Fairy Tales Classic and New

1. RUMPELSTILTZKIN OR THE MILLER’S DAUGHTER’S PROGRESS OR THE LITTLE DARKLING (From Andrew Lang’s GRIMM) By John Tan THERE LIVED A not very possessing and poor Italian Miller, in a large German town many years ago, who, once, in order to draw attention to himself as a person of some importance during his audience with the King, he foolishly declared, ‘My daughter besides being so comely to look at could also spin straw into gold.’ The monarch was much disinclined to believe the scoundrel though not openly, but as the latter had let his words stir him to such a temper he told him, ‘Now, that is a decent talent worth having, my man; if your daughter is as clever as you say she is, let her be brought to the palace after dinner-time tomorrow so that I can try on her my acid test. Do ye know, sir, what that is?’ When the girl was timidly brought to the King he led her into a room full of straw. Here he gave her a spinning-wheel and spindle, and after greeting her courteously he said: ‘Now set to work and spin all night till early dawn, and if by that time in lieu of the common straw I see no gold the price you shall pay is the loss of your life. If you pass the test; having withstood it somehow, your life shall still be whole inside you.’ Then he closed the door and locked it behind him and left her alone in the room. Left to herself and feeling crushed: because she did not know what in the world to do, the miller’s daughter sat down and did not stop crying until midnight. She had not the foggiest notion how to turn straw into gold, and a nerve near her heart soon became pinched because her miserableness had grown and grown all this time. She could only roll her eyes and yammer insensibly, ‘Ich -- Ich -- Ich -- Ich -- Ich,’ in the face of her sheer desperation. Her height of her futility of being a braggart’s daughter, however, was interrupted when suddenly she saw the door flew open at the stroke of twelve; and in stepped a darkling tiny man, of crabby countenance, who saluted her by her name: ‘Good evening, Miss Miller-maid or should I say, Miss Zazzeri! Oh, dear, oh, dear! What is the meaning behind your dropping so many bitter tears tonight?’ ‘Oh, sir!’ answered the girl, hopelessly. ‘I have to spin straw into gold, and have no idea how it’s to be done.’ ‘What will you give me if I spin it for you?’ asked shorty; scratching a pimple on his warty chin and blinking his small slinky eyes that were puckered up at her like a toad. ‘My necklace,’ the girl replied. The little man took the necklace, sat himself down at the wheel, and whir, whir, whir, the wheel went round three times, and the bobbin was full. Then he put on another, and whir, whir, whir, the wheel went round three times, and the second too was full; and so it went on till the morning, when all the straw was spun away, and all the bobbins were full of gleaming gold. As soon as the sun rose the King came, and when he perceived the gold he was astonished and delighted, but his heart only lusted more than ever after the precious metal. He had the miller’s daughter put into another room full of straw, much bigger than the first, and bade her, as she valued her life, to spin it all into gold for all she was worth before the following morning. Of course, it was a King’s right to bully others who happened to be his lowly subjects. Not knowing what to do, the girl began to weep until midnight when the door opened as before, and the tiny little man appeared and said: ‘What ’ll you give me if I spin the straw into gold for you?’ ‘The ring from my little finger,’ answered the girl; rubbing her moist eyes with her wrist this way and that. ‘See, I have conceived a great liking for you, Miss. Let me pocket that ring,’ the little man quavered in a cold, shrill little voice. ‘Then, shall I get down to brass tacks: I mean, to our business at hand.’ So round went the spinning-wheel again, and when morning broke he had spun all the straw into glittering gold. The King was pleased beyond measure at the sights but his greed for gold was still not satisfied, and he had the miller’s daughter brought into a yet bigger room full of straw, and said: ‘You must spin all this away in the night; but if you succeed; this time I shall be your own bridegroom.’ He was not deterred that she was a miller’s daughter; for, he was positively convinced he couldn’t find a richer wife were he to search the whole world over. When the girl was alone the little man appeared at midnight for the third time, and said: ‘What’ ll you give me if I spin the straw for you once again?’ ‘I’ve nothing more to give,’ the glum girl made her answer slowly; between the softest groans and sniffles that escaped her. ‘When you are Queen if you promise me,’ as baring his head and holding and twirling his hat, the little fellow gurgled ominously, ‘to give me your first child we shall have a deal!’ Sticking out his spatulate tongue close to a tendril of golden hair about her ear, he next hissed, ‘“The laborer is worthy of his reward,” this be 1 Timothy, v.16, you know? God, I wish to have her bambino! Quick, what do you say?’ The miller’s daughter drew in her underlip because she was not a little afraid; yet, she saw no other way out of it, so she promised evil shorty what he had demanded. ‘Who knows what might happen in that length of time?’ she thought to herself. Now, he set to work once more and spun the straw into gold. It cost the strange little man for his creative efforts, for after each of the three sessions he worked, he stood up and straightened his back stiffly, when the transformation had been accomplished. When the King came that last morning, and found everything as he had desired, he straightway made her his wife, and the miller’s daughter became a queen. When a year had passed a beautiful son was born to her, and she thought no more of the outlandish, odd little dwarf, till all of a sudden one day he stepped into her private closet and said: ‘Plain statement, so hear this, Madame Queen: since I had used my power to help you; now, crave pardon but I have come back; to fetch away your cute little bambino!’ At once, the Queen fell into a great state of alarm and dismay, both, and tried to buy off the little man with all the riches in her kingdom if he would only leave her the child. ‘No, thank you, Madame, a living creature, especially a king’s son, is, you may lay to it, dearer to me than all the treasures in the world. Scroll through or take a trip down your memory lane and remember all that have passed between us around Michaelmas of last year; if I breathe a single word abroad you’ll find yourself undone, of course,’ however, replied the other firmly. In the end, since the deeply-anguished Queen wailed and sobbed so very bitterly in his presence the little man felt a little sorry for her, and said: ‘I’ll give you three days to guess my name, and if you find it out in that time you may keep your child. And I will set your debt at nought! Barring accidents and hazards of life, that is, otherwise one final time will I return here to claim my dearly sought-after reward.’ Then the Queen pondered the whole night over all the names she had ever heard, and sent a messenger to scour the land, and to pick up far and near any names he could come across. When the little man arrived on the following day she began with Kasper, Melchior, Belshazzar, and all the other unusual or foreign names she knew, such as, Meridoc, Baldur, Sanballat, Loki, Xerxes, &c, &c, in a string or by employing imaginative leaps, but at each one the manikin called out: ‘That’s not my name.’ The next day she sent to inquire the names of all the people in the neighborhood, and had a long list of the most uncommon and extraordinary for the little man when he made his appearance. ‘Is your name, perhaps, Sheepshanks Cruickshanks, Spindleshanks?’ but he always replied, a triumphant gleam flashing in his black eyes: ‘Indeed! That’s not my name! By the way, do you know: beauty is pain? I don’t mean being beautiful, of course; but to express beauty. Your child expresses it to a superlative, extraordinary degree, they say. So have him I will!’ On the third day the messenger returned and announced: ‘So sorry, a thousand apologies, Madame! Worse and worse, but I have not been able to find any new names.’ No stormier brows yet were to be seen so unfitting upon a woman’s countenance as when the Queen, all distracted and aghast and about to be disgraced -- the sinister figure of the little fellow having bedecked her imagination with yet a blacker and grimmer afterglow -- now ran out of her palace, right into the night. She must have been wandering in a deep silence more eloquent than words for some time; when she found she had come upon a high hill round the corner of the wood, where the foxes and hares bid each other good-night; seemingly, like a country outside the sands of time. Everything here was quiet and very still. Though, she was wringing her hands rather inconsolably and her tears were silently dropping: fireflies, however, were lighting her path as she climbed the hill and she saw all around her was bathed in a milky moonlight, although the ground was dusty and turfy and gray underneath the hem of her gown. It must have been Compline and she was walking among tangled pines when she suddenly thought to fall on her knees to pray. ‘God is in his heaven! it’s all right with the world,’ she breathed, trying to be brave, and clasping her hands together; turning the words of a little poem into a profession of her deep faith. ‘Meaning: the world isn’t all right a moment ago; but it’s all right now,’ she whispered to herself in her heart and so felt some degree comforted. She looked at the warm yellow moon; not veiled by any silver cloud-fleck. A while later, going deeper into the middle of the wild woods which curved back from the same hill downwards, she espied a little house, in front of which house, was a red tawny wood-fire and in its darting orange flames was baking a pheasant or partridge from which white wisps of delicious steam was rising, and around the blaze leapt about a grotesque little man in the shadows, hopping from one leg to the other, and intoning in a sharp, high-pitched singsong voice his strange song -- the grotesqueness of which first three lines soon burned in her sore heart; time out of mind. For this was his song: ‘To-morrow I brew, to-day I bake, And then the child away I’ll take; For little deems my royal dame That Rumpelstiltzkin is my name!’ You cannot half well imagine the Queen’s sheer delight at hearing the man’s name being pronounced at the end of this corny little rhyme, and when he stepped in on the morrow and asked: ‘Now, my lady Queen, what’s my name?’ she pretended to ask him back: ‘Could your name happen to be Conrad, my man?’ A loving thought for her baby having sprang to her mind, it caused a pleasurable warmth to gush into her heart. The Queen wanted that moment to kiss its shining face with fervor. ‘No.’ ‘How about Harry?’ Now, with the queen’s face lighted up and she fluttered her eyelashes coyly, while he, on his part, gazing up at such her demure smiles, wonderingly, was started almost to impatient anger. ‘Come, come! Pray, isn’t that your name?’ she persisted, feigning some anguish or at her wit’s end. ‘No, no!’ replied the darksome feisty little man. ‘Nein!’ ‘Heck, no, eh? Is your name perhaps, Rum-pel-stiltz-kin?’ looking at him coolly with bated breath. Out flew loud, piercing screams and horrible curses like jet black clouds that rose from the little man’s choked gullet. ‘Some fiend has indeed told you! A demon has told you that!’ he ranted and raged, his visage hideously contorted. And, oh, he ground his teeth so very furiously. His temper bordering to pugnacity and then remembering quarreling with a queen was not a done thing, first, he stamped his right foot into the ground so hard that it sank right inside it, quite nearly waist-deep. Second, with louring passion at being unexpectedly foiled by a mere young girl by the name of Zazzeri, not yet satisfied, he grabbed his left foot with both hands and tore himself unceremoniously from groin to crown of his stove-pipe hat into half. Lastly, he vanished in a thick brown smoke that coiled up the high Gothic windows of her boudoir, and was in that part of the country, or, indeed, the whole of our fine world, to be seen, never again. So the comely Queen breathed in deeply at last; drawing in each breaths, and inwardly, she smiled; feeling hugely relieved. Don’t you know? It’s like this in fairy tales.