Rumpelstilzchen

Rumpelstiltskin

A poor miller, wanting to seem important, tells the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold. The king locks her in a chamber full of straw with a spinning wheel: if it is not gold by morning, she must die. She weeps, and a little man comes in; for her necklace he spins all the straw into gold. The greedy king puts her in a bigger chamber, and the little man spins again for her ring. In a third, still bigger chamber the king promises to marry her if she succeeds; she has nothing left to give, so she promises the little man her first child when she is queen. The king marries her. A year later she has a beautiful child, and the little man comes for it. She offers him all the riches of the kingdom, but he wants something living; when she weeps he gives her three days: if she learns his name, she may keep her child. She tries all the names she knows, then the strangest names from the neighbourhood, and he always says that is not his name. On the third day her messenger tells her of a little house on a high mountain, where a ridiculous little man hopped around a fire singing that nobody knows his name is Rumpelstilzchen. When the little man comes, she asks Kunz, then Heinz, then Rumpelstilzchen. Crying that the devil told her, he stamps his right foot so deep into the ground that he sinks in to his waist, then seizes his left foot with both hands and tears himself in two.

Retold from Kinder- und Haus-Märchen, Band 1, 7. Auflage (Ausgabe letzter Hand, 1857), KHM 55 by Brüder Grimm (public domain).