Straw is useless as food for humans, but gold can buy food – or, indeed, can be viewed as a symbol for food, specifically grain. Is the fairy tale of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ fundamentally about something that has concerned human beings throughout much of our history: namely, the desire for a good harvest?īoth the miller and his daughter are prepared to sacrifice their child for it: thus three generations of the same family, spanning both the relatively lowly and the highest in the land (the miller’s daughter being but one of many upward-climbers seen in the pages of classic fairy tales), are all implicated in this drive for individual sacrifice in order to bring forth gold from straw. The central motif of the story, of course, is the idea of being able to spin straw into gold. So the story may in part be about something that preoccupied the ancient Greeks in their greatest tragedies: man’s hubris, or the dangers of overconfidence, of over-reaching yourself.īut equally, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ may have its roots in our early agricultural development. This is a good narrative technique, of course, and repetition is very important in primal stories such as fairy tales. In ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, the miller’s daughter is locked up and commanded to spin straw into gold three times before she marries the king once she is queen, she has three days to guess the name of her odd little helper. The patterning of three is very important in many fairy tales: there are three bears, three bowls of porridge, and three beds in the ‘Goldilocks’ story, for instance. The miller is so proud of his daughter that he exaggerates her abilities the king, being the monarch, thinks he can command anyone to perform his oddest whim and the little goblin scuppers his own scheme by cockily dancing about yelling his own name within earshot of the queen’s servants. Is this hubris?Ĭertainly the three male characters in the story – the miller, the king, and Rumpelstiltskin himself – are too cocky for their own good, in many ways. Given his powers (breaking and entering into the chamber where the king, no less, has managed to imprison the miller’s daughter), his magical abilities, and his mysteriousness (nobody seems to know his name, and it’s only discovered because of his own big mouth), why didn’t he just come in and snatch the child? Not only does he not do so, but he even gives the queen another opportunity to wriggle out of their deal, by guessing his name. Yet why he might want the child is never revealed or explained. Everyone lives happily ever after (except Rumpelstiltskin, who was divided over the issue). ![]() When the little man returns to the queen on the third night, she tells him his name, and in his rage at being thwarted, he puts his foot through the floor and promptly splits in two. ![]() ![]() But on the third day, one of her messengers reports that he overheard a funny-looking little man dancing with glee around a fire, and in his song he let slip that his name is Rumpel-stilts-kin. The queen sends out her messengers to see if anyone knows the little man’s name, but after the first day, they return unsuccessful. Instead, he says that if she can guess his name in the next three days, he will let her keep her child. She begs him to release her from her promise, but he refuses. When she gives birth to her first child, she forgets her promise to the little man, who appears in her chamber and reminds her of it. The king is so pleased with all of the gold that he marries the miller’s daughter.
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