we have identified a fairy tale and literary motif, presented the life and work of H. C. Andersen, the history of the translation of his fairy tales in Slovenian and two books of his fairytales. We describe the basic features of the Bible and its influence on literature. Through the Curriculum for Slovenian and reading books for primary school we checked to Andersen's fairy tales and biblical passages that are learned by students. We present the mission of the Centre of Hans Christian Andersen in Denmark and the results of their research on the emergence of religious motifs in Andersen's fairy tales. In the empirical part, we used quantitative and qualitative content analysis of texts. We wanted to find out which Biblical motifs can be traced in the fifties Andersenih fairy tales collected in books Tales and Fairy 2, which biblical motifs occur most frequently in Andersen's fairy tales and which fairy tales contain the most various biblical motifs. In the analysis of ten of the most common biblical motifs we seek explanations from the Dictionary of the Slovenian language and quotes from the Bible. We also seek quotes from ten Andersen fairy tales with a maximum different of biblical motifs and his autobiography The Story of my life in places, where these motifs appear. We wanted to know, if there is any link between the occurrence of the ten most common biblical motifs in Andersen's fairy tales and his religious feelings, which are described in his autobiography. We found that in 48 % of Andersen's fairy tales in our sample, appeares at least one of 34 different biblical motifs. Fairy tales from several different biblical motifs are: The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf with 14 different biblical motifs, The Red Shoes with 11 different motifs and biblical The Snow Queen with 10 different biblical motifs. The most common biblical motif that we have seen are: the motif of Prayer, which appears in 11 different Andersen's fairy tales, the motive of God which appears in 10 different motif and the motif of Hymn, psalm which appears in 10 different Andersen's fairy tales too. Finally, we also found that 80 % of the most common biblical motifs, which are found in Andersen's fairy tales, also occurs in Andersen's autobiography.