How three things become a jewel in a fairy tale

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875), a Danish poet and storyteller, makes the philosopher's stone the object of a search. Its name suggests a single precious thing which might lie hidden somewhere. Andersen's tale takes the reader first to three things that could hardly be locked in a chest. Beauty, truth and goodness are given a task of considerable weight. They hold the world together well before the narrator mentions the formation of a jewel.

What holds a world together

He spoke to them of the true, the beautiful, and the good, and told them that these three held together in the world, and that under the pressure they had to endure, they became hardened into a precious stone, clearer than the water of the diamond — a jewel whose splendor had value with God, whose brightness outshone everything, and which was the so-called “Stone of the Wise.”

– Hans Christian Andersen, The Stone of the Wise Men, 1878, p. 381.^[1]

The transition takes place under pressure. Things generally thought of separately acquire a common shape in the tale. Its clarity is visible, while the three qualities from which it has arisen require experience and judgement to recognise. The comparison with the water of a diamond borrows a way of seeing from the vocabulary of gems. One thinks of the brightness with which a stone transmits light, and of an examining eye that would notice even a slight cloud within it.

Clarity under pressure

Andersen also keeps the burden to which the three qualities were subjected inside the image. The beauty of the result brings its past back into view as soon as a reader remembers how the jewel came into being. The character of the search changes accordingly. Someone looking exclusively for a brilliant object might easily pass by the experiences from which the storyteller has made it spring. A small and lucid body gives the meanings of three very large words a single imaginable form.