Diary: Kathryn Davis on Who Wrote the Fairy Tales (Part Two)

Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Steadfast Tin Soldier,” illustrated by Elizabeth MacKinstry (1933) and an unidentified illustrator, and “The Elder-Tree Mother,” illustrated by Anne Anderson (1934) and Polish illustrator Jan Marcin Szancer (1951)

[Begin at the beginning here]

“The Steadfast Tin Soldier” ends when a young man (“without rhyme or reason … no doubt the goblin in the snuffbox was to blame”) throws the tin soldier into the stove, and a breeze blows the paper dancer in after it. “When the maid took away the ashes the next morning, she found the soldier in the shape of a little tin heart. But of the pretty dancer nothing was left except her spangle, and that was burned as black as coal.”