The lighter
The lighter (Danish: Fyrtøjet) is an art fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen from 1835.
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A soldier returns home after completing the war. On the way he meets an old witch who offers him money if he can get her a lighter that her grandmother lost in a hollow tree. She wants to lower him into the cavity on a rope and then pull him up again. She explains to the soldier how he can use a blue checked apron that she gives him to soothe the large dogs that are supposed to be under the tree. As described by the witch, in the cave under the tree, the soldier comes one after the other to three chambers, each with a huge dog. The dogs, which are particularly distinguished by their strikingly large eyes and of which one is larger than the other, sit on boxes, the first of which is filled with copper, the second with silver and the third with gold coins. The soldier can help himself to all boxes and finds the lighter on the bottom of the tree. The old woman pulls him back up and demands her lighter. But the soldier refuses to give her the lighter if she doesn't tell him what it's for. When the witch refuses to answer him, he cuts off her head and moves on to town.
With the newly acquired wealth, he rents a room in the best inn and buys elegant clothes. He learns from the population that the king has a beautiful daughter, who he hides in a copper castle to prevent her from marrying an ordinary soldier, which she was prophesied at the cradle. The soldier has a great desire to take a look at the princess, but sees no opportunity to do so. A lot of "friends" ingratiate themselves with the newcomer, but after he has used up his money, he loses the wrong friends again and has to move into a poor attic room. When the soldier tries to light a candle with a lighter, he discovers the secret of the device: it calls the dogs who can provide him with money and make wishes come true. So he is solvent again and can resume his previous life.
One night the soldier asks a dog to allow him to meet the beautiful king's daughter. The dog brings the sleeping princess to him, he enjoys her sight and kisses her. The next morning, over breakfast, the princess reports about the nightly experience, which she considers a dream. The king and queen, a particularly clever woman, are alarmed and consider it possible that there is something more serious behind the story. The Queen has the girl guarded by an old lady-in-waiting the following night. Another dog appears and takes the princess with him. The lady-in-waiting follows them and makes a cross with chalk on the soldier's front door. But the dog notices this when he brings the princess back and puts the same sign on all the front doors in town. The next morning the royal couple and their entourage try to identify the soldier's house with the help of the marked door, but this fails because all the doors are marked.
Now the queen is tying a bag of buckwheat grains on her daughter's back, in which she has cut a small hole. When a dog kidnaps the princess again the following night, the grains trickle unnoticed onto the floor and create a trail to the soldier's house. He is identified in this way and sentenced to death on the gallows. On the morning before the execution, the soldier asks a shoemaker boy, who hurries past his prison hole to the place of execution, to get him the lighter that was left in the inn for a small reward. On the gallows, the soldier asks to be allowed to smoke one last pipe. The king grants the condemned man the request. When he struck fire three times with his lighter, the three huge dogs appear. They pounce on the judges and the royal couple, throw them up in the air and kill them. The king's soldiers are frightened and the people make the soldier and the princess the new royal couple. The fairy tale ends with a parade of the two in the king's carriage through the city, with the three dogs running ahead. The princess is satisfied because she is released from her captivity in the copper castle and becomes queen.
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- Hans Christian Andersen: fairy tales. Revised by Ingrid Kondrková. Werner Dausien Verlag, Hanau 1969, pp. 5–12.
- Christian Strich (Ed.), Tatjana Hauptmann (Ill.): The great fairy tale book. The most beautiful fairy tales from all over Europe. Diogenes Verlag , Zurich 1987, pp. 178-188.
Related works
- The blue light with the Brothers Grimm .
- Aladdin and the magic lamp from a thousand and one nights
The fairy tale The Blue Light from the Brothers Grimm's collection has many parallels with The Lighter and is obviously based on the same narrative tradition. The parallel with the fairy tale from the Aladdin cycle, on the other hand, is solely the motif of the wish-fulfillment through a magical object that summons fantastic helpers. This motif can also be found in other similar fairy tales, such as The Spirit in the Glass . Negative side effects of the wish-fulfillment through a ghost can also be found in Robert Louis Stevenson's story The Bottle Goblin .
Movie
The fairy tale was filmed in 1959 by DEFA under the same name Das Feuerzeug , but it wasn't until 1961 that it was also released in German cinemas. In the Federal Republic of Germany there were reservations on the part of the distributors because of the anti-capitalist tendency of the film: “The film [...] is entertaining and moving, but [...] cannot be played. It is not appropriate to show the rich in the mirror of their hard-heartedness and to show a kind of revolution at the end of the film [...] ”(quote from SuperIllu 45/06).
Illustrations
Illustration by Vilhelm Pedersen (1849)
Illustration by Alfred Walter Bayes (1895)
Bayesian (1895)
Bayesian (1895)
Web links
The lighter at Zeno.org .