The Tallow Candle
The tallow candle of a poem credited to a young Hans Christian Andersen and found in the Danish national archive in 2012. In the poem a rough, unlit candle complains that it has never burned, until it finds its true use and gives light, a moral tale about purpose and self-worth. The discovery pushed the start of Andersen's literary career back to the early 1820s, and the poem is now treated as his earliest known work. The candle is remembered as the first of the everyday objects Andersen made speak.