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When scholar Maria Tatar began her exploration of fairy tales, she wasn't enchanted as much as intrigued. "I started work in a mode that was really archival, interpretive, and historical," she says about researching her 1987 book, The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales. She was looking at the origins of the stories, how they evolved over time, how they spread.

"And then," she recalls, "I noticed that my audiences, when I went to bookstores or libraries, were always just wide-eyed—not while I was speaking but at the end of my talk, when they would start to describe their own experiences of reading fairy tales. I kept hearing words like ‘magic,' ‘enchanting,' ‘haunting beauty'—some of the words that you see," Tatar adds with a laugh, "when a Disney film is advertised. And I also heard this from my students again and again."

Formerly Dean of Humanities at Harvard, author of acclaimed (not to mention gorgeous) volumes such as The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales and The Annotated Brothers Grimm, Tatar has just published another oversize treasure chest of stories, artwork, and fascinating asides. The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen isn't some dusty old nursing home for footnotes, as such anthologies can sometimes be, but instead a lively party populated with some of the most enduring characters in our shared culture: the Little Mermaid, the Ugly Duckling, the Little Match Girl, in Tatar's own translations of the nineteenth-century Danish writer's stories.

Tatar was wary of how such tales "are supposed to weave a magic spell and in some ways keep you from thinking critically about them"—until, that is, one day when she was re-reading the familiar tale of the Emperor's New Clothes. "All of a sudden I just had this incredible rush when I came to the description of the invisible cloth. I think it was really the word ‘gossamer,' in one of the older translations, and this idea that a cloth could be like spiderwebs, and all of a sudden the enchanting beauty of something that is invisible just became so palpable to me." She remembered how as a child she had constructed the cloth in her mind's eye, even though it never actually materializes in the story.

This association made her think of E. B. White's description in Charlotte's Web of the spider's web as "a thing of beauty," and then Charlotte's mantra for web-building: Attach, ascend, repeat. "That also came back to me, and the way in which those words became a kind of talisman for me as a child—this idea of attaching to something and being expanded and raised by it. That's what life is, in a way—building a web-like ladder, and you hope the direction will be onward and upward."

But why are fairy tales still so potent even after undergoing translation into another medium? Disney animators would have no job without them; in the 1990s there was even a TV series called Beauty and the Beast. Concentrated imagery, answers Tatar: "They deliver these little incisive shocks, through a combination of images of beauty and horror—and sometimes beauty and horror combined." Although skeptical about "timeless universals," Tatar admits that such tales "really do capture, in an extraordinarily compact way, our deepest fears—and our most ardent hopes and desires, as well. It seems to me that the role of imagination really comes in there, because there are certain writers—and many of them write books for children—who create these images that require us to use our imagination, to work. It's almost a collaboration with the writer to create ‘a thing of beauty.'"

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