About Rumpelstiltskin

Rumpelstiltskin is the title character of an 1857 fairy tale (called Rumpelstilzchen in the original German) by the Grimm Brothers.

Rumpelstiltskin
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In return for his life-saving services, a beautiful maiden, promises a strange dwarf her first born child. When her first child is born, the dwarf returns, but in response to her pleas agrees to cancel the bargain, if she can guess his name within three days. At the last moment, she learns that his name is Rumpelstiltskin, and the enraged dwarf departs.

The name is believed to derive from an old children's game called Rumpele stilt oder der Poppart, which was mentioned in Johann Fischart's Geschichtklitterung, or Gargantua of 1577, a loose adaptation of Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel.

The Rumpelstilskin story appears under a variety of names in a number of other languages:

Dutch: Repelsteeltje
French: Grigrigredinmenufretin
English: Tom Tit Tot (from English Fairy Tales, collected & edited by Joseph Jacobs, 1884)
Spanish: El enano saltarín (the jumping midget).

Rumpelstiltskin has also been the inspiration for a variety of modern retellings, such as Rumpelstiltskin's Daughter.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Season" and from FairyTale-Cottage.com

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