When a poor miller boasts that his daughter can spin straw into gold, the king places her into a chamber full of straw to prove this claim under threat of death. An ugly little man appears and performs this impossible task for her in exchange for her ring and, on the second night, her necklace. On the third night, the king puts her into the largest chamber yet and promises to marry her if she succeeds. With nothing left to trade, she is forced to promise the dwarf her first child. When he comes to claim it, he is moved by her tears to let her keep the baby if she can find out his name in three days' time. Failing to answer correctly on the first two nights, the young queen is told by her messenger at the last moment how he had overheard a strange little man calling himself ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ as he was dancing round a fire in the woods. When the queen confronts ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ with the correct name, he tears himself apart in his fury.
The best‐known version of this tale, ‘Rumpelstilzchen’, was published by the Brothers Grimm in their collection Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales, 1812), but there are many other variants, mainly European, such as the English ‘Tom‐Tit‐Tot’, the Italian ‘Zorobubù’, or the Swedish ‘Titteli Ture’; the name‐guessing motif also links it to Puccini's opera Turandot. The Grimms' story is an amalgamation of three sources, one of which is similar to the influential ‘Ricdin‐Ricdon’ (Bigarrures ingénieuses, 1696) by Marie‐Jeanne Lhéritier, in which it is the king or prince who discloses the name. The Grimms' printed version differs from oral variants in which the girl's predicament lies in her inability to spin anything but gold. She acts on her own behalf when she willingly accepts the little man's help to perform her work and, as spinning was a marriage test in rural communities, gain a husband. Emma Donoghue in her revision, ‘The Tale of the Spinster’ (Kissing the Witch, 1997), takes up the theme of spinning as productive work and translates her version into an entirely female context; however, it is also a critique of materialistic self‐interest and entrepreneurial exploitation. A widow's daughter continues her mother's successful spinning business after her death, but needs to take on a slow‐witted girl, Little Sister, to carry out the fine spinning. When the widow's daughter becomes pregnant in the course of soliciting more work, Little Sister agrees to pretend to be the mother to protect the business. But she finally leaves when the baby is punished for damaging the wool, taking the child with her, since the widow's daughter had shown so little interest in either of them that she had not even asked their names. Anne Sexton interprets her ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ (Transformations, 1972) as a figure of interiorized infantile rage and despair, while William Hathaway's ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ (Disenchantments, 1985) is an angry meditation on contemporary pressures on men to be good at sports and physically beautiful to win the girl.
Bibliography
- Bolte, Johannes, and Polívka, George, Anmerkungen zu den Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm (5 vols., 1913–32).
- Mieder, Wolfgang (ed.), Disenchantments: An Anthology of Modern Fairy Tale Poetry (1985).
- Röhrich, Lutz, “‘Rumpelstiltskin. Vom Methodenpluralismus in der Erzählforschung’”, in Sage und Märchen, Erzählforschung heute (1976).
- Zipes, Jack, ‘Spinning with Fate: Rumpelstiltskin and the Decline of Female Productivity’,
Western Folklore (January 1993).
— Karen Seago
