The girl doesn't know what to do and begins to weep. At once the door opens and a little man, or "manikin" as the tale says, comes in, asking her why she is crying so. Apparently he has been attracted by her strong emotions, as faerie folk are said to be. When she explains her predicament he says he can spin straw into gold, no problem, and asks what she can give him if he does the job for her. She hands over her necklace and he at once sits down and spins the straw, whir, whir, whir, into shining gold wire on a spool.
In the morning the little man has vanished. The king is very pleased with the gold, but being greedy, locks the girl into a bigger room with more straw, and again demands that she spin it all into gold by dawn. If not, she will die. All alone in the room that night, the girl feels hopeless and weeps once more. As if summoned again by her emotions, the little man appears a second time. This time she offers him a ring from her finger to get out of her predicament. Whir, whir, whir, straw is spun into gold.
The king finds bigger spools of gold wire in place of straw the next morning and is delighted, but again is greedy and locks the girl in the biggest room in the palace, stuffed to the ceiling with straw. If she can turn it all into gold by dawn he will marry her, but if not, she will die.
The girl's weeping in the locked room attracts the little man for a third time, but now she has nothing left to give him. So he asks her, "If you become queen, will you give me your first-born child?"
Thinking nothing of the future, the girl agrees. Whir, whir, whir, the mountain of straw is spun into gold. The king collects his gold and marries the girl as promised. A year goes by and the girl, now a queen, has a beautiful child.
One day the little man comes and claims the child as his reward for saving her life. Horrified, the young queen offers him all the riches of the realm, but the little man refuses, saying "Something alive is dearer to me than all the treasures in the world." The girl laments and cries so much that the manikin relents a little for, as we have seen, he is very sensitive to human emotions. He strikes a new bargain with her. If she can guess his name within three days, she will get to keep the child. But she will never guess it, he says confidently, for he has a very unusual name.
The queen stays up all night thinking of every name she's ever heard and sends out messengers far and wide to assemble lists of unusual names. When the manikin comes to see her the first day, she tries out all these names but none is right. On the second day she sends out more messengers to the distant corners of the kingdom to collect weird names, but again the little man's name is not among them and he goes away laughing, sure he will get to keep the child.
On the third day the queen's most faithful, far-traveling messenger reports that he's struck pay dirt. In his wanderings he didn't uncover any new names, but far away, atop a mountain, he did come across a little house, in front of which a fire was blazing, and around it was dancing a ridiculous little man. The messenger heard him shout a rhyme that revealed his name was Rumpelstiltskin.
The little man appears once more in the queen's room, sure she will be unable to guess his absurd name. But after two bad guesses ("Conrad?" "Harry?"), she gets it right — Rumpelstiltskin! The tale ends abruptly as the little man, crying out that the devil must have told her his name, stamps his right foot so furiously that it goes through the floor and sticks deep in the earth. With his two hands he seizes the other foot and literally tears himself in two!
A fitting end for one who has connived to take a human child from its mother. Or is it?
Who is this strange little man with his supernatural powers to enter locked rooms and spin straw into gold? Although the tale only calls him a "little man" or "manikin," he is clearly one of the faerie people of worldwide folklore, perhaps an elf or a gnome. The oral storytellers may have avoided calling him what he is because the faerie folk are notoriously touchy about their names and identities. But it is likely that any hearer of this tale in medieval times would instantly recognize the little man as a supernatural creature from the faerie world. Like other denizens of that world he appears when he wants to and only to certain people. Like them, he is interested in human children and attracted by strong human emotions.
From early times people have associated the faerie folk with a certain sadness, perhaps because they lack some things that human beings take for granted. According to one theory, they are unable to conceive their own young and are therefore fascinated by human children, sometimes kidnapping them in the night, as Shakespeare's faerie queen Titania snatched an Indian princeling as her darling toy in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Sometimes the faeries steal children from their cradles and replace them with blocks of wood or soul-less replica children called changelings.
The faeries' ability to feel emotions may be different from ours, for they seem to be curious about our emotional outbursts, and are in fact attracted to them. It's as if they exist in a parallel dimension but are summoned into our world by strong human emotions, as demons and angels supposedly can be summoned by ritual ceremonies and prayers intended to focus emotional energy. Some authorities hold that faeries do not know simple human emotions like love or grief but are intensely curious to know what they are missing.
Re-experiencing the story of "Rumpelstiltskin" as an adult, I was struck by how instantaneously the girl's tears of despair summoned the little man. Implied in the girl's weeping is a cry for help, a wish. If given words, it might be "Please, get me out of this.'" It appears the inhabitants of the faerie world are attracted to human emotions especially when they are focused into wishes. In this case, the wish is to get out of a desperate, hopeless situation. In the fairy-tale logic of cause and effect, the girl's shedding of tears is a positive action that generates a positive result. By crying, she acknowledges her powerlessness and sends out a signal to the world of spirits that surrounds us. "Isn't there someone with the magical powers my father claimed for me, who can get me out of this uncomfortable spot?" And the story hears, and responds by sending a messenger, a supernatural creature who has the power to grant her unspoken wish to escape.
However, as always, there's a catch. The price for getting out of her trouble is very high, escalating from material treasures, like a necklace or a ring, to life itself. But the girl isn't thinking about that right now. Having a child is a remote possibility. When she gets to that point, maybe she can work something out or maybe the little man will just go away. Whatever the risk, she'll agree to it to get out of that room and out of danger from the kings wrath. Her wish to escape, expressed by a strong burst of emotion, has called the little man and the adventure into being.
THE POWER OF WISHING
I began to realize that wishing may be an underlying principle of storytelling. The hero is almost always discovered in a difficult or uncomfortable situation, very often making a wish to escape or to change the conditions. The wish is often verbalized and is clearly stated in the first act of many movies. In The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy's song "Somewhere over the Rainbow" is a wish to escape to a land where troubles are far behind her. In Lost in Translation, Scarlett Johansson's character expresses the theme of the movie in a line in the first act where she says to Bill Murray's character, meeting in a Japanese hotel bar, "I wish I could sleep," symbolizing a wish for spiritual and emotional peace.
The expression of a wish, even a frivolous one, near the beginning of a story has an important function of orientation for the audience. It gives a story a strong throughline or what is called a "desire line," organizing the forces in and around the hero to achieve a clear goal, even if that goal may later be re-examined and redefined. It automatically generates a strong polarization of the story, generating a conflict between those forces helping the hero achieve her goal, and those trying to prevent it.