The Tinderbox
 Illustration by Vilhelm Pedersen, Andersen's first illustrator (1862) | |
| Author | Hans Christian Andersen |
|---|---|
| Original title | Fyrtøjet |
| Translator | Charles Boner |
| Language | Danish |
| Genre | Fairy tale |
| Publisher | C.A. Reitzel |
Publication date | 8 May 1835 |
| Publication place | Denmark |
Published in English | 1846 |
| Media type | |
"The Tinderbox" (Danish: Fyrtøjet, "fire-steel"[1]) is a fairy tale by Danish poet and author Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875). The tale was first published 8 May 1835 in an inexpensive booklet with three other fairy tales by Andersen. The story is about a soldier who acquires a tinderbox capable of summoning three magic dogs to do his bidding. When the soldier uses the tinderbox to bring a sleeping princess to his chamber, he is arrested, but escapes execution through the intervention of the three dogs.
"The Tinderbox" was Andersen's first fairy tale, and was based upon a Scandinavian folk tale from the author's childhood. According to Andersen, the critics either ignored his fairy tale upon its publication or disouraged any further attempts in the genre. The story may reflect the author's desire for social revenge after suffering slights and snubs in his youth. "The Tinderbox" served as the source for Denmark's first animated film in 1946, and was adapted to a ballet with designs by Queen Margrethe II in 2007.
Plot summary
The story opens with a soldier climbing into a hollow tree to retrieve a magic tinderbox at the behest of a witch. The tinderbox is capable of summoning three powerful dogs to do the possessor's bidding. When the soldier finds himself in a town where a princess is kept in a locked tower, he strikes the tinderbox and orders one of the magic dogs to bring the princess to his chamber for a nocturnal visit. After several such visits, the princess's whereabouts are discovered through a trap set by her mother. The soldier is arrested and sentenced to death. At the place of execution, he strikes the tinderbox and the dogs rush in to save his life. The tale closes with the soldier and the princess being united in marriage and the three dogs enjoying the wedding feast.
Source
Andersen's source for "The Tinderbox" was a Scandinavian folk tale called "Aanden i Lyset" ("The Spirit in the Candle"). The story was known to Andersen in his childhood, and his father, a showmaker, may have been the source.[2] In the preface to the second volume of Eventyr og Historier, Andersen indicated he heard the tale "in the spinning room,[3]and during the harvesting of the hops."[4]
In the source tale, a soldier acquires a magic candle which is capable of summoning an iron man to do his bidding. The soldier uses the candle to secretly visit a princess, and is forced to summon the iron man when he is apprehended and sent to the stake.[5] Details from "Rapunzel", "Hansel and Gretel" and other tales have counterparts in Andersen's story.[5][6] Tales similar to "The Tinderbox" include "The Blue Light", a Grimm tale, "Hagop’s Wish", an Armenian tale, "Lars, My Lad!", a Swedish tale, and "Soldier of the Blue Light", an American tale from Kentucky.[7]
Publication history
On New Year's Day 1835, Andersen wrote a friend: "I am now starting on some fairy tales for children. I am going to win over future generations, you may want to know",[8] and, in a letter dated February 1835 he wrote the poet, Bernhard Severin Ingemann: "I have included a couple of those fairy-tales which I myself enjoyed so much as a child, and which I believe are not well known; I have simply written them the way I would tell them to a child."[4] Andersen had finished the tales by March 1835 and told the "clever, witty, ugly, hunchbacked" Admiral's daughter, Henriette Wulff: "I have also written some fairy tales for children; Ørsted says about them that if The Improvisatore makes me famous than these will make me immortal, for they are the most perfect things I have written; but I myself do not think so."[8] On 26 March, he observed that "they [the fairy tales] will be published in April, and people will say: the work of my immortality! Of course I shan't enjoy the experience in this world."[8]
"The Tinderbox" was Andersen's first fairy tale, and was first published in Copenhagen, Denmark by C.A. Reitzel, 8 May 1835 in an unbound 61-page booklet called Eventyr, fortalte for Børn. Første Samling. Første Hefte. 1835. (Tales, Told for Children. First Collection. First Booklet. 1835.).[8] The booklet cost 24 "skilling" (the equivalent of 25 Dkr. or approximately US$5 today), and was what Edvard Collin later referred to as a "good deal edition".[4]
"The Tinderbox" was the first tale in the booklet, which included "Lille Claus og store Claus" ("Little Claus and Big Claus"), "Prinsessen på ærten", ("The Princess and the Pea") and "Den lille Idas Blomster" ("Little Ida's Flowers").[9] The booklet saw a second edition in 1842, and a third in 1845.[4]
"The Tinderbox" was reprinted on 18 December 1849 in Eventyr. 1850. (Tales. 1850.) and again, on 15 December 1862 in Eventyr og Historier. Første Bind. 1862. (Tales and Stories. First Volume. 1862.).[9] In his "Remarks" to the tales in the second volume of Eventyr og Historier, Andersen wrote, "The style should be such that one hears the narrator. Therefore, the language had to be similar to the spoken word; the stories are for children, but adults too should be able to listen in. The first three fairy tales are ones I heard during childhood, in the spinning room and during the harvesting of the hops; "Little Ida's Flowers" on the other hand, came into being one day while visiting the poet Thiele, when I was telling his daughter Ida about the flowers at the botanical gardens; I kept and adapted a few of the child's remarks when I later wrote the fairy-tale down."[4]
"The Tinderbox" was first translated into English by Charles Boner, and first published in English in A Danish Story-Book (1846).[5]
Critical response
In his autobiography The Fairy Tale of My Life, Andersen wrote, "A few months only after the publication of The Improvisatore I brought out the first part of my Wonder Stories, but the critics would not vouchsafe to me any encouragement...The Monthly Review never deigned to mention them at all, and in Dannora, another critical journal, I was advised not to waste my time writing wonder stories. I lacked the usual form of that kind of poetry; I would not study models, said they—and so I gave up writing them; and in this alternation of feeling between gayeyty and ill-humor I wrote my next novel, O.T.. I felt just at the time a strong mental impulse to write, and I believed that I had found my true element in novel-writing."[10]
Analysis
Iona and Peter Opie suggest the tale enjoys comparison with "Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp" from The Arabian Nights: "The tale of Aladdin is, like "The Tinder Box", a tale of a mortal being made use of by a supernatural, on the promise of rich reward, and several of the incidents have much similarity."[5] The Opies note the Magician in Aladdin cannot enter the hole wherein lies the magic lamp, and inveigles Aladdin to enter for him. Once Aladdin is in the hole he discovers three halls, similar to the three chambers in Andersen's tale. Aladdin discovers the lamp, fills his pockets with riches, and then refuses to hand the lamp to the Magician—actions all paralleled by Andersen's soldier-hero. Finally, both characters win a princess through the use of a luminant. The Opies note that Andersen was twenty-nine and short of money when the tale was written, and think "Aladdin" would have had great appeal for the author.[5]
Andersen grew up poor and uneducated, and was subject to many humiliations on the road to fame and wealth. In Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller, Jackie Wullschlager writes of "The Tinderbox": "It is a confident, young man's tale—jaunty, brisk, and exhilarating. It celebrates youth over age and it has the energy and hope and satisfaction of a traditional folktale—"Aladdin", "Puss in Boots", "Jack and the Beanstalk"—whose young hero overcomes adversity and ends a contented, successful adult....For Andersen, the fairy tale was a form in which he could express forbidden emotions and thoughts without, as it were, being caught. It's no accident that of the first three folktales he chose to adapt, two are fantasies of social revenge." She notes that Andersen personalizes "The Tinderbox" with humor and detail. When the soldier finds gold in a chamber beneath the hollow tree, for example, he realizes he can now buy Copenhagen and "the cake-woman's sugar-pigs, and all of the tin-soldiers and whips and rocking-horses in the world". The author's characteristic social satire marks the moment when the soldier loses all of his riches and finds his friends will not visit him because there are too many stairs to climb to his attic dwelling. For Wullschlager, "The style [of the tale] is the greatest liberation: it draws the teller and listener together, sharing jokes against the pompous and powerful, engaging the cunning tricks that allow the poor and weak to triumph, and providing an outlet for Andersen’s rage against the bourgeois society that tried to make him conform."[8]
Tiina Nunnally observes that while Andersen borrows some details from "Aladdin" he also references other sources. The princess locked in a tower is a detail from "Rapunzel", the trail of grain from "Hansel and Gretel", and the doors marked with chalk from "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves". She notes that the Aladdin story had a special emotional significance for Andersen. As a poor grammar school student in Copenhagen, he was invited to stay with the Wulffs, a prominent Copenhagen family, in their apartment in the royal Amalienborg Palace. There, he enjoyed transports of ecstasy when given a Danish translation of Shakespeare, and wrote in his diary on 12 December 1825:
It's going for me as it did for Aladdin, who says at the close of the work as he stands at a window of the palace:
- Down there I walked when just a lad
- Each Sunday, if I was but allowed
- And gazed with wonder at the Sultan's palace.[11]
Five or six years ago, I, too, was walking around on the streets down there, didn't know a soul here in town, and now I am gloating over my Shakespeare in the home of a kind and respected family. O Lord, I could kiss you![6]
Jack Zipes views "The Tinderbox" as Andersen's way of dealing with his anger at his superiors. Zipes notes that in Andersen's early tales the rich and powerful are either overthrown or exposed as conceited, stupid, and arrogant. On another note, he observes, "Psychologically, Andersen’s hatred for his own class (his mother) and the Danish nobility (the king and queen) are played out bluntly when the soldier kills the witch and has the king and queen eliminated by the dogs. The wedding celebration at the end of the story is basically a celebration of the solidification of power by the bourgeois class in the nineteenth century: the unification of a middle-class soldier with a royal princess." Zipes decides "the soldier is justified in his use of power and money because he is essentially better than anyone else".[2]
Maria Tatar, dean for the humanities at Harvard University, notes that the soldier in Andersen's tale shares the brutal, greedy, and impetuous traits with the many soldier-heroes of the Grimms and other European collectors. She observes that he is not much of a role model for children but also notes that tales of returning warriors were usually directed toward adults. In Tatar's view, Andersen softens the story with enough magic and whimsy to make it appealing to both adults and children.[1]
Adaptations
"The Tinderbox" was the first Danish animated feature film (1946). Directed by Svend Methling, the film's principal animator was Børge Ring, who would win an Academy Award in 1984 for his animated short, Anna & Bella.[12]
In 2007, "The Tinderbox" was adapted into a 30-minute ballet with sets and costumes by Queen Margrethe II. The ballet opened in the Pantomime Theatre of Copenhagen's Tivoli Gardens.[13]
References
- ^ a b Tatar, Maria. The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen. W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. ISBN 9780393060812. p. 156–158.
- ^ a b Heiner, Heidi Anne (2008-07-21). "Annotations for "The Tinderbox"". SurLaLune Fairy Tales. Retrieved 2009-02-07.
- ^ As a child, Andersen was the favorite of the pauper women in the spinning room of an asylum where his grandmother worked. They entertained him by telling him tales, and he entertained them by sketching the human anatomy on the walls. He recalled, "...the stories told by these old ladies, and the insane figures I saw around me in the asylum, operated...so powerfully upon me, that when it grew dark, I scarcely dared to go out of the house." (Wullschlager, pp. 22–23.
- ^ a b c d e de Mylius, Johan (2009-01-07). "The Timetable Year By Year, 1835: The First Collection of Fairy-Tales". H.C. Andersens liv. Dag for dag (The Life of Hans Christian Andersen. Day By Day'. 1998). The Hans Christan Andersen Center. Retrieved 2009-02-08.
- ^ a b c d e Opie, Iona and Peter Opie. The Classic Fairy Tales. Oxford University Press, 1974. ISBN 0192115596. p. 64.
- ^ a b Nunnally, Tiina and Jackie Wullschlager (ed.). Fairy Tales. Viking, 2005. ISBN 0670033774. p. 423.
- ^ Heiner, Heidi Anne (2008-07-21). "Tales Similar to "The Tinderbox"". SurLaLune Fairy Tales. Retrieved 2009-02-07.
- ^ a b c d e Wullschlager, Jackie. Hans Christian Andersen: The Life of a Storyteller. Knopf, 2000. ISBN 0679455086. pp. 149–153.
- ^ a b "Hans Christian Andersen: The Tinder Box". Hans Christian Andersen Center. Retrieved 2009-02-05.
- ^ Andersen, Hans Christian. The Fairy Tale of My Life: An Autobiography. Cooper Square Press, 2000. ISBN 0815411057. p. 135.
- ^ Oehlenschläger, Adam Gottlob, Aladdin (1805). "Aladdin [is] a poetic drama on the writer’s own life, with the lamp of the story symbolizing intuitive poetic genius." Encyclopedia Britannica.
- ^ "From the Tinder Box to the Ugly Duckling". Retrieved 2009-02-05.
- ^ "Danish queen lends a hand for Andersen-inspired ballet". Retrieved 2009-02-05.
External links
- "Fyrtøjet". Original Danish text.
- "The Tinder Box". Jean Hersholt's English translation.