Gilbert Keith Chesterton penned a poem titled Modern Elfland and wrote in his book Orthodoxy about the wisdom found in the nursery tales of his youth. Joseph Campbell collected mythologies from all over the world, seeking common threads that transcend most cultures and religions. Carl Jung spoke of archetypes that he attributed to a universal consciousness among humanity. Theodore Roy Sarbin introduced us to a budding branch in the field of psychology called narrative psychology, which describes a process wherein our minds perceive reality as a sequence of stories we tell ourselves about reality.
I believe there is much to learn from investigating human nature in these ways. That is why I decided to make my own humble contribution by writing a series of essays on the fairy tales of The Brothers Grimm. It isn’t particularly novel to pursue such a line of inquiry, but it is interesting to me and, I hope, to you. This second installment of said series is on the familiar tale Rumpelstiltskin.
As I did with Hansel and Gretel in the first installment, I will ask you to indulge me in my own interpretation and analysis of the story, though I have no special claim to knowledge of the author’s original intent. My goal is to use this fable to convey a set of ideas. I have provided a link to the original story here for your perusing.
Rumpelstiltskin: Project Gutenberg link
Our story begins with a poor miller who, for some unexplained reason, is brought before the King. Wanting to impress the King and thereby gain a feeling of self-importance, the miller tells him a rather bizarre lie. The King, for our purposes, represents the dual roles of external approval from others and internal delusion of ourselves. Our emphasis will be on the former, but please keep in mind the latter. The miller is our public self. The entire sequence of events that follows is the product of the miller’s own inferiority complex and deception. We can learn from him to be wary of the tendency we all have to embellish the truth about ourselves to impress others. As we will see, these seemingly small false representations have real consequences.
When I was in the second grade, my school had a talent show. My teacher, a sweet and kindly woman, asked us to share with the class any special talents we had. I wanted to impress her and my fellow students. So I boldly raised my hand and claimed that I knew how to tap dance. I’m not sure why that sprang to mind. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do at the time. My teacher raised one eyebrow inquisitively and said, “How exciting. Would you like to show us?”
In that moment, the walls came crumbling down. My bluff had been called. The shame of my inability to tap dance, along with my deception, was almost unbearable. The jig was up, the cards were called, and the end was near. I had an opportunity to come clean. I could admit the truth and, surely, all would be forgiven. Is that what I did? Sadly, no. My heart pounded in my chest and my pores opened wide. If there had been any predators within a mile, they certainly would’ve smelled the fear and vulnerability. How did I react? I doubled down and claimed that I needed to have special music to dance. That was about thirty-eight years ago, and the incident is burned into my memory with astounding vividness to this day.
In the case of our miller, the boast was even more fantastical. He told the King that his daughter was so clever that she could spin straw into gold. The King, like my second-grade teacher, likely raised a single eyebrow and said, “That is an art that pleases me well; if your daughter is as clever as you say, bring her tomorrow to my palace, and I will try what she can do.” Remember that this is a poor miller making this claim. The King sees the state of the man and likely wonders why his daughter hasn’t been spinning him any gold. Like the miller’s tall tale, our own are usually much more obvious to others than we believe them to be. Nonetheless, we feel compelled to conform to what we perceive to be others’ expectations of us. We want to be liked. We want to fit in. We want to be part of the “in crowd.” The less we value who we are, the more likely we are to live a lie, especially if it grants us the acceptance we crave from others.
The miller brings his poor daughter to the palace as requested. The King informs her that she will be kept at the palace overnight. She is provided with a spinning wheel and straw and told that if she fails to spin the straw into gold by morning, she will be killed. Let us imagine that the young daughter is our inner self—our true self and our conscience.
Our lies always catch up with us. Sometimes it takes a lifetime. Other times, as with my inability to tap dance and the miller’s boast, the cost comes fast and hard. The daughter is terrified, and in quite a predicament. She is acutely aware of her inability to spin gold from straw, and it is now her life on the line, all because of the lie her father told about her. The father’s pride and desire for acceptance has compromised the safety of his daughter. Similarly, our yearning for approval can compromise our integrity—our inner self and our conscience—especially if the approval we seek is from other people instead of from God.
Enter the villain and the namesake of this tale, Rumpelstiltskin. The little man, or manikin, as he is called in the story, approaches the distraught daughter and offers a solution to her problem. In all fairness, if this little man had offered to magically help me tap dance thirty-eight years ago, I am almost certain I would have accepted his Faustian proposal. I only had my teacher’s disappointment on the line. The miller’s daughter had her life in the balance.
The little man spins the straw into gold for the young maiden. By accepting his service, she partakes in the lie and compromises her integrity. He asks only for her necklace in return, which seems to her a fair trade. How often do we justify our little “white lies” in service of the greater good? After all, we reason, no one is being harmed by our falsehood. In the Brothers Grimm tale, too, no one is being harmed. On the contrary, the daughter’s life is being spared.
The King is pleased. The sought-after prestige is granted to the miller by proxy at the small cost of a necklace and some temporary anxiety and guilt. The illusion of truth and innocence is maintained, for now. The King is greedy, though. If she can spin gold once, then certainly she can do it again. Does the greedy King remind us of our desire for approval and acceptance at the cost of our integrity? If so, then we know that, once we have crossed that line, it is hard to go back. Oh, what a tangled web we weave!
Once again, the daughter finds herself in the castle with a pile of straw, a spinning wheel, and the threat of death hanging overhead. All she bought with her sacrificed integrity was a little time. Once again, the little man appears and offers to solve her problem. This time the price is her last valuable possession: a ring. The little man delivers a second time, and the daughter is saved yet again. Her deliverance is fleeting, though, for the greedy King requests one more night of spinning. If she can produce gold on the third night, the King has promised to marry her and make her his Queen.
This is where my tap dancing analogy falls short. For a modern-day example of this fairy tale, I must point to people like politicians and celebrities who amass great wealth and prestige after being raised in a family as poor as the miller’s daughter. Who doesn’t like a rags-to-riches story? It resonates with us, profoundly.
What kind of flexible morals are required to purchase the golden ticket to fame and power? What about in the academic community? Surely the “Science” being done in the university lab is more important than the trivial ethical concerns of the less enlightened ones, right? How about in the religious community? God couldn’t have meant that little bit about such-and-such sort of sin, could He? Those biblical passages could affect our attendance and financial support. I am sure the compromises vary greatly from person to person. The truth is, no one need trade their principles for fame and riches. As an addict in recovery, I can speak with some authority on the topic of compromised integrity and flexible morals. We all fall prey to this trap in our own ways.
The King’s proposal is an offer too tempting to be refused. The prize of success is of inestimable value. The little man comes the third night and offers his services to the girl, but she is all out of gifts to give. All she had was her necklace and the ring. The little man is undeterred and asks for something more valuable than jewelry. If he does this for her, he knows she will marry the King and be the Queen, which means that she will bear children. So the little man asks for her first-born child. Well, that escalated quickly! The girl’s life is still on the line, but she has much to gain from his proposition. She weighs her options and tells herself that gambling the uncertainty of a future child and the certainty of death is worth the risk. Having counted the cost, she agrees. Here we might see the unborn child as the last vestige of our soul—our better angels—and the last shred of our conscience. The cost is considerably higher this time, but the little man delivers again.
The King, greatly pleased, marries the young girl and makes her the Queen. What started as the miller’s vain attempt at approval has ended with his daughter’s rise to grandeur. And everyone lives happily ever after . . . or not. The Queen has a child, and the little man comes for what is due him. Horror-stricken, the Queen offers him all the riches of the kingdom in exchange for the life of her son. On our own slippery slope of compromise, this is the point where we start to understand that the prize we gain from our wrongdoing is heavily outweighed by the price of our lost principles.
The little man is not tempted by her gold. After all, he is the one who can spin it from straw. What need does he have of her riches? Thus far, the little man has remained unnamed to the daughter. He represents the lies we tell and the compromising of our integrity. He is the devil at the crossroads, and he has always had this end in mind. The necklace and the ring were only tests of the daughter’s willingness to deal. They were never the end goal.
There is one more deal presented to the Queen. She is given three days to guess the name of the little man. If she is successful, he will forfeit his claim on the child. How fitting is it that our lies and compromised integrity hold sway over us only as long as we deny their existence or refuse to call them by their proper name? The Queen thinks of every name she can, but comes up empty. Her guesses remind me of how we first look to the paradigms we are familiar with to find the answers to the questions that challenge us. Then she sends out a messenger in search of the little man’s name. The messenger represents the honest person searching for truth with an open mind. When we seek truth in earnest and desire it above all else, we will find it. Seek and you will find, knock and it will be opened to you, ask and you shall receive. The messenger is our curiosity and our humble sense of awe. The Queen needs a name and the messenger delivers.
On the third day, the little man returns. He is certain of his victory. The prize is within his grasp. The Queen surprises him by saying his name. The outraged Rumpelstiltskin stomps his right foot into the ground so hard that his leg is mired up to his hip. By the Queen giving a name to her compromise, the tyranny of her lies is stopped dead in its tracks.
Rumpelstiltskin then grabs his left leg and pulls so hard that he tears himself in two. From his fate we see how Truth destroys lies—the lies we tell in our personal lives and the lies told in the wider world. We all compromise our principles at times. We all fail. We all give in to the promise of acceptance or security at the cost of our conscience. None of us is perfect. We all surrender to tyranny from within and without in various ways. But, as John 1:5 assures us, “The light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.” Truth is more powerful than deception. Truth always sets us free.
The Rumpelstiltskins in our lives wear many faces—many masks. So we must always be vigilant. Every choice we make has a consequence. Every time we compromise our integrity, every time we lie to ourselves or another, we give the Rumpelstiltskins of the world power over us. We need to call upon our courage and our tenacity and have the humility and the sense of awe that it takes to find the name of the evil one and speak it aloud. We must call out tyranny when we see it and be willing to sacrifice the approval of others in the search for Truth. In the end, there is only One Name that matters. To that name every knee will bow. Every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.