![]() The mental image of a blue beard mesmerised me when I was small. For my research I was privileged to be able to talk to officers who had served in Afghanistan and Iraq and their accounts, combined with those of child soldiers, made me realise that this story had a lot to say today's readers. When I started to write Tinder I felt that the Tinderbox had all the ingredients I needed to question the nature of war today and the damage done to so many young men. In many tellings of this story the soldier's deeds have been sanitised to make them more acceptable to a younger audience. Instead he chops her head off before setting out to find a town where he might spend his money. Yet even when the witch has given him the means to make himself rich beyond his wildest dreams in return for bringing her the tinderbox, he is incapable of showing gratitude. She asks him what he has to show for all his years fighting. In this profound story a witch is standing by the side of the road near an oak tree when she sees a soldier. The idea of any hound being large enough to have eyes the size of plates, or cartwheels or millstones I found more truly terrifying than any dragon. Of all his stories, it was this one that obsessed me as a child because of the dogs. One of the first fairy tales Hans Christian Andersen wrote, it was published in Copenhagen on when Andersen was 29. The heroine has to change in order to discover that love isn't all about superficial looks. Perhaps it is the most intellectually satisfying of all the stories because it's to do with love in its truest form, about seeing through perceived ugliness to the goodness of the heart underneath. ![]() It is a story that has fired the imagination of many writers including Angela Carter, who wrote Mr and Mrs Beast, and it inspired Jean Cocteau's film La Belle et la Bete. The classic text, which was first published in London in 1756, comes from Madame Leprince de Beaumount.
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