It’s the first Tuesday of the month, which I think is a good time to do a fairy tale highlight. I’ve recently been reading multiple versions of Rumplestiltskin stories for a creative project I’m working on (Keep an eye out! You might see some exciting news soon!) and I’ve realized something very interesting.
Rumplestiltskin is definitely not the worst thing you can name someone.
You’d probably be surprised to find out that Rumplestiltskin is only one name for the mysterious little man that shows up and helps women do impossible tasks. He’s not like Baba Yaga, the Russian witch who shows up in all sorts of stories and involves herself in all manner of strange happenings, retaining her name. Rumplestiltskin has his own story…but similar little trolls pop up all over the world.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…
So far I’ve found over 25 different names for strange and wily little helpers. There are several stories like Rumplestiltskin, and they’re all categorized under ATU 500, “The Name of the Helper.” I’m not going to go into all of them here, but I did pick a few of my favorite ATU 500 stories to share, with their crazy names, plus a short of list of honorable mentions for us to chuckle at. Click the names for links to the stories!
Holzrührlein Bonneführlein
This dwarf is from a much shorter tale called, “Dwarf Holzrührlein Bonneführlein” from Carl and Theodor Colshorn’s Märchen und Sagen aus Hannover. This one is a bit different than the others in that the helper…isn’t very helpful at all.
It goes like this. A cowherd’s daughter and a shepherd’s son fall in love, and plan to marry. But an ugly dwarf also takes a liking to the daughter, and comes to woo her and her family with many presents. No one likes him, but the girl’s mother accepts his presents anyway. Which is just bad form.
Eventually, though, they just tell him that she doesn’t want to marry the dwarf no matter how many presents he brings. He pitches a fit and insists on being paid for his presents, which you would probably do too if you spent a lot of money on something like that. Except that the only payment he’ll accept is the daughter, who he’ll take by force if the mother can’t tell him his name.
The shepherd happens to be tending to his sheep near the dwarf’s cave, and overhears the dwarf singing about his name. He doesn’t know anything about his sweetheart’s problems, but notices she’s sad when he visits that night, so tries to comfort her with his amusing story about this dwarf and his name. The mother memorizes it for when the dwarf visits again and uses it to make him disappear.
But not before guessing some other wild names first. Can you imagine being called Mäuserich or Ruppsteert? Still, she’s a better guesser than some, who stuck with names like Paul and John.
Winterkölbl
“Winterkölbl” is a tale out of German Hungary, written down by Theodor Vernaleken in his Kinder- und Hausmärchen, dem Volke treu nacherzählt. Don’t ask me to translate that accurately, because I can’t, but it’s basically his own version of “Children’s and Household Tales.”
What I really like about this version is that the helper isn’t really a mischievous or malicious little gnome intent on making deals to steal babies or wives. He actually adopts the main character. It’s the girl’s suitor who must guess his name.
In the story, a young girl is abandoned by her father in the woods. While wandering, she comes across the home of a friendly dwarf, who takes her in and teaches her chores to do around his home while he’s gone. They continue on like this for a few years until one day he informs her that he’s made preparations for her future, securing her a job as a servant to the queen of a nearby castle. She gets the job and her foster father promises to visit every Sunday.
One day the queen’s son returns home and takes a liking to the girl, and the girl to him. Even his mother is okay with the match, leaving one last loose end to tie up — the foster father. On his next visit, the queen asked if her son might not marry the girl, to which the dwarf responds, “Only if he can guess my name.” Thankfully the young king does, and Winterkölbl doesn’t pitch a fit like the other helpers. He even attends the wedding of his foster daughter.
None of the other ATU 500 stories had so kind a helper, and I loved the fact that not only does Winterkölbl save this little girl from being lost and hungry in the woods, but even secures her a comfortable living for the future. A servant to the queen would mean she never went hungry again, as long as she did her work, which her foster father taught her as a child. Of course, she does even better by getting a place as a king’s wife. It’s a cute and wholly different sort of “Rumplestiltskin” kind of story.
Martynko Klyngas
Martynko Klyngas is the name of the helper in “The Golden Spinster” from A. H. Wratislaw’s Sixty Folk-Tales from Exclusively Slavonic Sources. What I like about this tale is that, even though it matches “Rumplestiltskin” and other stories similarly, there’s one tiny detail that makes me happy.
You see, in most of these stories we encounter a lazy girl who refuses to do any work and whose parent lies to cover their shame for having such a lazy child. Often a young man will come by and inquire why the girl is being punished in some way and the parent, often a mother, will cover her own hide by saying something like, “Oh she works so much she’ll work herself to death if I don’t stop her.” This “work” is often something miraculous like spinning huge quantities of thread, or spinning something like straw or clay into gold.
“The Golden Spinster” opens and goes much the same way. We see a mother and her three daughters, two of which are hard at work spinning their yarn, and the third, named Hanka, who is lazing about in a corner. A young lord sees this and asks why the third daughter isn’t working, and the mother, in shame, makes up a story about how if she did work, she’d get everything done in a third of the time it took the rest of them to work, turning it all to gold. Not only that, but if she ran out of the usual materials to spin, she would end up spinning the thatch on the roof, and even the hairs on their heads. The young lord is amazed and wishes Hanka as his wife. The mother agrees, and Hanka is sent away with him.
Like most of the rest, Hanka is locked in a room with things to spin, told that if she fails then she would be executed. (The husbands in these stories leave much to be desired, really.) And like in the other stories, a little helper shows up, looking particularly dwarfy or gnome-like.
But the change is this: rather than do all the work himself, he teaches Hanka the art of spinning material into gold. The price is that she must discover his name after one year, or he will return to fetch her as his own wife. Hanka has no choice but to agree, and so learns the art of spinning gold.
The rest of the story goes the same as the others. They have their happy year of wedded bliss, they have a baby boy. The husband goes out hunting and gets lost in a storm and somehow discovers the dwarf’s name. They use it against him. They live happily ever after. With a cow.
I just thought it was cool that Hanka learned to do the work herself. The story also makes it seem like she continued to spin gold for riches, until after the name problem is resolved. But by that point I’m sure they’re more than wealthy enough to live comfortably with their son…and the cow.
Tarandandò
“Tarandandò” isn’t from Germany or Germanic-like countries, like most of the other stories about impish little helpers. This one is from northern Italy, but the source is Märchen und Sagen aus Wälschtirol by Christian Schneller. So it’s…still kind of German…I guess.
This story is honestly just funny. And kinda gross. We have a mother with a daughter who, a bit like Amelia Bedelia, takes commands a little too literally. But unlike Amelia Bedelia, who seems to want to do right and be good, this daughter just seems lazy. And, unfortunately, kind of dumb.
Her mother tells her to cook some soup with “a couple of kernels of rice” in it for her to eat after she returns from a day of working in the fields. So the girl puts in exactly two kernels of rice. The next day the mother asks her to cook the noonday meal again, telling her to use “whatever is honest.” So the girl kills the donkey named Honest and boils his meat, which is so tough it can’t be eaten. The next day it’s the same, but the mother tells her to cook mush. Which the girl does, and then eats seven dishes of it, leaving only a tiny dish for her hardworking mother.
This sets the mother into such a loud scolding that a gentlemen stops to inquire what the problem is, and the mother, ashamed, says her daughter spun seven spindles and she didn’t want her to overtire herself. Amazed by her industriousness, he asks to marry the girl, and both mother and daughter agree.
You know the story. Girl gets locked up, strange little dwarf appears, bargain is struck — spin the material (not into gold this time) in exchange for a name. The girl agrees and hundreds of dwarves take the flax she’s meant to spin away. The husband comes home with a story about how he happened across a strange scene, hundreds of dwarves spinning while one of them sat on a throne and sung about his name.
The girl is ecstatic. The dwarf returns with her spun threads and smugly asks her what his name is. She makes two silly guesses, letting him think for a moment he’s perhaps won, and then — wait, it would be better to show you.
“Is your name perhaps — Tarandandò?”
“Curses!” cried the red dwarf, as though he had been stung by a viper. He slapped her hard on the cheek, and then he and his little devils departed into the air with such a sound of whistling and rushing that it was like a windstorm in the fall swirling the dry leaves about and blowing them through the woods.
When the gentleman arrived home that evening, his wife showed him the spun flax, and he was uncommonly satisfied. “But why is your cheek so swollen?” he asked.
“Oh, dear husband, my lord,” she said, “that comes from spinning.”
You can’t make this stuff up. Or maybe you can.
What’s even better, or grosser, I guess, is how the wife gets out of spinning for the rest of her life. She asks for her aunt’s help, and her aunt puts together this truly disgusting contraption. A dead hen filled with blood and grease that she puts under her arm, hidden by her clothes.
When she meets the husband, she squeezes it with her arm so all the blood drips down to the floor, which is just a really horrifying picture. She complains of her ailment, a large boil brought on by too much spinning. Horrified the husband demands the wife never spin again. So she doesn’t. And, as the story ends, “if she hasn’t died, she is still living lazily forth.”
Moral of the story? Spinning is…bad for your health?
Whuppity Stoorie
This one is from Scotland, taken from Celtic Folklore: Welsh and Manx by John Rhys. This one is notable because, one, it’s just so Scottish, and two, there isn’t a single man in the story. That’s right. Rumplestiltskin is a woman in this one.
Whuppity Stoorie is a fae-like woman who, upon seeing a widow crying over a dying and pregnant pig, asks what the woman will give her if she saves the pig. The woman replies, “Whatever your ladyship’s madam likes,” not knowing she’s making deals with a fairy.
Of course, the fairy asks for her baby boy.
What I like is that the woman here doesn’t sit around. The fairy gives her three days to learn her name, and the very next morning the woman is out exploring the forest with her baby, searching for this fae woman or her name. On the second day she finds her, and on the third day she returns and decides to have a bit fun.
She pretends to cry and beg and grovel, until the fae woman thinks she’s demented. Finally, after the fae woman pretty much calls her ugly and crazy, she curtsies and says, “In troth, fair madam, I might have had the wit to know that the likes of me is not fit to tie the worst shoestrings of the high and mighty princess, Whuppity Stoorie.”
I assume, with that kind of sass, she lives happily ever after with her son and her pigs. I hope so, anyway. We don’t really get a clear “happily ever after.”
Peerie Fool
Give it to Scotland to have the best Rumplestiltskin stories. This one comes from Orkney Islands, which I had to look up. Turns out, they’re part of a Scottish archipelago. If you look at a map of the British Isles, its the teeny specks at the very northern tip. It’s from Examples of Printed Folk-Lore Concerning the Orkney and Shetland Islands, collected by G. F. Black and edited by Northcote W. Thomas.
This story uses one of my favorite elements in fairy tale and folklore, and it’s an element pulled from ATU type 311. I’ll give you the ATU 311 title as a hint: “The Heroine Rescues Herself and Her Sisters.”
In this story king and queen had three daughters, but the king died and the women all moved to a small farm where they grew kale. They noticed their kale was being stolen each night, so the eldest sister stays up to keep watch over the kale. That’s when the giant comes.
She tries to stop him, he just tosses her in his basket and leaves. Once home, he orders her to do all these tasks. She tries, but around noon, as she’s making lunch, a bunch of “little yellow-headed folk” ask for a bite to eat. She refuses and finds she can’t finish the work after they’ve left. As punishment the giant…peels off her skin and hangs her on the rafters like she’s meat in a smokehouse.
No, I’m serious. That’s not even the craziest thing you find in ATU 311 stories.
The exact same thing happens to the second sister, and the third gets kidnapped as well. Around noon, the yellow-headed folk appear again, but this time the third daughter feeds them, and one offers to work for her. She says she cannot repay him, but he says his price is only his name. Luckily she learns it, thanks to a beggar woman who bears news in exchange for a place to sleep.
When the giant comes home, the third girl asks that he take home a basket of food for her mother’s cow, and he agrees. She takes her sisters down from the rafters, puts their skin back on, and hides them in his basket one at a time. On the third trip, she hides herself, and when the giant arrives at her mother’s home, her two sisters and mother are waiting with a big pot of boiling water and, well, that’s the end of the giant.
Yay female agency!
Honorable Mentions
I can’t go over every story or we’d be here all day. But I thought I’d at least mention and link to some of the other funny names I’ve seen thus far. With links to the stories so you can read them.
Hipche
Nägendümer
Kugerl
Hoppetînken
Zirkzirk
Kruzimugeli
Titteli Ture
Purzinigele
There are others which you can find on A. L. Ashliman’s fabulous folktext’s website, and there are some extra links on SurLaLune’s website as well.
What do you guys think? What’s your favorite name? What’s your favorite story? Is there a story I perhaps didn’t mention that you think ought to have been included? Let me know your thoughts!