Rumpelstiltskin and the power of names

 by Inbali Iserles



In the tale of Rumpelstiltskin, a mill owner boasts to the king of his daughter’s talent for spinning straw into gold. Presumably he utters this fib in a moment of reckless abandon, consumed with ambition and the desire to please. Why the king believes him is another question. Avarice and hubris rub shoulders thickly. So the mill owner’s daughter – beautiful, naturally, but quite lacking such talents, is set to work amid bales of straw. She must spin it into gold by morning, or perish at the king’s command. Men do not emerge well from this tale.

Yet the despairing maiden is visited by an odd little fellow. A dwarfish caliban without much to endear him, he nevertheless possesses the skill she lacks and he agrees to spin the straw into gold in exchange for her necklace. By morning, the man has gone, the room is full of gold, and the maiden is overjoyed. But the king is not satisfied: he wants more.

So the maiden is placed in a room, this time larger and with many more bales. Again she must spin them into gold, on pain of death. The little man returns to save the day, but creepily so – this is no prince on horseback, not the sort of character with whom you wish to do deals. But a deal must be struck, and the maiden offers him her ring. When the man has gone, and the room is full of gold, the king is overjoyed. But still he wants more.

Once last time the maiden is placed in a room, this time vast, with towering bales. As she wallows there, alone in her despair, the little man returns. This time she has nothing to offer him. He asks for her firstborn and the maiden agrees – thoughts of children are far from her mind. All turns out well, then, for a while. The delighted king offers his hand in marriage (the girl is of low birth but she is attractive, and she has made him rich beyond imagining). It is only later, long after the wedding festivities have concluded, that the young queen gives birth to her first child. And the little man returns to claim what is his.

Desperately the queen offers him the fortune of the kingdom, but the man will not be appeased – he longs for something living, not for the trappings of human wealth. Stirred with pity at the queen’s tears, he agrees that the she may keep the child provided that she can guess his name within three days.

The queen tries every name she knows but all to no avail. She despatches messengers across the kingdom to hunt down unusual variations. Only on the third day, moments before the little man is due to appear, a messenger returns with a peculiar tale: on the very outskirts of the kingdom, he saw someone dancing a jig around a bonfire and singing of his unusual name: Rumpelstiltskin. The jubilant queen repels the little man by uttering his name. The man stamps his foot in fury, so hard that it sinks deep within the earth. Stamping his other foot, he rips himself apart. And that is the end of Rumpelstiltskin.

Here is a story where the greedy succeed, the victim is unsympathetic (was it wise of the maiden to promise her first born?) and the villain curiously wretched. What is the message of Rumpelstiltskin if not that cheaters are winners? After all, the little man had fulfilled his side of the bargain. Couldn’t it be that he was merely seeking that human affection that was denied him in his solitary life? He is odious, of course, but tragic too. I know that my interpretation of the story is a controversial one. I was always inclined to identify with the bad guy.

What struck me most on first hearing this fairytale as a child was the power of a name. Rumpelstiltskin’s name was ultimately his undoing. As the bearer of an unusual name: my bête noir, my curse, my identity – I could empathise.

In most cultures names have symbolic meaning. They are not just labels by which we distinguish ourselves but avatars that hold a deep message, whether about our origins (Moses, in Hebrew “Moshe”, meaning “plucked out of water”), our intention for the name-bearer (Linda – “beautiful” in Spanish, Aslan – “lion” in Turkish) or a homage we pay to a deity or a saint for protecting the name-bearer.

Modern fantasy reveals a fascination with names. In The Lord of the Rings, there are names in many tongues, and ancient words hold in them the power of revelation. Most characters have multiple monikers. The shift in a hobbit-like creature to a wasted, tormented obsessive is characterised through a change of name from Smeagle to Gollum. The handsome hero of the epic is known, among other things, as Aragorn, son of Arathorn, the Dúnadan, Longshanks, Wingfoot and Strider.

Names may be dangerous and, in the world of books, their expression alone can be folly. Characters in the early Harry Potters are urged not to speak the name Voldemort, due to its perceived power, and in the later books dare not do so because of a trace placed on its utterance (Harry’s foolishness in breaking the taboo almost costs him and his friends their lives). In a world of spells, where language is gateway to untold power, a presence can be called upon by a name alone.

Invocation of this kind does not appear in Rumpelstiltskin, but another theme familiar to fantasy does. If someone knows your name – your true name – they can defeat or even rule over you. Take, for instance, the Earthsea series by Ursula K Le Guin. As the Master Namer explains: “A mage can control only what is near him, what he can name exactly and wholly.” A name, then, is the very essence of a thing. It is not simply a useful appellation by which is it known – it is the actual knowledge. Symbolically, Rumplestiskin’s name is his sacred identity. Revealing it cleaves him to his very core, taking his identity away from him.

It is probably imprudent to stray into the realm of souls, a thing’s essence, or whatever we may call it, and yet I suspect that the longing to communicate this is at the heart of creativity: the desire to be understood. If the wicked would seek to enslave us by possession of our true names, could that knowledge, shared with those we love, dismantle the barriers between human minds? Where could such insights take us, should we seek to do good? How else might poor Rumpelstiltskin have responded, had his name been invoked with love?

Inbali Iserles was born in Israel, but came to London with her family at the age of three when her father took up a post at London University. When she was eleven the family spent a year in Tucson, Arizona – she claims to have arrived a tomboy and departed well-groomed and tidy! – before returning to England, where she eventually studied at the Universities of Sussex and Cambridge before becoming a lawyer. She lives in Islington, London, with four degus - exotic rodents rescued from the RSPCA. 

 

Inbali has been an animal-lover all her life. And from childhood she has loved to write. Aged eight, she wrote a poem called ‘Rich Cat/Poor Cat’, which won a prize (I’m not allowed to reproduce it here!) – but it would take years of secret scribbling before she revisited feline themes in her first book, ‘The Tygrine Cat’ and its sequel, 'The Tygrine Cat on the Run'.

In her spare time she's a committed globetrotter, a passion that has taken her to the depths of the Amazon Rainforest and the bubbling geysers of Iceland.  In addition to her two books about the Tygrine Cat, she has written another children’s book called ‘The Bloodstone Bird’.

Picture credits: Rumpelstiltskin, Walter Crane
Rumpelstilskin, artist unknown
Rumpelstiltskin, Arthur Rackham

Riddles, Poems, Oracles

You remember, of course the riddle scene in ‘The Hobbit’, illustrated here by the amazing Alan Lee, where Bilbo Baggins pits his wits against hungry Gollum on the edge of the dark lake at the roots of the Misty Mountains? And how, after each has guessed a number of traditional riddles: ‘Thirty white horses on a red hill/First they champ, then they stamp, then they stand still’[1] and a number of others which Tolkien obviously enjoyed writing himself: ‘Alive without breath/As cold as death/Never thirsting/Ever drinking/Clad in mail/Never clinking’[2], Bilbo finally foxes his adversary with the simple and thoughtless question, ‘What have I got in my pocket?’

Riddles have a long history, and probably a long prehistory too.  There are riddles in the Bible, such as the one Samson baffled the Philistines with: ‘Out of the eater came something to eat/Out of the strong came something sweet’[3] (Judges 14,14) – still to be found, with its pictorial answer, on the green and gold tins of Tate and Lyle’s Golden Syrup. And one of the earliest known riddles, strikingly similar in form to Samson’s, is written on a Babylonian tablet and reads: ‘Who becomes pregnant without conceiving? Who becomes fat without eating?’[4]

(Oh, by the way, all the answers will be found at the bottom of this post.  I’m certain you are going to try and guess them, so I’m not going to provide the answers straight up…)

Everyone remembers the riddle of the Sphinx, which Oedipus guessed; but did you know that Plato refers to children’s riddles in ‘The Republic’? (‘A man who was not a man threw a stone that was not a stone at a bird that was not a bird, on a twig that was not a twig’[5])’ Or that there are Sanskrit riddles in the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata?  And what about the Norse riddles of the Elder Edda, such as ‘The Words of the All-wise’ in which the dwarf Alvis (literally ‘All-wise’) – anxious to win the hand of Thor’s daughter – answers a number of questions which might be called riddles in reverse:

Thor:   What is heaven called, that all know

            In all the worlds there are?

Alvis:   Heaven by men, The Arch by gods,

            Wind-weaver by vanes,

            By giants High-earth, by elves Fair-roof,

            By dwarves The Dripping Hall.

Thor:   What is the moon called, that men see

            In all the worlds there are?

Alvis:   Moon by men, The Arch by gods,

            The Whirling Wheel in Hel,

            The Speeder by giants, The Bright One by dwarves,

            By elves Tally-of-Years.

For verse after verse, Alvis provides the kennings – the riddling poetic descriptions – for all the elemental, important things in the world such as fire, rain, the moon and sun, the sea, forests, night and day (and beer)… until at last dawn breaks and he turns to stone.

When I talk to schoolchildren I usually ask them some Norse or Anglo-Saxon riddles, which of course are also poems: and it seems to me one of the best and easiest ways to show children what poetry is and why it might be fun to read. “So,” I say, “in a poem about the sea a Viking wouldn’t say ‘the sea.’  He’d call it the ‘whale’s home’ or the ‘swan’s bath’, and his audience would know what he meant. If you wanted to make a poem in which a king rewards one of his men with gold, you wouldn’t say ‘The king gave gold to his warrior.’  That would be plain boring.  Instead you would have to say something like ‘The Land-Ruler gave Sif’s Hair to his Sword-Bearer.’

“For your listeners to understand it, they’d have to know the story of how the trickster god Loki cut off the goddess Sif’s beautiful hair. The other gods were so angry with him that he went to the dwarfs and got them to make Sif some beautiful new hair out of pure gold, which magically grew just like real hair.”

 

But there were plenty of other ‘kennings’ for gold.  For example, you could call it ‘Frodi’s flour.’ And to understand that, your audience would remember a completely different story, about a Danish king called Frodi who bought two giant slaves and set them to turn two huge magic millstones which would grind out whatever you told them to grind.  Instead of flour, King Frodi told them to grind out peace, prosperity and gold. (That’s why gold could be called ‘Frodi’s flour’.)  For a time, King Frodi’s people enjoyed a golden age.  Unfortunately, however, Frodi made the two giants work almost non-stop, not allowing them rest or sleep ‘for longer than it takes to hear a cuckoo call.’  In revenge, the two giants asked the millstones to grind out an army which attacked King Frodi and killed him.  And that was the end of his peaceful reign.

The Vikings thought more of a man if he could weave words: some of their most renowned warriors were also poets, like Egil Skallagrimsson, and Grettir the Strong. The murderous Harald Silkenhair in my book ‘Troll Blood’ is a warrior poet from this tradition, and keeps his men happy by asking them riddles (here are two I made up for him):

“I know a stranger, a bright gold-giver

  He strides in splendour over the world’s walls.

            All day he hurries between two bonfires.

            No man knows where he builds his bedchamber.”[6]

            “I know another, high in the heavens

            Two horns he wears on his hallowed head

            A wandering wizard, a wild night-farer,

            Sometimes he feasts, sometimes he fasts.”[7]

Spells, words, similes, riddles… the very word spell itself in Old Norse simply means speech. To describe the world is to apprehend it, to understand it.  To this day we retain this double meaning. A magician may cast a spell, but children spell out words aloud, syllable by syllable. Words do not only give power, words are power.  Even in the Judaeo-Christian sense: God creates the world with the words ‘Let there be light,’ and St John describes Christ as the ‘Word of the Father’. 

Ursula K Le Guin made wonderful use of this in her Earthsea books, in which the language of wizards is literally the language of ‘the Making’:  once you know the true name of a thing, you can summon it or reveal it: “the language dragons speak, and the language Segoy spoke who made the islands of the world…We call the foam on the sea sukien: that word is made from two words of the Old Speech, suk, feather, and inien, the sea.  Feather of the sea, is foam.  But you cannot charm the foam calling it sukien; you must use its own true name in the Old Speech, which is essa.”

‘Feather of the sea’:  a kenning, a knowing – which is what ‘kenning’ means.  Describing the foam is one way of knowing it better, of exploring its essence.

It seems to me that riddles may always have had dual purpose. They amuse us, but they do so in a different way from puns and jokes. If I ask you a riddle – even a simple child’s riddle like ‘What’s green and goes up and down?’[8] – and you can’t guess it, I score a point over you. More than that: I retain knowledge which I may or may not choose to tell you. I have the power to reveal or conceal. The riddle game is a contest which may once – as with Bilbo and Gollum, Thor and Alvis, Oedipus and the Sphinx – have had serious consequences.

The Delphic Oracle was traditionally delivered in obscure, riddling form. Today we may suspect that oracular utterances were made deliberately vague so as to be applicable to any variety of future events – but that seems to me false to the ancient way of thinking.  Much more likely, the sibyl or seer regarded riddling, poetic speech as sacred: the authentic voice of God. Just as with poetry today, whoever heard it had to find their own meaning in what was uttered, follow the clue through the maze to the centre of themselves. Riddling speech, like poetry, may have been thought of as the truest, the most revelatory way of communicating.

 

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths...

See how the floor of heaven's thick inlaid

With patines of bright gold...

Oh look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond dells, the elves' eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quick-gold lies!”

To describe the night sky in this way is to use riddles as riddles were meant to be used. Can you still feel the shiver of power? 

---

[1] Teeth

[2] Fish

[3] A bee’s nest full of honey in the ribcage of a dead lion

[4] Clouds

[5] A eunuch throwing a piece of pumice at a bat on a reed.  (Yes.  Really.)

[6] The sun (and the two bonfires are sunrise and sunset)

[7] The moon

[8] A frog on a trampoline