This does make him more interesting, and is something that helps to distinguish Andersen’s tales from many earlier fairy tales, the Perrault ones if not the Grimm tales. We say that Andersen overdoes things because something about ‘The Tinder Box’ leaves a bitter taste. The story takes the idea of wish-fulfilment and really runs with it – perhaps even overdoing it somewhat. There are three chambers at the bottom of the tree, and three dogs guarding the treasure the soldier has the dog abduct the princess for three nights before he is caught.īut of course, the soldier has more than three wishes, and can call upon the dogs from the tinder box a seemingly endless number of times. The ‘rule of three’ or ‘pattern of three’ motif is common across fairy tales – three wishes, three bears, three heads in the well, and so on – and ‘The Tinder Box’ has more ‘threes’ than you can shake an oversize dog’s paw at. However, the idea of the genie or spirit able to grant wishes to the hero is hardly unique to the Aladdin story, either, and Andersen, as Iona and Peter Opie observe in their excellent edition, The Classic Fairy Tales, was also recalling a Danish folk tale, ‘Aanden i Lyset’, or ‘The Spirit in the Candle’. Meanwhile, the tinder box, with its summoning of a helpful spirit with the ability to grant wishes, clearly recalls the tale of Aladdin and the magic lamp. Sure enough, when the thieves turn up to sneak into Ali Baba’s house and kill him, they cannot work out which house is his, since all houses in the area bear the same chalk mark. So she goes and marks all of the neighbouring doors with similar white chalk marks. The chalking of a cross upon the door of the soldier’s hotel, and subsequent chalking of other doors in the neighbourhood to confuse the king and queen, recalls the same device in ‘ Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves’, in which Ali Baba’s clever and sharp-witted servant, a girl named Morgiana, spots the white chalk mark made by the thief and suspects something’s going on. ‘The Tinder Box’ shares a number of elements with two stories from the Arabian Nights, a fact which need hardly surprise us given the 1,001 Nights were favourite reading for the young Hans Christian Andersen.

He agrees, the princess is liberated from the castle and marries the soldier, and the dogs live with them, in what has to be one of the strangest military coups in all of literature. The crowd who have gathered to watch the execution are terrified by the dogs, but they tell the soldier to be their king, now the old one is dead. He calls upon them to save his life, and the dogs fall upon the judge, and then the king and queen, throwing them into the air until they are dashed to pieces. Taking out the tinder box, he strikes it three times, and all three dogs appear. When the time comes for the soldier to be hanged, he requests one last wish, which is to be granted the right to one last smoke before he is executed. The boy does so, passing it through the grated window of the soldier’s prison cell. He is to be hanged the next morning, and what’s more, he’s left his tinder box back in his hotel room! But he pays a boy passing his cell to go to the hotel room and get the tinder box for him.

Tinderbox mashpee