The Life and Stories of H.C. Andersen - Lena H Brennand & Cat Irving - Zoom

The Life and Stories of H.C. Andersen

Long before Disney and Pixar, there was Hans Christian Andersen—a poor shoemaker’s son from Odense whose imagination would enchant the world. In this lecture, we journey through the extraordinary life of Denmark’s most celebrated storyteller, from his humble beginnings and restless travels across Europe to his friendships with royalty, artists, and literary greats.

We will uncover the inspiration behind timeless tales like The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, and The Ugly Duckling, exploring how Andersen’s own triumphs, heartbreaks, and unrequited loves found their way into his fables. Alongside his fairy tales, we will meet the man himself—eccentric, romantic, and endlessly curious—through his diaries, letters, and the anecdotes of those who knew him.

Blending biography, history, and literary magic, this talk invites you to step into a 19th-century world of candlelit parlours, grand salons, and windswept northern shores, where every life holds the seed of a fairy tale—if only we learn how to tell it.

Speaker Bio

Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience, Lena's New Book - Mythical Creatures in Scandinavian Folklore is now available on Amazon

Speaker Bio:

Cat Irving has been the Human Remains Conservator for Surgeons’ Hall since 2015 and has been caring for anatomical and pathological museum collections for over twenty years. After a degree in Anatomical Science she began removing brains and sewing up bodies at the Edinburgh City Mortuary. Following training in the care of wet tissue collections at the Royal College of Surgeons of England she worked with the preparations of William Hunter at the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow University, where she is now Consultant Human Remains Conservator. Cat is a licensed anatomist, and gives regular talks on anatomy and medical history. She recently carried out conservation work on the skeleton of serial killer William Burke

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