'The Tinderbox': Military Culture and Literary Culture from Romanticism to Realism'

When Hans Christian Andersen published The Tinderbox in 1835, he claimed it was ‘a tale I heard as a child’, probably from his father, a shoemaker and veteran of Denmark’s contribution to the final battles of the Napoleonic Wars. (As he lay dying of a fever in 1816, he believed he was receiving orders from Napoleon himself.) However, this was not the first time this story of a soldier’s sexual violence and social revenge had appeared in print: a version had appeared in the second volume of the Grimm brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1815, and a second, ‘The Wonderful Pipe’, in Gyorgy Gaal’s 1822 collection of Märchen der Magyaren. He had recorded it from a hussar from the 12th Cumanian Regiment stationed in Vienna.
The fashion for fairytales during the Restoration owes much to the Grimms’ example and their personal connections (Gaal was influenced by the circular calling for the collection of popular traditions that Jacob Grimm distributed at the Congress of Vienna; Grimm was also in direct contact with the folktale collector and mentor to Andersen, Mathias Thiele). One purpose of this chapter is to consider why, under the Restoration, these representatives of the educated middle classes wanted to record and publish plebeian storytellers, soldiers prominent among them. However, it will also consider the practice of storytelling among soldiers, the processes by which this particular story (Aladdin relocated to a Europe) spread among European armies, and what message it inculcated in barracks and camp.