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Rumpenstünzchen
Translation of the German original "Rumpenstünzchen" © 2015 Ulrich Flemming. All rights reserved |
There once was a little girl, who was given a lump of flax, to spin flax threads from it; but whatever she spun was always a thread of gold, and no flax could come out.
She got very sad and sat down on the roof and started to spin and spun for three days, but nothing except gold.
There approached a little man, who said, "I want to help you out of all your troubles; your* young prince will pass by, who will marry you and lead you away, but you must promise me that your first child shall be mine."
The little girl promised him everything.
Soon afterwards a handsome young prince passed by, who took her with him and made her his wife.
After a year, she gave birth to a beautiful boy; presently, the little man arrived at the bed and demanded the child.
She offered him everything instead; he accepted none of it and gave her only three days' time—if she would not know his name on the last day, she had to give him the child.
The princess thought about it for a long time; she had already been thinking for two days and still had not found the name.
On the third, she orders a faithful maid to go out into the forest from where the little man had come.
The maid leaves at night; there she sees him as he rides on a cooking spoon around a big fire and shouts,
"If the princess knew that my name is Rumpenstünzchen! If the princess knew that my name is Rumpenstünzchen!"
The maid quickly brings this news to the princess, who becomes very pleased about it.
At midnight the little man appears and says, "Do you know my name, or I will take the child with me."
She mentions various names, finally she says, "Should you perhaps be called Rumpenstünzchen?"
When the little man hears this, he is shocked and says, "The devil must have told you this," and flies out of the window on the cooking spoon.
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*The text reads "dein Prinz" (your prince); "ein Prinz" (a prince), as it appears in a following sentence, would make more sense, but I let the "your" stand because I have no way of telling if it is a misprint or contained in the original manuscript.
The language of the German original is not entirely smooth—the syntax is odd at times; there are awkward repetitions of words; and the tense changes from past to present in the middle of the story. I tried to stay faithful to the original and made no attempt to "improve" the text.
About the names. The Grimm Brothers changed the name of the title character and anti-hero of the story from "Rumpenstünzchen" to "Rumpelstilzchen" (rendered in English typically as "Rumpelstiltskin" or, sometimes, "Rumplestiltskin"). Let's deal with this one first. The German Dictionary started by the Grimms (who themselves did not get beyond the letter f) defines a Rumpelstilz as a "lärmender, spukender Kobold" (noisy, spooking or haunting goblin). The suffix chen is a common German diminutive so that a Rumpelstilzchen is a little noisy spooking goblin. See the English Wikipedia article on the tale for more details.
I have found no information on "Rumpenstünzchen," neither in the Grimms' Dictionary nor on the web. My friend Thomas Kreifelts suggested that if we strip away the diminutive, we have the compounds Rump (regional for "rump" or "body") and stunz (archaic for "short", related to English "stunted"), both listed in the Dictionary. Taken together, the two words may indicate someone short of body, which usually means, in the context of fairy tales, he is a gnome or dwarf.
Whatever its meaning, "Rumpenstünzchen" remains an odd name. This may be the reason why the Grimms opted for a more familiar one in the published version, even though this goes against the grain of the story, which crucially hinges on the unfamiliarity of the anti-hero's name.
Last update: March 25, 2015