Hans Christian Andersen's First Fairy Tale

Danish experts believe they have found the first fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875). Titled "Tællelyset" (The Tallow Candle), the ink-written manuscript was found by local historian Esben Brage. Brage made the discovery in October, 2012, in an archive on the island of Funen where the Danish author was born. Historians have confirmed that the six-page manuscript was indeed written by Andersen. They dated the document to the mid-1820s, when the writer was about eighteen.

The Tallow Candle

 by

 Hans Christian Andersen

Note: Before there was electricity and electric lights, people used candles. Candles could be made from tallow. Tallow is a rendered form of mutton fat, processed from suet. It is solid at room temperature. Unlike suet, tallow can be stored for extended periods without the need for refrigeration to prevent decomposition, provided it is kept in an airtight container to prevent oxidation.



It sizzled and fizzled as the flames fired the cauldron. It was the Tallow Candle’s cradle - and out of the warm cradle came a flawless candle: solid, shining white and slim it was formed in a way that made everyone who saw it believe that it was a promise of a bright and radiant future – a promise that everyone believed the candle would really want to keep and fulfil.

The sheep – a fine little sheep – was the candle’s mother, and the melting pot its father. Its mother had given it a shiny white body and an inkling about life, but from its father it had been given a craving for the flaming fire that would eventually go to its marrow and bone and shine for it in life.

That’s how it was born.

And with the best and brightest anticipation, it was cast into existence. There it met so many, many strange creations that it became involved with, wanting to learn about life – and perhaps find the place where it would best fit in. But it had too much faith in a world where people only cared about themselves, and not at all about the Tallow Candle. A world that failed to understand the value of the candle, and thus tried to use it for its own benefit, holding the candle wrongly; uncaring fingers leaving bigger and bigger blemishes on its pristine innocence which eventually faded away, completely covered by the dirt of a surrounding world that had come much too close; much closer than the candle could endure, as it had been unable to tell grime from purity – although it remained pristine and unspoiled inside. False people found they could not reach its inner core and angrily cast the candle away as useless.

The filthy outer shell kept all the good people away – scared as they were to be tainted with grime and blemishes – and they stayed away.

So there was the poor Tallow Candle, solitary and left alone, at a loss at what to do. Rejected by the good, it now realised it had only been a tool to further the wicked. It felt so unbelievably unhappy, because it had spent its life to no good end – in fact it had perhaps sullied the better parts of its surroundings. It just could not determine why it had been created or where it belonged; why it had been put on this earth – perhaps to end up ruining itself and others.

More and more, and deeper and deeper, it contemplated – but the more it considered itself, the more despondent it became, finding nothing good, no real substance for itself, no real goal for the existence it had been given at its birth. As if the grime had also covered its eyes.

But then it met a little flame from a tinder box. It knew the candle better than the Tallow Candle knew itself. The tinder box had such a clear view – straight through the outer shell – and inside it found so much good. It came closer and there was bright expectation in the candle – it lit and its heart melted.

Out burst the flame, like the triumphant torch of a blissful wedding. Light burst out bright and clear all around, bathing the way forward with light for its surroundings – its true friends – who were now able to seek truth in the glow of the candle.

The body too was strong enough to give sustenance to the fiery flame. One drop upon another, like the seeds of a new life, trickled round and chubby down the candle, covering the old grime with their bodies. They were not just the bodily, but also the spiritual issue of the marriage.

And the Tallow Candle had found its right place in life – and shown that it was a real candle, and went on to shine for many a year, pleasing itself and the other creations around it.

Two Long One-Act Plays In Which The Weak & The Vulnerable Get Dumped On by Dale Andersen

The Little Match Girl

November 22, 2012. Eight Chinese officials have been fired or suspended after five boys died in a rubbish bin after suffocating on fumes from charcoal they burned to stay warm, according to state-run media. The bodies of the boys, aged between 9 and 13, were found by a trash collector in Bijie in China's southwestern Guizhou province. They are believed to have died the night before, as rain fell and temperatures plunged to as low as 33 degrees Fahrenheit.

Users on China's social media platforms expressed shock and disgust, with some questioning how society could have allowed such young children to fall through the cracks. There are estimated to be more than 150,000 street children in China, according to official figures quoted by Xinhua. State media reported that four of the five boys found dead in the dumpster were being cared for by their aging, blind grandmother who had difficulty caring for herself. A local resident told reporters neighbors had noticed the boys wandering the streets. "They were living in a shabby shed in a construction site near the dumpster and ate some discarded vegetables in the market," he said.

The plight of the dead children in Guizhou is being compared on China’s social media to the tale of The Little Match Girl, a Hans Christian Andersen story of a poor girl ignored by the rich who froze to death after trying to warm herself with matches. The Little Match Girl is familiar to Chinese because it is taught in reading classes in elementary schools.

The Little Match Girl

 by

 Hans Christian Andersen

It was so terribly cold. Snow was falling, and it was almost dark. Evening came on, the last evening of the year. In the cold and gloom a poor little girl, bareheaded and barefoot, was walking through the streets. Of course when she had left her house she'd had slippers on, but what good had they been? They were very big slippers, way too big for her, for they

belonged to her mother. The little girl had lost them running across the road, where two carriages had rattled by terribly fast. One slipper she'd not been able to find again, and a boy had run off with the other, saying he could use it very well as a cradle some day when he had children of his own. And so the little girl walked on her naked feet, which were quite red and blue with the cold. In an old apron she carried several packages of matches, and she held a box of them in her hand. No one had bought any from her all day long, and no one had given her a cent.

Shivering with cold and hunger, she crept along, a picture of misery, poor little girl! The snowflakes fell on her long fair hair, which hung in pretty curls over her neck. In all the windows lights were shining, and there was a wonderful smell of roast goose, for it was New Year's eve. Yes, she thought of that!

In a corner formed by two houses, one of which projected farther out into the street than the other, she sat down and drew up her little feet under her. She was getting colder and colder, but did not dare to go home, for she had sold no matches, nor earned a single cent, and her father would surely beat her. Besides, it was cold at home, for they had nothing over them but a roof through which the wind whistled even though the biggest cracks had been stuffed with straw and rags.

Her hands were almost dead with cold. Oh, how much one little match might warm her! If she could only take one from the box and rub it against the wall and warm her hands. She drew one out. R-r-ratch! How it sputtered and burned! It made a warm, bright flame, like a little candle, as she held her hands over it; but it gave a strange light! It really seemed to the little girl as if she were sitting before a great iron stove with shining brass knobs and a brass cover. How wonderfully the fire burned! How comfortable it was! The youngster stretched out her feet to warm them too; then the little flame went out, the stove vanished, and she had only the remains of the burnt match in her hand.

She struck another match against the wall. It burned brightly, and when the light fell upon the wall it became transparent like a thin veil, and she could see through it into a room. On the table a snow-white cloth was spread, and on it stood a shining dinner service. The roast goose steamed gloriously, stuffed with apples and prunes. And what was still better, the goose jumped down from the dish and waddled along the floor with a knife and fork in its breast, right over to the little girl. Then the match went out, and she could see only the thick, cold wall. She lighted another match. Then she was sitting under the most beautiful Christmas tree. It was much larger and much more beautiful than the one she had seen last Christmas through the glass door at the rich merchant's home. Thousands of candles burned on the green branches, and colored pictures like those in the printshops looked down at her. The little girl reached both her hands toward them. Then the match went out. But the Christmas lights mounted higher. She saw them now as bright stars in the sky. One of them fell down, forming a long line of fire.

"Now someone is dying," thought the little girl, for her old grandmother, the only person who had loved her, and who was now dead, had told her that when a star fell down a soul went up to God.

She rubbed another match against the wall. It became bright again, and in the glow the old grandmother stood clear and shining, kind and lovely.

"Grandmother!" cried the child. "Oh, take me with you! I know you will disappear when the match is burned out. You will vanish like the warm stove, the wonderful roast goose and the beautiful big Christmas tree!"

And she quickly struck the whole bundle of matches, for she wished to keep her grandmother with her. And the matches burned with such a glow that it became brighter than daylight. Grandmother had never been so grand and beautiful. She took the little girl in her arms, and both of them flew in brightness and joy above the earth, very, very high, and up there was neither cold, nor hunger, nor fear - they were with God.

But in the corner, leaning against the wall, sat the little girl with red cheeks and smiling mouth, frozen to death on the last evening of the old year. The New Year's sun rose upon a little pathetic figure. The child sat there, stiff and cold, holding the matches, of which one bundle was almost burned.

"She wanted to warm herself," the people said. No one imagined what beautiful things she had seen, and how happily she had gone with her old grandmother into the bright New Year.

Download a copy of the story HERE

THE JAPANESE NEXT DOOR....

This is about our neighbors, the Miyakes.

The Miyakes aren't our right-now neighbors. They were our neighbors when I was born, sixty-five years ago. By "our," I mean the Andersens.

So before I talk about the Miyakes (pronounced Mee-YAH-key), I better say something about the Andersens.

The Andersens were Danish farmers in California's Central Valley. Vineyards. Family farms. Grapes of Wrath. Where I grew up, there were a lot of Danes. A huge amount of Danes. A whole gaggle of Danes. And---trust me, this is going somewhere---in our family, there was always the story of Papa. Papa, Hans Peter Andersen, was my grandfather. He died at age 92. Blind for half his life. Came to America at age 17. Ellis Island, then on to Wisconsin, North Dakota and California. Now bear in mind Papa was an orphan. And orphan back then was a euphemism for having been born out of wedlock. And that was true of Papa. But Papa was a very special orphan. In fact, he was about as special as you can get and still be an orphan. For the family oral history has it that Papa's father was none other than the great Hans Christian himself. The mother, a lady of the Portuguese persuasion. Probably a groupie.

Hans Christian Andersen was, in his day, famous for his novels and travelogues and fairy tales. And he certainly did travel to Portugal and write wittily of his stay there. Alas, nothing about making the two-backed beastie with the fair Teresa......or was it Carmen......Rossetta maybe? Ah well. As the Johnny Cash song has it, I'll Never Forget What's Her Name.

So that's where Papa came from.

He named his first-born after the great writer, even though the great writer wasn't "great" enough to acknowledge him.

And that is how my my dad came to be called Hans Christian Andersen. Except, my dad was Hans Christian Andersen the farmer.



Which brings us to the Miyakes. They lived the next vineyard over on the corner of Cherry and Adams. It was a big family.

There was old Mister Miyake.



There was his wife, Umeyo, and their boys, Shigeto, Masato, Tsumoru, Kiyomi and Tadao. There was a daughter named Kimiko.

1941 happened and they were sent to a camp in Arkansas. There wasn't much time to get ready to leave. It was "Hans, will you take care of our place?" and "Of course I will."

I was born in the Miyake house. Here I am in my crib.



The Miyakes were in Arkansas from 1942 to 1945. The camp there was set out in numbered blocks. The Miyakes lived in Block 26. The Miyake boys joined the army. Here's the Block 26 list of volunteers:



In 1945, Mom and Dad got a letter from Kimiko. Mom saved it. Here it is...





As I grew up, the Miyakes were always nice to me. And they always told me what a fine man Hans Christian Andersen was. I didn't understand then what they meant. But I do now.

MY GREAT GRANDFATHER

Hans Christian Andersen spent most of 1848 feeling sorry for himself. It was not an unusual state for this hypersensitive hypochondriac, with his conflicted sexuality and his tortured awareness of his own genius. He had been flung into a gloom that January by the death of King Christian VIII of Denmark, "whom I loved unspeakably," and had been unable to shake himself out of the depression.

His closest confidante, Henriette Wulff, sent him a letter on November 18 to try to cheer him up. "You have discovered that you are that prince's child we talked about the other day," she wrote, "and you are feeling it too much! But I wish you wouldn't, because if you were descended from all the world's kings, I could not be any more fond of you."

"You have discovered that you are that prince's child . . ." What does she mean? Was it a private joke, or a reference to a story? Or an inexplicable aberration, like the time in 1830 when Bishop Blok wrote to Andersen as "Your Majesty?" The whole world knows that Hans Christian Andersen was the son of a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman, who through his own efforts and the kindness of strangers raised himself from the gutter to become a great poet.

Andersen himself called this rags-to-riches story "the fairytale of my life." But fairytale characters are not always what they seem. At the end of Adam Oehlenschlager's play Aladdin, a favorite of Andersen's, it turns out that Aladdin is not the son of a poor tailor, but instead the son of an emir. Andersen's childish imagination cast himself in the same scenario; he was, he told his first schoolfriend, a switched child of noble birth.

It is not an uncommon fantasy; just the sort of thing to expect from a solitary and dreamy boy such as Hans Christian Andersen. But in Andersen's case it is just possible that behind the consoling fantasy lies the naked truth.

Rumours about Andersen's true parentage have swirled around Denmark for a century or more. The most persistent, championed in books published there by Jens Jørgensen and Rolf Dorset, is that he was the illegitimate son of Countess Elise Ahlefeldt-Laurvig by Crown Prince Christian Frederik, the future King Christian VIII. If true, it was not just Andersen's king who died that January, but also his father...

The rest of the story is here

Everything you ever wanted to know (and more) about HCA is here

My Great-Grandfather......

The Little Prince

Hans Christian Andersen won literary immortality with his stories of an outcast boy made good. But were his timeless fairytales thinly veiled parables of his own life as the illegitimate son of a future king? Hans Christian Andersen spent most of 1848 feeling sorry for himself. It was not an unusual state for this hypersensitive hypochondriac, with his conflicted sexuality and his tortured awareness of his own genius. He had been flung into a gloom that January by the death of King Christian VIII of Denmark, “whom I loved unspeakably”, and had been unable to shake himself out of the depression.

His closest confidante, Henriette Wulff, sent him a letter on November 18 to try to cheer him up. “You have discovered that you are that prince’s child we talked about the other day,” she wrote, “and you are feeling it too much! But I wish you wouldn’t, because if you were descended from all the world’s kings, I could not be any more fond of you.”

“You have discovered that you are that prince’s child . . .” What does she mean? Is it a private joke, or a reference to a story? Or an inexplicable aberration, like the time in 1830 when Bishop Blok wrote to Andersen as “Your Majesty”? The whole world knows that Hans Christian Andersen was the son of a poor shoemaker and a washerwoman, who through his own efforts and the kindness of strangers raised himself from the gutter to become a great poet.

Andersen himself called this rags-to-riches story “the fairytale of my life”. But fairytale characters are not always what they seem. At the end of Adam Oehlenschläger’s play Aladdin, a favourite of Andersen’s, it turns out that Aladdin is not the son of a poor tailor, but instead the son of an emir. Andersen’s childish imagination cast himself in the same scenario; he was, he told his first schoolfriend, a switched child of noble birth.

It is not an uncommon fantasy; just the sort of thing to expect from a solitary and dreamy boy such as Hans Christian Andersen. But in Andersen’s case it is just possible that behind the consoling fantasy lies the naked truth.

Rumours about Andersen’s true parentage have swirled around Denmark for a century or more. The most persistent, championed in books published there by Jens Jørgensen and Rolf Dorset, is that he was the illegitimate son of Countess Elise Ahlefeldt-Laurvig by Crown Prince Christian Frederik, the future King Christian VIII. If true, it was not just Andersen’s king who died that January, but also his father.

Many Andersen experts dismiss this theory as preposterous. It relies on circumstantial evidence, gossip and guesswork. Royal patronage does not prove royal parentage, and without a DNA test it remains pure supposition. But it does raise some intriguing questions about the accepted “fairytale” of Andersen’s life.

Prince Christian Frederik and Elise Ahlefeldt-Laurvig's love affair was ignited in the summer of 1804. Gossip spoke of a baby, and even of a clandestine marriage, forbidden by the king. In 1807 Elise had a second child, Adolphine, who in old age claimed that Christian Frederik was her father.

Andersen was born in 1805. At this time, Denmark was still an absolute monarchy. Society was rigidly stratified, and there was little social mobility. A few managed, by hard work or exceptional talent, to climb the social ladder. One such was Andersen’s friend, the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. But a pauper boy stood little chance of escaping his class. As the heedless aristocratic children say in his story Kids’ Talk (given a sprightly new translation in the Franks ’ The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen): “Those people whose names end with sen, they can never, ever become anything in the world!”

Andersen’s father, Hans Andersen, who died when the boy was 11, was a shoemaker with few or no clients. His mother, Anne Marie Andersdatter, was an alcoholic washerwoman. His aunt ran a brothel in Copenhagen; his half-sister Karen Marie (always referred to as “my mother’s daughter”) was probably also a prostitute. Yet the young Hans Christian was coddled like a nobleman’s child.

His family, despite having few sources of income, wanted for nothing. There was no pressure on the boy to work. In fact, before the days of free universal education, he was sent to school. His mother even felt able to insist on an extraordinary proviso: in no circumstance was the boy to be beaten. When a teacher forgot this and birched him, Hans Christian was withdrawn and sent to another establishment.

In those days, corporal punishment, ranging from the birch to a clip around the ear, was the rule for all pupils save the children of royalty and the upper nobility — and Hans Christian Andersen. At his grammar school in Slagelse the same rule applied. His Latin master, Mr Snitker, was so frustrated by it that he kept his own son Georg handy, so that he could thwack him whenever Andersen made a mistake. “He is my own flesh and blood, so I am allowed to punish him.”

Andersen was miserable at Slagelse. He was dyslexic, his basic education was woefully deficient, and he was six years older than his fellow pupils. Worse, he was forbidden to write stories, plays or poetry. He was convinced that Simon Meisling, the principal, was trying “to destroy my soul”. Andersen had been sent to school after three wasted years spent hanging around the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen. Nobody seems to have seriously thought he showed great promise as a singer, dancer, actor or writer. Nevertheless he was indulged and financially maintained by a number of high-born people with close relations to the royal family.

The general view of Andersen in these years was that he was a figure of fun. The aim of sending him to school was not to fulfil his artistic ambition but to stamp it out. But why should this gawky boy, with his hopelessly misdirected enthusiasms, have seemed a suitable candidate to turn from a guttersnipe into a gentleman? His fees — twice those paid for other pupils — came directly from a royal fund. The Crown Princess sent him pocket money; all kinds of important people, most notably the State Councillor Jonas Collin, kept a careful eye on him. Andersen was to become Denmark’s greatest writer, the supreme master of the literary fairytale, but few would have predicted it then. They were more likely to agree with Simon Meisling’s furious description of his lanky pupil: “an insufferable skittle, a mad person, a stupid numskull!”

Could it be that Andersen really was the Crown Prince’s son? Contemporary rumour and oral tradition have it that such a child existed, and was given “into the hands of good people”. Was Andersen foisted on Hans and Anne Marie to raise as their own, like the unwanted baby in Andersen’s story Anne Lisbeth, who is given to the ditch digger’s wife because she asks the smallest payment?

Anne Marie and Hans had been married in St Knud’s Church two months before Andersen’s birth. She was in her late thirties, and already had one illegitimate daughter, who was raised by her parents; Hans was 22. Both were servants — Hans on the estate of the Ahlefeldt-Laurvigs, and Anne Marie with a family closely tied to Broholm Castle, where Elise Ahlefeldt-Laurvig’s baby is said to have been born.

The boy lived a life of extraordinary social isolation. But the young Hans Christian nevertheless received favourable attention from some of the Odense gentry, who had been asked by Rural Dean Gutfeldt (called by Andersen “my benefactor”) to keep their eyes on “a certain little boy”.

In 1816 the Crown Prince and his family moved to Odense Castle, as Christian Frederik had been made governor of Funen. In his early memoirs, privately written for a friend, Andersen describes how his mother used to take him to play at the castle with Prince Frits (later King Frederik VII), who was three years his junior. This pauper boy had no playmates on the street; only a royal prince in a castle.

When Andersen came to write his autobiography for publication he made no mention of this story, an odd omission for someone as vain as he was. But the closeness with Frits continued into adulthood. After he became king, Frits treated Hans Christian as an old friend. He liked to hear Andersen tell his fairytales, and once asked him: “How can you think up all these things? How does it all come to you? Have you got it all inside your head?” When Frits died, Andersen was the only non-family member allowed a private visit to the king’s body in its coffin.

Andersen looks back on this unlikely childhood friendship in one of his most finely crafted fairytales, The Bell, which is included in Tiina Nunnally’s meticulous translation of 30 of his best stories, Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales. The story tells of two boys who search for the source of a great bell that sounds through the forest. One is a pauper, the other is a king’s son. Although they take different routes, one in sunshine and one in shadow, in the end they arrive at the same place and embrace like brothers: “The two boys ran to each other and held hands in the great cathedral of nature and poetry. Above them rang the invisible sacred bell, and blessed spirits hovered and danced around them to a jubilant ‘Hallelujah!’ ”

If it is true that Andersen himself had come to believe that he was the older son of King Christian VIII, the story becomes a parable of destiny in which both boys represent Andersen himself. If he were a king’s son or a pauper, it did not matter, for he would still achieve his goal.

It is possible that, despite his relentless hobnobbing with royalty, Andersen even felt some relief to have been allotted the role of the poor boy rather than the king’s son. His diary records a meeting with King Maximilian II of Bavaria in 1851: “I sat alone with the king on a bench. He spoke about everything God had given me, about the fates of men, and I said I would not like to be a king, it was such a great responsibility, I would be incapable of fulfilling the task; he said that God must give one power, and through him one did what one was capable of.”

The Bell was written in 1842. Prince Christian Frederik had become King Christian VIII in 1839, and it may be that Andersen was subsequently made aware of his true parentage. He was certainly from this time included in the intimate circle of the royal family. For instance, in 1844 he was invited to join them for a 12-day holiday on the island of Føhr; a fellow guest was the king’s illegitimate daughter, Franziska Enger, known as Fanny. She was born at Castle Ludwigslust in Schleswig four months after Andersen, and given away to a castle servant to raise.

Another of Andersen’s best-known stories, The Ugly Duckling, dates from this same period. It is usually seen as a fable of a disadvantaged child overcoming all obstacles to rise from obscurity to fame. But read in the context of the king’s-son theory, the tale’s conclusion has a slightly different ring. It becomes a story about an adopted child who rejects and is rejected by his adoptive milieu, but finds true happiness when he meets his own kind, the “regal” swans. Its moral is simple: It’s no wonder you don’t feel at home in the duckyard if you’ve been hatched from a swan’s egg.

Andersen was first formally introduced to Christian Frederik, his putative father, at Odense Castle in 1819. Advised to tell the prince that he wanted to go to the grammar school, Andersen blurted out that he longed to be a singer or a dancer. The answer did not please the prince.

In 1832, when Andersen had been published but had not yet made his name, Christian Frederik sought out Anne Marie Andersdatter in the almshouse where she was spending her last years in an alcoholic haze, especially to tell her that Hans Christian was a credit to her.

Elise Ahlefeldt-Laurvig lived out her life in Germany. Although they shared a passionate interest in the theatre, music, and literature, it does not seem that Hans Christian Andersen ever met her. In his later years he was once seen picking up a picture and sighing, “If only you were still alive”; it was a portrait of Elise.

Andersen’s cagey diaries are little help in solving the mystery of his parentage. But on January 3, 1875, the last year of his life, he does allow himself one bone-dry joke. Noting how many letters he has received asking for autographs, he writes: “One has my name and address: King Christian the Ninth.”

It does not really matter; whoever his parents were, Andersen remains one of literature’s great originals. And as the old baroness says in his 1848 novel The Two Baronesses: “We are all of one piece — all made from the same clod of earth; one came in a newspaper wrapping, another in gold paper, but the clod should not be proud of that. There is nobility in every class; but it lies in the mind, not in the blood, for we are also of one blood, whatever they may say.”


Read here about Hans Christian Andersen's other body of work: paper cuttings...


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