Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm(54)
The king was overjoyed at the sight of it but hadn’t yet had his fill, so he had the miller’s daughter brought to a still-larger room filled with straw. “This night,” said he, “you must spin it all – if you succeed I will take you as my wife.” Even if she’s only a miller’s daughter, he thought to himself, I won’t find a richer wife in the whole wide world.
When the girl sat there alone, the little man came to her a third time and said, “What will you give me if yet again I spin all this straw into gold?”
“I have nothing left to give you,” said the girl.
“Then promise me once you’re queen to give me your first child.”
Who knows how all this will end, thought the miller’s daughter, but with no other way out, she promised him what he asked, and in exchange the little man once again spun the straw into gold. When the king came the next morning and found all that he had asked for, he took her as his bride, and the lovely miller’s daughter became his queen.
A year later she bore a beautiful child and never gave a thought to the little man, when, all at once, he strode into the room and said, “Now give me what you promised.”
Now the queen took fright and offered the little man all the riches in the realm, if he would only leave her child. But the beastly little man said, “Not on your life! A living thing is dearer to me than all the treasures in the world.” Then the queen started weeping and wailing so hard that the little man took pity on her. “I’ll give you three days’ time,” he said, “and if by then you manage to find out my name, you can keep your child.”
All night long the queen racked her brain over all the names she had ever heard, and she sent a messenger throughout the land to inquire far and wide after other names. When the little man came the next day, she began with Kasper, Melchior, Balthazar, and rattled off all the names she knew, one after the other, but each time the little man said, “Guess again.”
The next day she sent her messenger to ask around what people were called in the neighboring lands, and when the little man appeared, she recited the oddest and strangest names: “Might you perchance be called Sparerib or Muttonchop or Lambshanks?”
But to each the little man responded, “Guess again.”
On the third day the messenger returned and said, “No new names have I found, but at the edge of a forest at the foot of a high mountain in the middle of nowhere I spotted a little house, and in front of the house a fire burned, and by the fire leapt a paltry little man, skipping around on one foot and croaking:
‘Today I bake, tomorrow I sup,
The next day I fetch the queen’s young pup;
Never ever will she dream,
That Rumpelstilzchen is my name.’”
You can well imagine how overjoyed the queen was to hear that name, and when, a short while later, the little man returned and asked, “So, Your Majesty, what’s my name?,” she first asked, “Is it Kunz?”
“No.”
“Is it Heinz?”
“No.”
“Might your name perchance be Rumpelstilzchen?”
“Who the devil told you? Who the devil told you?” shrieked the little man, and in a furious fit stamped the ground so hard with his right foot that he got stuck up to the waist, whereupon, enraged, he took his left foot in both his hands and tore himself in two.
had the girl found her hiding place than the godless gang got home. They had dragged along another girl, were dead drunk, and kept on screaming and yammering. They gave her wine to drink, three glasses full – a glass of white, a glass of red, and a glass of yellow wine – which made her heart burst. They tore off her fine clothes, lay her on a table, chopped her lovely body into bits, and sprinkled it with salt. The poor bride hidden behind the barrel quaked and trembled with terror, for she saw what fate the robbers had in store for her. One of them noticed a golden ring on the little finger of the murdered girl, and since he could not slip it off, he took a cleaver and hacked the finger off, but the force of the blow made the severed finger bounce in the air and bound over the barrel, landing smack-dab in the bride’s lap. The thief took a lantern and searched for it, but he couldn’t find it. Whereupon another one said, “Have you looked behind the great big barrel?”
But the old woman called out, “Come and eat, and leave the looking for tomorrow – the finger won’t run away.”
“The old woman’s right,” the robbers replied, then left off their search and sat down to eat. The old woman dripped a sleeping potion into their wine, so that they soon lay down on the cellar floor and fell asleep. When the bride heard the sound of their snoring, she crept out from behind the barrel and had to climb carefully over their sleeping hulks reclining side by side on the floor, terrified of waking one. But God helped her make her way safely across. The old woman climbed with her out of the cellar, opened the door, and together they hurried as fast as they could away from that den of thieves. The wind had blown away the scattered ashes, but the peas and lentils germinated and sprouted and showed them the way in the moonlight. They walked the whole night until they came to the mill. The girl told her father everything that had happened.