While the emotional sophistication of his stories can make them seem darker than their child-friendly frames at first suggest, there is no shortage of humor or high spirits in Andersen’s fanciful canon. Only a dozen or so of his more than 150 tales were drawn from existing folktales, in the manner of the Brothers Grimm; the rest came straight from his own imagination, enlivened by the vernacular ease and immediacy that made their telling innovative. Despite their relatively recent invention, Andersen’s best tales—“The Emperor’s New Clothes,” “The Princess and the Pea,” “The Snow Queen,” “The Nightingale,” and “Thumbelina,” to mention a few—have taken such strong root in our collective imagination that many readers fail to recognize that they have an author. Famously insecure in life, Andersen would almost certainly be stung by this failure to recognize his genius; but what better tribute to his stories than the assumption that they’re as old as time?