The story
Hans Christian Andersen was born in 1805 in Odense, a town on the Danish island of Funen. At 14 he went to Copenhagen hoping to become an actor. The Royal Danish Theatre took him in for his fine soprano voice, but his voice soon broke, and he turned to writing instead.
On November 11, 1843, he published a small book of new fairy tales, and one of them was Den grimme Ælling: The Ugly Duckling. A mother duck’s last egg hatches into a big, gray, clumsy chick. The ducks and hens of the farmyard tease him, and before long he runs away.
He spends a long, hard winter on his own. When spring comes, he flies toward a group of beautiful swans, sure they will chase him off. Instead they welcome him, and when he bends his head to the water, he sees a swan looking back. He had hatched from a swan’s egg all along.
The tale has one of Andersen’s best-loved lines: “Being born in a duck yard does not matter, if only you are hatched from a swan’s egg.” Readers have long seen Andersen himself in the swan: a tall, gangly boy from a small town who grew into a writer read all over the world.
In English, an ugly duckling became an everyday name for anyone, or anything, that looks unpromising at first and blossoms later.
