“The Tinder Box”
“In the night the dog came again, took the princess on his back and ran with her to the soldier.” These words accompany our art for today.
This wonderful little piece is by the Danish illustrator, Kay Nielsen. It was made to accompany the fairy tale, “The Tinder Box,” by Hans Christian Andersen. This is one of the many gorgeous pieces Nielsen created for a publication of ‘The Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen’. It was published by Pook Press in 1924. This particular project took Nielsen twelve years to complete and included such fantastical tales as “The Real Princess (The Princess and the Pea”), “The Nightingale”, and “The Snow Queen” amongst others. “The Tinder Box” is the first story in the book and this illustration was used as the frontispiece.
As many fairy tales are, “The Tinder Box” is dark and violent. This is a quick summation of the story:
In “The Tinder Box”, a soldier gets payment of gold from an old witch for recovering a tinderbox for her from within the depths of an old tree. In the tree, he meets three large and unusual looking dogs with eyes as large as saucers. As the witch won’t tell the soldier what the tinder box is for, he strikes her dead by cutting off her head. After spending all the gold in the following months, he finds himself poor and once again thinks on the old tinder box.
Trying to figure out what the meaning of the tinder box is, he strikes it and is immediately visited by the unusual looking dogs with large eyes from within the old tree. To his delight, they bring him whatever he wishes for. After several wishes of gold and money and several strikes on the tinder box, the soldier wishes for the dog to bring him the king’s daughter, a princess who is hidden away from the public, so that he may gaze upon her. The dog dutifully brings the sleeping princess to the soldier who gives her a kiss while she sleeps before the dog brings her back home.
The dog brings the sleeping princess to visit the soldier for the next two nights. The king and queen, parents of the princess, find out that she is taken every night and are very angry. After they seize the soldier and are about to have him hanged, the soldier uses the tinder box to call the dogs to save him. The dogs kill the king and queen in the process. The soldier marries the princess and becomes the new king.
In this image, Kay Nielsen neatly depicts the sleeping princess as she is being carried upon the dog’s back to the waiting soldier. It is night and the full moon hangs in the sky. The dog and princess stand out in warmer colors against cool colors of the background.
This image from “The Tinder Box” is sold today online as poster art, cards, and in reproductions of the original publication.
For more on Kay Nielsen, please visit his short biography here.
You can find more artists to learn about here.
