But it was not until he was 30 that he wrote his first fairy tales. Published in Denmark in 1836 and across Europe within a decade, The Little Mermaid made his name. Other collections followed, and soon he was being lionized in Copenhagen and beyond. He began traveling widely and also published essays about his wanderings.
Yet he remained an outsider, and it was probably this that enabled him to empathize with many of the losers who appear in his stories. Biographers invariably argue that he identified with the Ugly Duckling -- who was abused for his odd appearance until it was recognized he was actually a swan -- and that he remembered his mother's difficult early years when he wrote The Little Match-Seller, about a girl who ends up freezing to death.
Although a self-made man who could claim to have triumphed against all odds, he was also a loner who appears never to have had a physical relationship with any of the women or men he fell in love with. His repressed bisexuality was long studiously ignored by Danish scholars. Today, it is generally acknowledged here as another example of his complexity.
However, this bicentenary seems devoted less to the tortured writer than to the universality of his stories. To spread this word, the Andersen foundation has named "ambassadors" in a score of countries -- among them Harry Belafonte, Roger Moore, Susan Sarandon, the Brazilian soccer star Pele and the writers A.S. Byatt and Isabel Allende. The foundation and the town of Odense also gave special awards to the German writer Gunter Grass and the American literary critic Harold Bloom.
This international note was reinforced at Saturday's spectacle, Once Upon a Time, which was presented in English and televised in a half dozen countries. Between excerpts from a movie about Andersen's life projected onto three huge screens, singers and dance groups interpreted different fairy tales, starting with Jean-Michel Jarre's light-and-sound version of The Shadow and including Australia's Tap Dogs imagining The Red Shoes. A new UNICEF song composed by Carsten Morch was performed by Hayley Westenra of New Zealand and Morten Harket of Norway. The percussionists Safri Duo of Denmark interpreted The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Shenyang Acrobatic Troupe of China did a daring version of The Nightingale.
But it was left to two very different American singers to stop the show: Renee Fleming sang O Silver Moon from Dvorak's opera Rusalka to an ecstatic ovation, and Tina Turner had the stadium on its feet with What's Love Got to Do With it.
Strangely absent from the celebrations, though, is almost any mention of Danny Kaye, the man whom many older Americans perhaps most identify with Andersen. Playing the storyteller in Charles Vidor's 1952 movie Hans Christian Andersen, Kaye had a generation of children singing Wonderful, Wonderful Copenhagen. But that fictionalized version of Andersen's life is no longer welcome here.
"The 20th century offered many a sentimentalized version of his life story," Seeberg wrote in an essay for this occasion, "not least in the Hollywood adaptation from 1952 where Danny Kaye depicts Andersen as a sweet, pathetic entertainer, reducing the image of the fairy-tale poet to a caricature: a divinely inspired half-wit. Nothing could be more unfair."
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