Is there an entymology to this name, or is it just a gibberish word?
The name and the story are German, but I don’t know what it means. There are different spellings: Rumpelstiltskin is the usual spelling in English, Rumpelstilzchen seems to be the common spelling in German, and Rumpenstünzchen seems to be an older German spelling. “Rumpel” means “rumble” in modern German, but I’m not sure it’s related.
Three German versions of the story
A German and an English parallel version
Similar stories from other languages