Image caption The story is dedicated: "To Mme Bunkeflod, from her devoted HC Andersen" 
 
 An early work by Hans Christian Andersen has been found at the bottom of a box near the Danish fairy tale writer's home city, experts say. 
 
 The Tallow Candle is a short story about a revered candle that becomes grimy and neglected until its inner beauty is recognised and ignited. 
 
 The ink-written manuscript is dedicated: "To Mme Bunkeflod, from her devoted HC Andersen". 
 
 Experts say it was probably written by the Ugly Duckling author in the 1820s. 
 
 Mrs Bunkeflod is thought to be a widow whom the writer visited, read to and borrowed books from as a child. 
 
 Experts told Danish daily Politiken the script is likely the copy of an original manuscript that has since been lost. 
 
 The newspaper has translated and published a version of the story in English. 
 
 Shoemaker's son 
 
 Historian Esben Brage made the chance finding in a filing box at the National Archives of Funen in October and experts have since scrutinised the copy of the 700-word manuscript. 
 
 Image caption Andersen wrote hundreds of fairy tales which have been translated into more than 100 languages 
 
 Experts say the story's simplistic style is not on a par with Andersen's elegantly written mature works, suggesting it was written during his time at a grammar school in the mid-1820s. 
 
 Born in Odense in 1805, the son of a shoemaker and a washerwoman concentrated on poetry before his first book of fairy tales was published in 1835. 
 
 Many of Andersen's most famous works, such as the Emperor's New Clothes and the Little Mermaid, focus on perceptions of wealth and beauty - themes touched on in The Tallow Candle. 
 
 Andersen expert Ejnar Stig Askgaard described the discovery as "sensational". 
 
 "I have no doubt that it is Christian Andersen who wrote it," he said. 
 
 A dedication thought to have been written on the copy later in blue ink reads: "To P Plum from his friend Bunkeflod." 
 
 The Plum and Bunkeflod families were close friends, and Hans Christian Andersen had a close relationship with Mme Bunkeflod, Politiken reported. 
 
 Before he died in 1875, Andersen wrote hundreds of fairy tales which have since been translated into more than 100 languages. ||||| A Danish historian says he has discovered what he believes is a previously unknown fairy tale written by Hans Christian Andersen. 
 
 A newly found manuscript of a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen which has been located in Odense, pictured in the State Archives in Copenhagen, Denmark Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012. The story of ‘The... (Associated Press) 
 
 A newly found manuscript of a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen which has been located in Odense, pictured in the State Archives in Copenhagen, Denmark Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012. The story of ‘The... (Associated Press) 
 
 A newly found manuscript of a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen which has been located in Odense, pictured in the State Archives in Copenhagen, Denmark Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012. The story of ‘The... (Associated Press) 
 
 Retired historian Esben Brage said Thursday he found the six-page text in early October while searching in the National Archives through boxes that had belonged to wealthy families from Andersen's home-town of Odense in central Denmark. 
 
 "I was ecstatic. I immediately contacted the curator to tell him about my discovery. I had never imagined this," Brage said. 
 
 The handwritten tale, entitled "Tallow Candle," and dedicated to a vicar's widow named Bunkeflod who had lived across from Andersen's home, had been left seemingly untouched at the bottom of one of the boxes. 
 
 The short story tells the tale of how a tallow candle seeks help from a tinder box to be able to ignite itself. 
 
 A senior curator at the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense said the work is likely one of the author's earliest, written seven years before his official debut in 1830. 
 
 "I often get calls about stuff thought to have been off Andersen's hand. Most of the time, it is not. This time I was thrilled," Ejnar Stig Askgaard told The Associated Press. "This is a very early attempt at prose by Andersen who was then 18." 
 
 Askgaard said Andersen knew the Bunkeflod widow well and regularly visited her, reading to her and borrowing books from her, even after he moved to Copenhagen to attend university. 
 
 "The text is not at the level of the more mature fairy tales that we know from Andersen's later writing," Askgaard said. "I have no doubts ... this has been written by Andersen." 
 
 Born to a charwoman and a shoemaker in 1805, Andersen wrote nearly 160 fairy tales in his life including classics like "The Ugly Duckling" and "The Little Mermaid." He has also written dozens of novels, poems and travel journals. ||||| Addressed to “Dear Cri-cri,” the poem is signed by Anne and dated March 28, 1942, nearly four months before her family went into hiding in an annex of rooms above the Amsterdam office of her father, Otto Frank. It was there that she wrote her famous diary, which was published in 1947 and transformed her into an emblem of lost innocence. 
 
 In a phone interview from Amsterdam on Wednesday, Jacqueline van Maarsen, 87, said that she had decided to part with the poem in part because her sister had spurned it. She stressed, however, that she treasured the notes and verse that Anne had written to her. 
 
 “My sister didn’t really like the poem very much because Anne was very critical of her, because she left school early, whereas Anne was busy all the time,” she said. “She gave it to me because she knew I was collecting Anne’s things. I would never sell the verse that Anne addressed to me. But as my sister was not attached to hers, I decided to sell it.” 
 
 Thys Blankevoort, co-director of Bubb Kuyper, the auction house that sold the poem, said the price was nearly five times the minimum price of $32,000. He said the successful bidder wished to remain anonymous. 
 
 Mr. Blankevoort said that autographed works by Anne Frank were extremely rare and that only four or five had been discovered in the past four decades. He said the auction had generated strong interest, including inquiries from as far away as Fiji and Japan. 
 
 Photo 
 
 “The bid was much higher than I expected and shows Anne Frank’s cultural importance and also the emotional attachment to who she was and what she represents,” he said. “Any item by Anne Frank is very important, as there is not much left. When the Nazis broke down doors, they put everything on the street, where it could be destroyed by the rain or stolen.” 
 
 After two years of hiding from the Nazis in the annex, the Frank family was discovered in August 1944 and deported. Everyone died, except for Mr. Frank. Anne died of typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany in the first few months of 1945. She was 15. Her “Diary of a Young Girl” has been translated into 67 languages and has sold 30 million copies. 
 
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 Mr. Blankevoort noted that the “friendship books” that circulated in the Netherlands in the 1940s were the social media of their time, and that the sentiments expressed by Anne to Christiane were particularly notable because they were written before Anne was confined, emotionally and physically, by the attic walls that would soon curtail her activities. 
 
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 “In our mind, she is the girl who never left the attic,” he said. “But here she is free, with her spirit free.” 
 
 In the spring, a Massachusetts museum paid $50,000 for a copy of Grimm’s fairy tales in which Anne had inscribed her name and the name of her sister, Margot. In 1989, another short piece of verse written in a friend’s notebook went on sale at Christie’s. 
 
 The Anne Frank House, the popular four-story museum in Amsterdam on the Prinsengracht canal where the Frank family hid during the war, decided not to bid on the latest document for sale. 
 
 Maatje Mostart, a spokeswoman for the museum, noted that the poem was addressed to the sister of a friend and, as such, did not shed deep light on Anne’s own story. 
 
 “It’s, of course, very special that part of an Anne Frank collection comes out after so many years,” Ms. Mostart said. “As we have other original manuscripts directly connected to her life, for us this is less important.” 
 
 Jacqueline van Maarsen, whose father was Jewish, survived the Nazi occupation because her mother, who was born Catholic, had registered her as a Christian. The father survived the Holocaust, but his relatives died. She has written a memoir, “Your Best Friend, Anne Frank,” which she said was how Anne signed a farewell letter to her before she went into hiding. 
 
 Ms. van Maarsen said the two had enjoyed playing Monopoly and chatting about Hollywood stars. She said her friend would have “loved the interest around the world” that her writing had inspired. 
 
 “People say her diary was very well written, and I think her work remains powerful so many decades later because of her intelligence and her character,” she said, adding, “To me, she was just my little friend, and I miss her very much.”
– A Danish historian has found what he believes is an early Hans Christian Anderson manuscript buried at the bottom of a box in the National Archives of Funen. "I was ecstatic," the historian says. "I had never imagined this." The handwritten story, titled "Tallow Candle," tells the story of a neglected candle that can't light itself until its inner beauty is recognized, the BBC reports. The dedication reads, "To Mme Bunkeflod, from her devoted HC Andersen." Andersen had a close relationship with a widow named Mme Bunkeflod. "I often get calls about stuff thought to have been off Andersen's hand. Most of the time, it is not," the senior curator at Odense's Hans Christian Andersen museum tells the AP. " This time I was thrilled." Experts say the piece lacks the grace of Andersen's later work, and was likely written around 1823, while he was still in grammar school. "This is a very early attempt at prose by Andersen, who was then 18," the curator says. You can read an English translation here.