Rumpelstilskin
(By Grimm Brothers)
Once, a poor miller had a clever, beautiful daughter. One day he boasted to the King that his daughter could spin straw into gold. Of course this wasn?t true, but the King believed him. So he locked the miller?s daughter in a room full of straw and said that if she did not spin it all into gold by next morning, he would chop off her head.
The girl was sitting there weeping, not even trying to spin, when a little voice said, "What will you give me if I do your job?" A strange little man was in the room.
"My necklace," said the girl. And the little man spun the straw into gold.
Next day the King locked the girl into an even bigger room. Again the little man appeared. This time the girl gave him a ring in return for his work.
The third day, the King promised to marry the girl is she did the trick one last time. He locked her into a room as big as a barn. When the little man appeared, the girl had nothing to give.
"In that case," he said, "when you are Queen your firstborn will be mine."Secretly the girl thought "Never!" All the same, she let the little man do his spinning.
The King was as good as his word and they were married. In a year?s time, the new Queen had her first baby. How horrified she was when the little man appeared. She offered him gold but no, he would only have the baby. The Queen wept so hard that he took pity on her. He said that if she could guess his name in three nights, she could keep her baby.
The first night she went through all the alphabet: Aaron, Bartholomew, Christian ? None of her guesses were right.
The second night she tried funny-sounding names: Artitickle, Danielslovel, Gumdroopy ? But again she was wrong each time.
Then the Queen overheard a servant laughing about a strange little man he?d seen in the forest dancing and chanting to himself.
"My name?s not Elgin, Merlin, Finn or Larkin!
My secret name is Rumplestiltskin!"
When the little man realized that the Queen knew what he was called, he flew into such a rage that smoke came out of his ears and he stamped his foot through the floorboards. In his effort to pull himself out, he split into two. And that was the end of him!