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. In no time at all, he is living back in the grand hotel where he was living before he lost all his money, with all his fine clothes again. The soldier soon learns that if he strikes the tinder box once, the first dog will appear if he strikes it twice, the dog from the second chamber with the silver coins will appear and three times will summon the large dog from the ‘gold’ chamber. When the dog asks the soldier how he can be of service, the soldier demands some money, and the dog quickly vanishes, only to return shortly after with a bag of copper coins. He strikes a match to light the tinder box so he can look around his room, when lo and behold! The dog from the first chamber in the tree appears before him. Living in rags and in squalid digs, he has nothing but the tinder box he had fetched for the witch. Unfortunately, he keeps spending, and because he has no job, he is eventually penniless again. The soldier becomes well-liked about town, not least because he gives a fair amount of his money away. When the soldier hears of a beautiful princess who is kept locked away in a brazen castle (i.e., a castle made of brass) by her father, the king, because the king had heard a prophecy that his daughter would marry a common soldier (and there’s nothing kings want less than for their daughters to marry ordinary soldiers), the soldier longs to see the princess, but he’s told it’s no good: nobody can see her. With his new-found wealth, he turns himself into a fine-looking gentleman, wearing the best clothes. He then continues on his way towards town, with all his treasure – and with the tinder box. She says she won’t tell him and, true to his word, the soldier cuts her head off. But before he does so, he demands to know what she wants with it, and threatens to cut off her head with his sword if she refuses.
When he’s back out of the tree and standing before the witch, she tells him to hand over the tinder box. When he signals to the witch to pull him up, she reminds him about her tinder box, and he confesses he’d forgotten it! So he goes and finds it.