08/12/2024
It is a fantastical Friday.
“In the night the dog came again, took the princess on his back and ran with her to the soldier.” These words accompany the art.
This illustration is by the Danish artist, Kay Nielsen. It is an illustration of the fairy tale, “The Tinder Box,” by Hans Christian Andersen. This is one of many pieces Nielsen created for ‘The Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen’, published in 1924.
This project took Nielsen twelve years to complete and included such tales as “The Real Princess (The Princess and the Pea”), “The Nightingale”, and “The Snow Queen". “The Tinder Box” is the first story in the book and this illustration was used as the frontispiece.
In "The Tinder Box", a soldier gets payment of gold from a witch for recovering a tinderbox from within the depths of an old tree. In the tree, he meets three large and unusual dogs with eyes as large as saucers. The witch refuses to tell the soldier what the tinder box is for, so he strikes her dead. He spends all the gold in the following months, and he finds himself poor. Once again, he thinks on the tinder box.
Trying to figure out its use, he strikes the tinder box and is visited by the unusual dogs with large eyes from within the old tree. To his delight, they bring him whatever he wishes. After wishes of gold and money, the soldier wishes for the king’s daughter, a princess who is hidden from the public, so that he may gaze upon her. The dog brings the sleeping princess to the soldier who gives her a kiss 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 and are angry. After they seize the soldier and are about to have him hanged, the soldier uses the tinder box to call the dogs. The dogs kill the king and queen. The soldier marries the princess and becomes the new king.
Kay Nielsen 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.
