No, it was more likely due to Andersen’s glowing imagination. His story about the court cards is among the radically deep insights into the nursery, children’s behaviour and psychology, something which was completely new in the 1830s and 1840s. Hitherto, nobody else had ever spoken to children so consistently on their own level; the sum of imagination and conceptual power in a confrontation between children and the child in Andersen’s own mind was often so intense that there was a risk of setting fire to the paper. The fact that Andersen could create such delicate patterns and gossamery, graceful dancers out of a thickly folded piece of paper with the help of a crude, heavy pair of scissors was pure magic in the eyes of children. The eldest of the daughters at Holsteinsborg Manor remembered in particular, later in life as a grown-up baroness, the light, delicate dolls Andersen had cut for her out of white paper and which she afterwards had placed on the table and blown at carefully so that they fluttered back and forth: “He always cut with an enormous pair of paper scissors, and I simply couldn’t understand how he could cut such pretty, delicate things with his big hands and this enormous pair of scissors.” Unlike many of the silhouette and paper cutters of the period, Andersen never began with a pencil sketch of his subject. Instead, he cut from an inner horizon – improvised – as we can see from the two very beautiful and romantic bouquet holders from the Laage-Petersen Collection (Laage-Petersen, No. 658 + Laage-Petersen, No. 656) which were designed to wrap round the rather unorthodox – if not to say “post-modern” – flower bouquets which he made with the flowers he found in manor house gardens and growing wild in ditches, dunes and on the moors.                     With his sense of colour, ability to think three-dimensionally and pictorial talents, he was able to embark on very large and often quite complicated paper-cuts that demanded both time and concentration. Quite splendid is the big paper-cut for the Melchior family, which now hangs on a wall in the Andersen House in Odense. It combines most of the figures, symbols, subjects and themes in Andersen’s paper art, and at the same time includes a number of small puzzle pictures of the kind that have a form or figure concealed within the main lines of the paper-cut. Something of the same kind often takes place in Andersen’s fairy-tales and stories, which may well have several layers of meaning and thus expose themselves to two, three or four possible interpretations. Andersen often exploited the possibility for a puzzle or silhouette effect in his paper art with great elegance. See, for example, the relatively simple paper-cut “Dancers under Trees” in the Laage-Petersen Collection (Laage-Petersen, No. 656), where two young sylphs, beneath old, threatening treetops that are hardly distinguishable from evil stepmothers or grumpy witches, form a puzzle picture whose black base could be both an oriental palace and a Chinese temple, or a ship bound for other worlds into which the young girls, together with the beholder of the paper-cut, dance and dream themselves: “Come on! This way!” In his collages in the large, well-organized picture-books for children in families which Andersen frequently visited, his artistic form of expression was extremely modern. They often included such varied and ephemeral material as cut-out fragments of periodicals, train tickets, bills, advertisements, wine-bottle labels, stamps, maps and the like, which were then coloured or given another layer of material, for example colourful fragments, such as surplus from a paper-cut or a very short poem, written in flowing ink that gathered the scattered parts of the collage together in short, rhyming lines of verse such as “En linedans / under træernes krans. / Manden nederst, han hedder Frands!” (“Tightrope-walking / beneath the treetops / Below is the man, his name is Franz!”) and “Guld på tværs, / indeni et vers, / det er komers.” (“Gold across, / a verse inside, / that’s fun.” [?] It certainly was! In many places in Andersen’s hundreds of collages we find an expressionistic idiom that points directly towards the collage art of dadaism and surrealism in the 1920s.                     If Andersen’s collages are thus avant-gardist, his more isolated and unusual paper-cuts seem to reach back in time, back to his childhood, to nature and to the beginning of all things, to archetypal, primitive conceptions related to an ancient world of legends and fairy-tales that had been so vivid in his own youth and marked his impoverished childhood in town and rural surroundings, where the oral narrative tradition was strong and the number of listening ears and clairvoyant eyes enormous.                     In a prolongation of the way his scissors cut their way back, consciously as well as unconsciously, to his strongly superstitious mother and his rationalistic, fairy-tale-loving father in his cobbler’s workshop squeezed into a corner of the tiny room in Munkemøllerstræde in Odense, Andersen took another couple of steps backwards into the history of mankind. And in his very simple and crudely executed paper-cuts, which in certain cases look as though they had been torn with his fingers (and sometimes had been, using newspaper or the leaves of a gum tree!) he gave life to a long series of colourful figures and masks. On the one hand, these standing, sitting and balancing figures (for instance Laage-Petersen, No. 657 + Laage-Petersen, No. 658) are pendants to the colourful and widely ramified gallery of characters in Andersen’s 156 fairy-tales. On the other hand they are often so grotesque and primitive (Hans Christian Ørsted's Picture-Book, fol. 4 verso) that in many cases they resemble mythical or cultic figures known to us from heathen times, from the Inuit culture in the polar regions as well as ancient tribes in the heart of Africa and outer Polynesia, where orally narrated and sculpturally formed art has always been associated with a mythological attitude to life. Andersen’s own father, who knew how to use a pair of scissors and a needle, had been quite a clever paper-cutter, and it was he who taught the sensitive, feminine boy how to handle a pair of scissors and how to cut in many different kinds of materials. In his youth, the cobbler in Munkemølle-stræde had been good at composing so-called “pledge-letters”. A letter of this kind obliged the receiver to guess the identity of the sender – an early form of valentine – and always involved a touch of roguish eroticism. And he could also cut and paste pictures and arrange them in the funniest ways, as Andersen relates in The Story of My Life, so that they could be transformed, as if by magic, just by pulling a string. He had also built a little theatre in a box with a peephole through which his son – who was crazy about the theatre – could see a series of little nodding puppets.                     As an adult Andersen thus had an extremely well-developed appreciation of the possibilities of both the tool and the material, and at the same time a feeling for, and grasp of, the attractively ornamental as well as the more twisted and distorted notions that rumbled in the depths of the rural superstition in which his mother placed her faith and for which her son remained a mouthpiece throughout his life. And it is this natural, close association with the world underground that we find everywhere in Andersen’s writings, drawings, collages and paper-cuts, where elves, gnomes, witches, pixies and trolls materialize time and again (Laage-Petersen, No. 658 + Hans Christian Ørsted's Picture-Book, fol. 30 verso + Portman No. 279 + Laage-Petersen, framed cuttings), together with more amorphous creatures known from the rural world and from the beliefheld in vigorous objects and figures by heathen peoples from which his half-crazy grandfather’s strange wood-carvings had also once originated.                     Wearing an imperial crown of coloured paper and adorned with fresh beech branches stuffed into his trousers, his grandfather had wandered round the streets of Odense, followed by a chorus of jeering boys, trying to sell his imaginative wood carvings – these “people with animal heads, animals with wings and strange birds” as Andersen writes in The Story of My Life. And from the grandson’s scissors, throughout his life as a writer, flowed a series of similarly humoristic, optimistic representatives of an enchanting, timeless, natural and legendary world which, in line with the technical and scientific conquests of the century, industrialization and the whole modern breakthrough, became more and more distant and strange. As a German admirer expressed it in a toast to the Danish writer in 1873, all the characters in his fairy-tales were a true expression of what he called “the splendour of poetry in our materialistic times”.                     And there they stand, sit, hang and hop to this day, all Andersen’s fairy-tale characters, in his writing and in his paper-cuts, these timeless spectators and graceful, grinning challenges to the modern world. As such, we should always accept them kindly and gratefully. They mean well. As Andersen added in a note to a paper-cut representing a “Tableau of Dancers”:

”Fra H.C. Andersens saks sprang et eventyr straks Du klipningen fik, Du er den milde kritik!” (From Andersen's scissors A fairy-tale sprang forth. You were given the paper-cut; You are the kindly critic!)