by Jerry Cayford
“This is the story of a man. Not rich and powerful, not a big man like your father, Sweetheart. Just a funny little man. I didn’t know him long, only three nights. But there was something about him, something magical.” If “Rumpelstiltskin” started with this framing, we would have a different picture of the story’s meaning, a truer picture, for this framing suggests what is hidden below the surface.
The miller’s daughter is our “shadow” narrator. No one else witnesses the central events of the story, except Rumpelstiltskin, and he’s dead. We get suspicious that the story she’s telling makes her look too good: the beautiful victim, abused by everyone, who somehow ends up with the king, the gold, the servants, and the child, and never has to pay her debts. Clues pile up, starting from Rumpelstiltskin’s death. He “ripped himself up the middle in two” and sank into the earth. The poor sap killed himself. Why? We follow the trail of breadcrumbs. Why would the guy want the daughter’s firstborn? Sounds like a euphemism… That’s it! The bargain wasn’t for the child but for the woman! It’s the oldest bargain in the world. But if that was the deal… paydirt: Rumpelstiltskin is the child’s father!
There is plenty to uncover in this fairy-tale-noir story of illicit sex, betrayal, obsession, and suicide, but you have to believe it is worth digging. Perhaps if I tell you the story is older than the bible: “Rumpelstiltskin, in summary, is one of the earliest known narratives in Western literature” (Oliver Tearle). Scholars have traced the story back to languages long vanished. As Tearle puts it, “The story obviously has its roots deep in the most primal and basic drives and emotions which are commonly shared throughout humanity.”
The child’s paternity is less a big reveal than it might seem, because in other stories of secret names (which folklorists categorize as ATU type 500: The Name of the Supernatural Helper, examples here or here), the forfeit for not knowing the helper’s name is almost always sex (“you shall be mine”; “accompany me home and be my wife”). However, the man always loses and the woman always wins; so, when the wager is for sex, no sex takes place, and so there is no child. What separates “Rumpelstiltskin” from other stories is that a child is born, and the man loses in a different way.
The Unreliable Narrator
Obviously, the tale of a poor beauty trading on her body to get out of trouble and then successfully passing her illegitimate child off as the king’s own heir is not going to make it past millennia of morality police. Long before internet users were using “$ex” to get past search filters, though, “Rumpelstiltskin” made itself a beloved children’s classic whose surface story is a map to what cannot be told directly: the primal tale of the costs and mechanics of the poor beauty’s success. This story endures by hiding its deep themes under surface events so suggestively implausible as to invite the reader to wonder what really happened. The invitation comes right away.
The first sentence tells us the miller is poor and the daughter is beautiful; the second sentence tells us the narrator is unreliable: “Now it happened that he [the miller] got into a conversation with the king…” Wait. Poor millers don’t “happen” into conversations with kings! (I’m analyzing the Grimm Brothers’ canonical 1857 text, D.L. Ashliman’s translation.) Other, similar tales give a sensible account of the parent’s boast, but at the daughter’s expense. Usually, she is lazy: “as handsome as the day, and as lazy as a pig” (“The Lazy Beauty and Her Aunts”); “The truth must be told. Duffy was an idle slut” (“Duffy and the Devil”). Typically, the mother is bawling out the daughter on a public street when the king or prince rides by, and the lie is a quick cover. In “Tom Tit Tot,” for example, the daughter eats all five pies her mother just made, and when the king hears the mother yelling, the mother pretends she was praising her daughter for spinning five skeins.
Stories like these make sense: a lazy girl marries advantageously based on a lie about her spinning prowess, covers it with something much worse (a deal with the devil), just barely escapes, and so learns her lesson. We have no reason to look for more than a simple morality tale. “Rumpelstiltskin,” though, is full of baffling nonsense. That second sentence ends with the miller’s inexplicably preposterous and dangerous boast to the king about spinning straw into gold! An unreliable narrator is not a license to make things up, but a challenge to find the sense when real plot puzzles appear: what does the “little man” (as he is always called) want? Why does he give her a chance to keep her child after he has already won it in their bargain? What makes this child (for him) “dearer to me than all the treasures in the world”? Why does he commit suicide when he loses a bet he never had to make? Treating this as just a fairy story, with loopy motives and opaque rules, would give us license to dismiss these questions. But once we accept the challenge to make sense of the story, its hidden human drama becomes disturbingly recognizable.
The Room Where It Happened
I love so many details of this story. Rumpelstiltskin never demands anything, but asks the miller’s daughter what she will give him, and accepts whatever she offers. For two nights, he gives her rooms full of gold in exchange for cheap costume jewelry. And it’s clear they are there together all night. In similar stories, the fairy/devil gives her magic gloves or a magic spindle to do the work herself, or takes the material away and returns it later. But Rumpelstiltskin sits down at the wheel, “whir, whir, whir,” the spool is full, he puts on another, and “So it went until morning.” I wonder what they talked about all night.
On the third night of magic, he asks again what she will give him. “‘I have nothing more that I could give you,’ answered the girl.” One can imagine inserting the word “shyly” here. Or maybe “slyly,” if she has an ankle bracelet that he can plainly see. I imagine the rest of their steamy conversation cut by the censor (our unreliable narrator), who substitutes one dry, plot-advancing sentence: “Then promise me, after you are queen, your first child.” (Kind of a steep price escalation, since presumably he would have accepted a lock of her hair.) Her next thought confirms that we have jump-cut over the steamy parts, and that the dry sentence is not really what he said: where shock and horror are the usual folktale responses to the demand for a child, the response in “Rumpelstiltskin” is “‘Who knows what will happen,’ thought the miller’s daughter,” and she goes for it. “In return the little man once again spun the straw into gold.” A mating dance concluded, all between the lines. Wonderful.
Before we fast forward to the child, let me offer an image to those of you grossed out by the thought of the beautiful miller’s daughter having sex with a gnome. Imagine George Clooney as Rumpelstiltskin. This is not a random suggestion: the 2009 movie Up in the Air is a subtle version of “Rumpelstiltskin.” Clooney plays the isolated, alienated outsider who lives in a magic world of airplanes and hotels, and who hooks up for sex with miller’s daughter Vera Farmiga. (The movie even has a running gag about photographing a traveling gnome.) He thinks he likes his life, until he falls in love and discovers his beloved wants the king’s world, with him, Rumpelstiltskin, on the side.
Versions of “Rumpelstiltskin” pop up here and there, not surprising for a story so deep in our cultural consciousness. My favorite is Harry Chapin’s 1972 song “Taxi”: “It was somewhere in a fairy tale / I used to take her home in my car.” But comparing “Rumpelstiltskin” to other works raises the question of what features define this archetypal tale.
First, the man is outside the social structure, not part of society. This is a known character in literature: think of Ralph Ellison’s invisible man, and Dostoevsky’s Underground Man (both of whom, significantly, have no name); Ishmael, Hagar’s illegitimate son by Abraham, is the original, “a wild ass of a man: his hand shall be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell in the face of all his brethren” (Genesis 16:12). Second, the man brings something valuable, something magical, to the woman. Ultimately, it is love he is bringing; but his magic is idiosyncratic, an outsider’s gift, valuable but problematic. As Chapin puts it, “I’ve got something inside me to drive a princess blind / There’s a wild man wizard, he’s hiding in me, illuminating my mind.” Third, whatever magic the man offers, the woman chooses the king (society) over it. Other motifs might appear—the name usually, the child maybe. Mrs. Doubtfire is a “Rumpelstiltskin” with the child featured.
So, three nights of magic save the miller’s daughter, who then marries the king. The story now jumps ahead. The 1812 Grimm’s version says, “Soon thereafter the queen delivered a child.” But that was too revealing, so the 1857 version chastely adjusts it to “A year later she brought a beautiful child to the world,” which won’t fool anyone. The wonder of “Rumpelstiltskin” is its balancing of a surface story suitable for children and acceptable to moralists with a hidden-but-not-too-hidden tale of darker human conflicts and choices.
The 1857 version emerges as canonical because of how exquisitely it accomplishes that balance, deftly guiding us from the surface to the deeper story. The 1812 ending, for example—“He ran away angrily, and never came back”—loses Rumpelstiltskin’s death and confounds the narrative; the 1857 version corrects the ending to “with both hands he took hold of his left foot and ripped himself up the middle in two,” an unmistakable image of suicide just cartoonish enough to suit the fairy tale surface. The difference is important to who the little man is: not a con man grabbing something he wants, but an outcast staking his life on something he needs. Unless we know that, we cannot make any sense of the second bargain: the name.
Know My Name
Rumpelstiltskin comes for his child, “dearer to me than all the treasures in the world.” But the child born of them both is just as dear to her. The story is true to the moral and emotional complexity of the situation. It makes clear Rumpelstiltskin’s moral claim to the child, as well as his power to take the child. But then it introduces a plot twist: “the little man took pity on her and said, ‘I will give you three days’ time. If by then you know my name, then you shall keep your child.’” What is going on here? Let’s unpack it.
The story always treats Rumpelstiltskin with compassion—here he is a softy, taking pity—yet it also shows that the little man is dangerous and powerful and must be taken seriously. The 1812 version refers to him at this point as “the dangerous little man.” The 1857 version lets us know his powers are not limited to spinning gold; we’re told that “he [the king] himself locked the room,” but Rumpelstiltskin just opens the door. The king’s thought that “I will not find a richer wife in all the world” draws our attention, not only to the avarice of the king and the world that the miller’s daughter will join, but also to the value of Rumpelstiltskin’s abilities (mistakenly believed to be the daughter’s). We cannot gauge his power, but whether it’s Rumpelstiltskin’s magic, the “wild man wizard hiding in me,” Mrs. Doubtfire’s wildly comic creativity, or the Clooney character’s gift for knowing what people in pain need to hear, the outcast does have power. These examples make his power visible for the audience, but it need not be so visible: every outcast man has enough power to kidnap his own children.
The danger of unneeded males is universal in the animal kingdom. Human beings minimize this problem with socially enforced monogamy, called “marriage”: if everyone pairs up, men find mates to connect them to society. But there is an intrinsic precariousness to that solution, personified in the miller’s daughter. Her character in Up in the Air, discussing with a younger woman what to seek in a mate, says, “Please let him earn more money than I do. You might not understand that now, but believe me, you will one day. Otherwise, that’s a recipe for disaster.” In other words, choose the king. The real recipe for disaster, though, is women marrying up and men down, which makes it mathematically certain that there will be no partners for a group of women at the top of society and a group of men at the bottom, men with little to lose; furthermore, the admirable modern push for gender wage parity will increase both of those groups: more well-educated, well-paid women stay single, while the underclass of outcast men grows. The outcast can be dangerous, both to the social order and—as in “Rumpelstiltskin”—to himself. It is a theme for the ages, and certainly for an age of declining marriage rates and rising overdose rates, when men are killing themselves in record numbers and even lashing out with mass shootings.
An archetypal story presents a situation many people face, but in which different choices are possible; the dramatic tension is from our knowing it could easily turn out differently. The tragedy here is foreshadowed when the child is born: “She thought no more about the little man.” Whatever the three nights of magic meant to the miller’s daughter—whether it was profound, or just a fling, or whatever she had to do to get out of a jam—she has moved on. She has rocketed up the social ladder to become queen. Once upon a time, when she was in need, Rumpelstiltskin gave her what she needed, but she no longer needs him. This is the new reality when he comes to her now—he the outcast, dangerous and generous, powerful and needy—and voluntarily offers her an out: “know my name.”
In literature, history, and religion, the “true name” is the “true nature”; “know my name” means “know me,” know the real me, truly and deeply. In asking her to know him, he is asking her to choose him: “know my name” and “you shall keep your child” because we will be together. The three-day time frame is not coincidental, either: Rumpelstiltskin is trying to rekindle the magic of their three nights spinning gold together. She is his cure for alienation and his ticket to reconnecting with society. He has everything at stake. (As the protagonist puts it in Picnic, a sort of “Rumpelstiltskin”-adjacent story, “You’re mine, Baby. I’ve gotta claim what’s mine or I’ll be nothin’ as long as I live!”) But she, too, has stakes and makes choices.
The story has brought our two characters around to a different kind of bargain. The original bargain could be seen as transactional, legalistic: on the surface, it was the child in exchange for saving her life, so the child is his; below the surface, it was her body in exchange for spinning the gold, so since she already paid him with sex, the child is hers. Rumpelstiltskin offers to replace their transactional bargain with one based on human connection, on knowing one another; both parents have a moral claim to the child, one not transactionally based.
But the queen seizes on the new bargain in the opposite spirit of what was intended. Instead of spending three days truly getting to know Rumpelstiltskin, she spends it seeking exactly the sort of shallow, legalistic information she might use in a divorce court or a custody hearing. (Last Tango in Paris is a “Rumpelstiltskin” that emphasizes this element of the story; it features the sex (obviously), but also the name and the contrasting kinds of knowing: “I don’t know him. I don’t know who he is… I don’t know his name.”) The surface story of “Rumpelstiltskin” descends into a silly guessing game. The deeper story, though, is of a man reduced to factoids in which he does not recognize himself. She is successful, and he is betrayed. She wins custody, and he takes his life.
The tragic tale of Rumpelstiltskin is a miracle of compression. Short and fast, it tells a clever story of puzzles and magic and a beautiful woman escaping dangers to win it all. Underneath, it tells a dark tale of society’s margins and an isolated little man who can’t win to save his life. The dark depths make the clever surface so compelling that every generation rediscovers this story. So, men, next time you pick your kids up from the nice house where your ex-wife lives, tell them a story with teeth, a 4,000-year-old, big, bad wolf of a tale: read them “Rumpelstiltskin.”