![]() He leaves the tree and asks the witch what she wants with the tinderbox. ![]() He finds the three rooms with the three dogs with enormous eyes, exactly as the witch said, and he fills his pockets with coins. The soldier agrees and climbs into the tree. Why do I suddenly think of the Nigeria email? You know, the one that says if you send your bank account info, you'll be able to help a poor widow and also make millions of dollars for yourself. In exchange, she merely wants a tinderbox, which (she claims) her sister left last time she was down there. She gives him an apron and instructs him to pick up each dog and lay it on the apron and then help himself to as many coins as he wishes. Rooms inside a tree? Dogs with oversized eyes? The old witch sounds a few bristles short of a broomstick, if you know what I mean. If I were the soldier, I'd be edging away real slowly now. The third dog will have eyes each the size of the Round Tower. In the second, it will have eyes the size of mill wheels. In the first room, the dog will have eyes the size of teacups. Inside, she says, he'll find three rooms: one filled with copper, one with silver, and one with gold. The witch asks him to climb down into a hollow tree. On his way home from war, a soldier meets an old witch. The Tinderbox (by Hans Christian Andersen) And a single writer created the story that I'm going paraphrase below. A thousand storytellers made Cinderella, but a single writer made the Ugly Duckling. He created them, and he did it so well that many of them entered the canon with the same cultural status as tales born from the oral tradition. One geeky sidenote before we begin: unlike the Grimm brothers and Asbjornsen and Moe, HCA didn't collect folktales. Well, OK, it hasn't been done by Disney, but it is one of the very first fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen so that's got to give it some clout. Today's fairy tale is not incredibly obscure.
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