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Tinderbox Essay

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Many different resources have been put together to form a full puzzle, which helps to understand the different aspects tinderbox has. The author, Hans Christian Andersen, wrote many other children stories that were published around the world that kept children entertained. Tinderbox is about a soldier that goes into a tree since a which told him about it having money and all he had to do was bring her back a tinderbox. When he comes back he kills her since he wanted the tinderbox and went off and using the tinderbox got a princess to marry him since inside the tinderbox were three dogs that attacked the king when he was going to execute the soldier. Tinderbox has many different aspects to look at for example, the characters and whether or …show more content…

They saw a meaning in every little detail especially the characters. “The witch magnifies inner flaws and frailties in the reader” (Annotations for Tinderbox) So the witch is not just some mean old lady that has some magic but instead she is the readers flaws and what they find wrong with themselves. All things in this story have a deeper meaning if you really think about it. Even the tree that the soldier goes through in order to find the chambers where the money is. “Trees can be seen as creatures of two worlds, intermediaries between above and below”(Annotations for Tinderbox) Like how it is clearly betrayed in Tinderbox as a pathway from the outside world to the three chambers. Obviously the three hundred burning lambs that the soldier encountered on his way to the chambers had to mean something. “A lamp is a symbol of intelligence and the spirit” (Annotations for Tinderbox) So by having the lambs burning to death that would mean that the intelligence and spirit is burning away and by looking at where the lambs are positioned, on the way to the money, it represents that by people only caring about wealth they are burning away their intelligence and spirit. So although Hans Andersen didn’t mean to have all of these symbols they were still there to think about and take something out of it. Since there is always something to think about and not everyone will think the same thing as

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