Rumpelstiltskin’s Secret

What Women Didn’t Tell the Grimms

Harry Rand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780815384564
• eBook ISBN: 9781351204132
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Everyone knows Rumpelstiltskin's story—or thinks they do. But this innocent-seeming tale hides generations of women's shrewd accounts of their relationships with men. And the verdict is not flattering. The fairytale may count among the world's oldest dirty jokes. The theme of the tale, an observation repeated and varied throughout, mocks male inadequacy in many forms, beginning with sexual failure. The punchline misplaced, over time its wickedly funny insights about adult life passed for childish nonsense. The story hides, in plain sight, criticism of workplace sexual harassment—centuries before society took notice of the indignity. Rumpelstiltskin tells a feminist tale with lessons for men and women, about what women said to each other when they thought their private conversation and complaints passed unnoticed. In the story's different versions, the Brothers Grimm, who recorded the tale, missed women's wry observations.

1
The Story’s History

Of the best known Grimm tales, this one is perhaps the most obscure and puzzling.

James M. McGlathery

The Life and Times of Rumpelstiltskin: Foreword from Eden

Despite their durability ancient stories float insubstantial in the air. They’re easily destroyed artifacts until nailed down to the page, pinned like butterflies. Granted incarnation in a body of ink and paper, stories traded their free-ranging immortality for a fixed written form. Formerly sovereign wanderers, once rounded up, paralyzed as exhibits, stared at like caged animals, fairytales endured poking here and there by scholarly gawkers. Most prominently by the Brothers Grimm.

The famous brothers gathered, classified, sometimes extensively edited, then published quaintly outlandish materials. Their German expeditions resembled explorations that combed the countryside of France, Russia, England, and Scandinavia. The far-ranging explorers of different countries and languages harvested collections variously named Mother Goose or the Arabian Nights. As part of this collecting effort the Grimms created one tale’s fixed pattern. That form, called the Tale of Rumpelstiltskin, endures like a classic recipe that only a fool would alter for knowledgeable consumers. The story lives in the reveries of every modern child who hears it recited or who silently reads the fairytale.ⁱ It has stopped evolving.

iFolklorists strictly define the terms “story”, “tale”, “variant”, “version”, “type”, and “fable”. This book is intended for the rest of us who make no such distinctions. I cannot argue with professionals who discriminate niceties of the folklorists’ trade, but the various terms for stories will be used informally. To the vexation of diploma-bearing specialists I intend to be easy going with such fine points of their livelihood. If you belong to the scholarly ilk of professional folklorists, you might feel less lenient than merely irritated but the rest of us won’t notice the difference if the usage slides from calling Rumpelstiltskin a fairytale or a story.

Frozen in form, ancient Rumpelstiltskin, though apparently unsuited to our era, tenants imaginations constructed in post–Industrial Age childhoods. He faced unprecedented competition for childhood’s fond attention. This latest generation saw folk music drained of authenticity and replaced with commercial popular sounds. The same assault swept every branch of authentic folk traditions. Now drenched in visual and aural kitsch childhood must work to reclaim its original culture. In addition, as if things weren’t bad enough for tale-telling as amusement, for three generations movies foamed inanity to blunt lived experience. Adolescents and adults undergo pop culture’s vapid moralizing, perhaps intended to dissuade proletarian reflection by substituting anger or sentimentality for shrewd observation. With scant exceptions, throw-away novels, so-called airport reading, dilute critical awareness to change standards for concentration on the storytelling art. Background (elevator) music taught us how not to pay attention; indeed, this aural wallpaper forced the captive listener to disregard surroundings or go mad. Music had never been intended to be ignored but was formerly regarded as precious. The fairytale largely succumbed to kitsch.

Industrial modernity’s harsh winds evaporated oceans of vital folklore when steam-driven machines doomed an essential and age-old home craft. Industrialization and mechanization on an enormous scale began in the early nineteenth century with automated devices for pumping out mines and for thread-spinning. The latter is especially pertinent. Hellish workshops of unprecedented size cloistered factory workers away from hand-spinning, and such industrialization decisively changed Rumpelstiltskin’s world. As poorly as male factory workers were served when sweating near puffing, noisy, and lethal machines that whirled indifferent to lopping off an arm or head to fill a spindle with thread, women’s self-confidence fared worse. Knowledge formerly essential to womanhood, the crafts of fiber arts became the first automated victims of alienated labor. Along with society’s titanic upheaval and the huge migration from farm to factory, industrialization demoted the womanly crafts that supplied the key to understanding the Tale of Rumpelstiltskin. By divorcing a population from its formerly proud handiwork in just two generations, employment in maddeningly loud and dangerous cotton or wool mills expunged the specific knowledge listeners needed to understand this strange story. Rumpelstiltskin emerges from the twin background of industry’s encroachments on folklife and the Grimms’ editing.

Who Owns This Story?

More than a season spanning a few years, childhood proposes a way of doing, a biologically driven process of seeing and reacting while under the protection of grown-ups. Sheltered in the care of adult guardians who exercise more or less trustworthy oversight, life’s first years feature almost daily “ah-ha!” moments of learning, of discovery. That sensation rouses or quenches appetites to last a lifetime. As part of childhood experience, those sometimes-dependable adults recited Rumpelstiltskin’s story. Or they introduced us to the library where we found it ourselves. Rumpelstiltskin names a sanctioned activity. But why?

What act do we commit when telling his story? Folklorists assign Rumpelstiltskin to Aarne and Thompson’s folklore type 500, a “guess the [helper’s] name” or “The Name of the Helper” story.¹ In addition to the Secret Name, some of the other fairytale themes in the Tale of Rumpelstiltskin are the Impossible Task, the Hard Bargain, and the Changeling Child.² To some, this story exemplifies a so-called Rise fairy tale that opens “with a dirt-poor girl or boy who suffers the effect of grinding poverty and whose story continues with tests, tasks, and trials until magic brings about a marriage to royalty and a happy accession to great wealth”.³ Chafing at the standard classification, a prominent commentator suggested that Rumpelstiltskin’s function in the story “has always been presented in a misleading way… . Rumpelstiltskin is categorized as a helper, while he is obviously a blackmailer and oppressor”.⁴ Much depends on assessing his moral stature.

While enthralling children, Rumpelstiltskin perplexed adult readers. One of the story’s most knowledgeable commentators flatly stated that “[o]f the best known Grimm tales, this one is perhaps the most obscure and puzzling”.⁵ The enigma has not impeded this story’s acceptance. Despite its unique status—a story that belongs to a class with only one constituent—Rumpelstiltskin entered our culture. Not only “part of” our culture, Rumpelstiltskin contributes a small but irreplaceable parcel to the great sum of occidental literature, a story recalled by nearly everyone. The story’s title entered English as a word now found in the dictionary. But it’s a strange word in that everyone knows it—most use it without hesitation or fear of seeming esoteric or being misunderstood—yet the word apparently lacks any meaning: this everyday reference lacks a referent. We mention the name knowingly but understand not what it means. That was not always the case.

An Unlovely Story About Unpleasant People

Generations embraced this tale of an unlovable character who seems neither admirable nor approachable. But that’s also true for all the story’s characters.

Rumpelstiltskin’s harsh story offers no moral or spiritual uplift. Other fairytales shine definitive “happy endings”, but Rumpelstiltskin’s story suggests nothing superior to everyday life’s often grubby choices. The contrasts emerge obvious and striking.

Sleeping Beauty wakes to the kiss of a prince—not bad—while the Miller’s Daughter essentially submits to being raped by the King following a frenzy of cupidity.

Snow White’s hopeful tale condemns villainy. Wickedness sets the tale in motion balanced by the ending’s bracing uplift. After her crisis, good-willed rescuers flock to assist Snow White. Her (cinematic) dwarfs prove themselves unforgettably charming and loyal companions. The tale animates the age-old clash between fecund youth and menopausal anxiety as Snow White glows with abundant beauty that vexes her aging stepmother’s waning sexuality. We are expected to side with youth and health.

Just a glimpse of Rapunzel’s face through an upper-floor window renders a passing man besotted. The Miller’s Daughter, described but once—and then formulaically and obligatorily, if not grudgingly, as nominally beautiful—seems plain. She captivates no one. Her personality and unremarkable looks are never reported. In the Rumpelstiltskin story, it’s not the girl’s looks, alluring sexual potential, or charm that attracts the King. Even her doting loopy father driven to distraction by the King’s sudden appearance fails to praise her looks with specifics about her eyes, musical laugh, radiant hair, willowy figure, graceful gestures, glowing skin, singing voice, or smile; the King could see these unmentioned details for himself so that praising them in their absence would be futile and obviously counterfactual compared to the father’s great lie.

Since she cannot spin straw into gold, by this same order of hyperbole her looks are probably nothing special either. Since her braggart father’s claims are patently false, why would anyone hearing the story believe that the miller has “a daughter who is more beautiful than all the girls in this region”? Naturally the horse-mounted King gazing down at the peasant was unimpressed by the evidence of his own eyes. He ignores her until hearing an amazing gilded boast (not even an exaggeration but an impossibility) draws his attention to an extraordinary unproven talent that he demands the girl demonstrate. Before hearing that claim the monarch hardly looked at the Miller’s Daughter and was planning no dalliance: she’s no fetching peasant girl.

Again, the contrasts are clear.

The beautiful Cinderella crowns her rags-to-riches trajectory with the satisfying bonus of moral vindication. The polite heroine rises from clearing hearth-dust to glitter. She enjoys material elegance, social station, and vast riches while, after scrubbing away the eponymous cinders, her outer beauty appears to mirror her inner virtue. (In some versions Cinderella pardons her stepsisters and welcomes their penitence.) Cinderella’s mercy confirmed a cosmic justice that exalted her to the prospect that she would join the ranks of mythical wise queens. Suitably gowned, her soot polished off, the scorned sister Cinderella proves both beautiful and compassionate; ennobling allows her to practice ample forgiveness and make visible an expansive soul that bestows clemency and graciousness. That’s one lesson about the workings of Providence, pagan or Christian. Truth will out. Her ascent also counterpoises her nasty stepsisters’ chagrin: a second lesson. The higher Cinderella rises, the more miserable they feel, an emotional balance that reflects many real-life family relationships.

Cinderella offers a “role model” for peasant girls dreaming of being plucked from their chores to fame. But are young girls hearing the Tale of Rumpelstiltskin supposed to emulate the Miller’s Daughter? As queen she leaves behind all material cares but yet exacts sadistic retribution on her defender. However bloody the Grimms’ tales in their day, gloating sadism remains a timelessly unfashionable behavior. It also differs from many best-loved fairytales.

Like Cinderella, Belle (costar of Beauty and the Beast), Snow White, the Bible’s Queen Esther, and many others, the Miller’s Daughter undergoes social elevation and new wealth. But instead of revenge against her tormentors—her father and husband—she destroys poor Rumpelstiltskin who helped her gain the crown. The story presents a confusing message⁶—pretty sordid in all as she treats her benefactor shabbily. The story’s attraction must reside elsewhere than in teaching morality. Essentially, this tale lacks any lesson in scruples.

Pleasurably creepy stories often end with a last-minute triumph at the curtain, a jubilant resolution of release from tension. In Rumpelstiltskin’s tale, deliverance arrives after doubly accented stress. The familiar pattern supports hundreds of plots, and many jokes rely on the same triple “setup”. Three nights of spinning, three pulls to fill a spool, three days of guessing, three names guessed—this near-universal rhythm supplies a cadence essential to many droll stories.ⁱⁱ Rumpelstiltskin himself reckons triple time when he sings that “Today I bake” (the first day), then “tomorrow brew” (the second day), and “The next I’ll have the young Queen’s child” (the third day). A thrice-metrical pattern sustains both high and low art and that array lavishly ornaments Rumpelstiltskin’s story. Yet, despite its familiar organization, this story remains uniquely alien. Its seemingly familiar types, a commonplace triple form, and famous themes of magic and human woe—nothing habituates us to it or expunges this tale’s remarkable strangeness, which suggests neither its structure nor stock elements distinguish Rumpelstiltskin’s story—but something else, unspoken. Beneath its obvious surface an unstated content lingers weirdly in the mind.

iiAn odd statement or situation repeats to set a pattern of expectations. A third syncopated variant delivers the punchline that breaks toward a surprising direction. (So the last of the three Billy Goats Gruff fares better than his two brothers. The story counsels learning and progress. “The Three Little Pigs” celebrates an evolution to celebrate technological development. “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” always finds a middle ground between extremes.) In really sophisticated jokes the punchline refers to a pattern that already exists outside the joke, meta-humor. Present in the crudest drollery, this three-part order also defines the sonata form beneath the nineteenth century’s great symphonies.

The Tale of Rumpelstiltskin occupies a place apart from otherwise-comparable fairytales.⁷ The story drops into our present as an exceptional legacy because of where it was composed, by whom, how it was transmitted into the present, the disregard and scorn it suffered before gaining serious attention, and how its message (but not its content) adapted to an onrushing future. We might ask: Does the Tale of Rumpelstiltskin mean anything at all? Perhaps that is not even a fair question to pose of a work that was never intended to withstand interrogations routinely directed at high art’s literary ambitions. It’s certainly not a question we pose to its main audience, children: “OK kids, what was that all about? Think about it. Tomorrow morning you’ll be tested on this bedtim...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• The Tale of Rumpelstiltskin
• 1 The Story’s History
• 2 Meaning Is Purpose
• 3 Rumpelstiltskin’s Author
• 4 The Spinner’s Libido
• 5 Fairytale Contracts and Commerce
• 6 Supernatural Zoology
• 7 The Talking Cure
• 8 The Devil versus Motherhood
• 9 The Unknown Name
• 10 A Bad Reputation, Unearned
• 11 A Lamentable Example of Self-Abuse
• 12 Rumpelstiltskin’s Competition
• Appendices
• Works Cited
• Notes on the Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Index