How to search

Write a search phrase in the text field and click the button "Search". The reviews are in Danish or Swedish.

Go to the search page.

What does the search engine search in?

The search engine searches in contemporary reviews of Hans Christian Andersen: 32 reviews, equivalent to approximately 200 printed pages, from the poet's own time.

Besides searching in the reviews themselves the search engine searches through the notes about the reviews, the title and the bibliographic description of the reviewed works and the works, these work may contain. If you e.g. search for 'tinder box', you will find only one review, that explicitly speaks of "The Tinder Box", but six other reviews of the fairy tale collection Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Første Samling. Første Hefte ('Fairy Tales, Told for Children'), which contains "The Tinder Box".

Truncation and masking

Truncation: A search can be widened to include variations of a word by adding * or ? at the start or the end of the word:

Examples: "stor*" finds words starting with "stor", e.g. amongst others "story" and "stories".

Masking: Masking substitutes unknown letters inside words:

Examples: "*len*ger" finds "Oehlenschläger" and "Ra?bek" finds "Rahbek".

Refine the Search

There are several ways to refine the search:
  1. "All the words" means that results must contain all of the words in the input.
  2. "Some of the words" means that the result must contain at least one of the words in the input.
    This method is right, if you for example want to find either the name "Henriette" or "Jette". The method is, however, not recommendable, if the input contains very frequently used words, for example "travel", "HCA" or "the". It will return too many irrelevant results.
  3. "Whole sentence" means that all the words in the given order must be in the results.
  4. "Whole words only" means that the word(s) in the input must stand alone and not just be part of a word in the results.
    In some cases, for example searching for "Ælling" ('duckling'), this is a good idea, because you otherwise will find and have irrelevant words marked up, because the search phrase is a part of them.
  5. "Case-sensitive": Small or block letters make a difference.
    This gives a quicker search. If you have a doubt concerning when to use upper- or lower-case, choosing this option is a bad idea.

Danish vowels (æ, ø and å)

If the vowels æ, ø and å are not present on the keyboard, you may write '(ae)' instead of 'æ', '(oe)' instead of 'ø' and '(aa)' instead of å. Thus "H(oe)gh-Guldberg" equals "Høgh-Guldberg". This also applies to upper-case letters: '(AE)' for 'Æ' and so on. The two letters in the parenthesis must be either lower- or upper-case - one of each, like '(Oe)' for 'ø' or 'Ø', will not work.