Hans Christian Andersen`s new fairytale found

Experts in Denmark believe they have found the first story written by Hans Christian Andersen.
The Tallow Candle was discovered by local historian Esben Brage in the dense private archives of the Plum family, revealed Danish paper Politiken, which printed the story in its entirety today.

 Brage was in the reading room at the National Archive for Funen in Odense when he stumbled across a small, yellowing piece of paper at the bottom of a box and realized it might be important. Two months later, experts have now confirmed that the story was written by Andersen.

The story is not "at the level of the more mature and polished fairytales that we know from Andersen`s later authorship", according to the experts, and has been dated to his time at school, probably between 1822 and 1826. Andersen made his literary debut in 1829. The first real fairytale he published was The Dead Man, with two booklets appearing in 1935 called Fairytales Told to the Children. He went on to write hundreds of stories, including The Little Mermaid, The Emperor`s New Clothes and The Little Match Girl.

Although Maitland, too, was unimpressed with the quality of the story, she found it "very interesting - he obviously got better at his job which is very refreshing". And she believes the story of an unlit candle would have had more resonance in the era in which Andersen was writing.

The newly discovered tale is dedicated "To Madam Bunkeflod from her devoted HC Andersen". Bunkeflod was a vicar`s widow whom Andersen knew as a child. The story was then copied, with that manuscript passed to the Plum family, among whose archives it was found by Brage, almost 200 years later. The Tallow Candle is the most important Andersen find since the 1920s, when his memoirs were discovered at the Royal Library, said Politiken.

The new Andersen story follows the discovery earlier this year of 500 new fairytales in an archive in Germany.