Once upon a time, a the kingdom was short of money. One man told the King that his daughter could spin gold out of yarn. The king locked the girl in a room full of yarn, and told the girl she couldn’t come out until it was all spun into gold.
But this girl couldn’t really spin gold out of yarn, so she didn’t know what to do. Then a troll appeared to her. He told the girl that if she gave him her first born child, he would spin all the yarn into gold for her. Seeing no other way out, she agreed.
So, the troll spun all the yarn into gold, and this girl was let free. Years later, this girl married a man and had a baby. Then the troll came back, and reminded the girl of their agreement. The girl refused to give her baby to the troll, so he stole it one day when she wasn’t looking.
The girl went to find the troll to find her baby. After looking for ten years, she finally found it. The troll refused to give the baby back, after all, they had a deal. The troll then said to the girl, that he would give her son back if she could guess his [the troll’s] name. She had three guesses to get it.
She guessed once, “David”. No. She guessed a second time, “Jeffrey”. No. She guessed a third time. She just blurted out complete nonsense syllables, and by some miracle she was right.
I think it’s Rumpelstiltskin (el). Can anyone tell me the moral of this story? The father lies, the girl breaks a contract, and the troll sings songs about his name while home alone…am I missing the point?
Rumpelstiltskin. He wasn’t a troll though, and her father claimed she could spin straw into gold, not yarn, and she married the king not just some man.
He never took the baby either, he just gave her three days to guess his name otherwise he threatened to claim it. She had unlimited guesses not just three, and she didn’t just blurt the name out randomly – she had sent messengers out tracking down all the names in the kingdom, and one messenger caught R doing a little dance and singing this song outside his cottage…
‘Today I’ll brew, tomorrow I’ll bake.
Soon I’ll have the queen’s namesake.
Oh, how hard it is to play my game,
for Rumpelstiltskin is my name!’
So she had the right name ready when he called back on the third day.
I just happened to have the book to hand because of the Brothers Grimm thread.
As far as I can see there are two morals to the story:
Rumpelstiltskin was greedy asking for a baby in payment for spinning all the gold. Even for such miraculous work he should have asked for something reasonable (the young queen offered him great wealth instead but he turned her down).
The rich and powerful are allowed to be greedy bastards wanting as much gold as they can shake a spindle at and threatening death on anyone who messes them around (as the king did to the girl in the first place). Cue the revolution?
Yes, again quoting from Grimm his reply to her backup offer was “No, something living is more important to me than all the treasures in the world.”
But given that the alternative to agreeing to give up her (as yet) non-existant child was a death sentence, what choice did she have? Does it seem reasonable to have to hand over your baby to pay a debt?
All the same, I’m not surprised Bob55 has difficulty seeing the moral in the story; I do too, but I was just making a suggestion off the top of my head. Some of the Grimm tales don’t really have clear cut moral resolutions, they’re just simple adventure stories set in a cruel world.
Colibri’s remarks about whether a story from the Brothers Grimm should be figured to have a moral or not seem sound.
The brothers, incidentally, did not “write” their stories in the same sense, say, as Hans Christian Andersen wrote his. They were two of the first social scientists, and collected stories from people throughout what is now the nation of Germany as a way of studying accents, and of preserving ethnic heritage. There is a basic rule about how pronunciation changes by region throughout Europe they developed which is called Grimm’s Law. It is still considered a basic tool in studying how Indo-European languages are inter-related.
The Brothers Grimm got the story of Rumpelstiltskin from a woman named Dortchen Wilde who enjoyed preserving old folk stories. In her they obviously found a kindred spirit; in fact, one of them married her and, I like to think, lived happily ever after.
There is innuendo in the story that the “little man” is, in fact, a devil–he disappears into the ground when the young queen bests him, and it was traditionally thought that knowing the name of a demon gave one some power over him. There is also innuendo as to what he was going to do with the child; first he was going to get some beer, then he was going to bake up some bread, and for the rest of his meal? Ick.
In some versions of the story it is said that the girl’s father was speaking figuratively of her skill when he said she could spin straw into gold, and that the father was too afraid of the king to contradict him when he took the story literally. To the extent a moral can be found in the story, it may be that one should be careful with how you say things, and be on guard against boasting.
