Fairytales

wtf is up with the Rumpelstiltskin story. this perplexed me as a kid, and now that my I'm reading it to my daughter it still seems completely strange. Most fairy tales have a fairly obvious psychological/archetypal subtext (Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood = predatory male sexuality, etc) but this one... first of all, everybody in the story is a jerk. The father pimps out his daughter to the king under the pretense that she can spin gold. The king is just a greedy fuck who wants the gold, once he's convinced his new princess can provide, he marries her (which she's apparently totally cool with? marrying a guy who imprisoned her and threatened her with death unless she spun straw into gold? sounds like a real fairytale marriage). Then of course she can't really spin it into gold, she get Rumpelstilstkin to do it. He does all the hard work, and asks to be appropriately renumerated. But does she pay up when she has the baby? NO! she screws him over on a technicality and he gets nothing! He gets so angry he stamps his foot and makes a crack in the ground that he disappears into. (what kind of way is that to die, anyway?) So the dad = jerk. the king = greedy jerk. the princess = liar and a cheat. Rumpelstiltskin = a magical figure who gets screwed over by some unscrupulous royal family. exactly what kind of moral is my child supposed to be taking away from this.

Don't grow up to be any of these people!

it's weird how many fairytales I think I "know" but actually could not provide the plots to if my life depended on it

I know her behavior isn't honorable in a classic moral sense, but the daughter's only option to secure her own survival is to outwit all the male characters, who try to use her, each for his own ends. By that perspective, you have to admit she's very canny.

It may or may not say something about me that I think is the greatest fairytale of all time.

The Story of Harold has a Rumpelstiltskin theme.