The Rumpelstiltskin Problem

I may have forced you to read this before (if you've ever visited me this summer), but I make no apologies. Ladies and gentlemen (or whoever you are), may I present pieces of the introduction to Vivian Vande Velde's The Rumpelstiltskin Problem, which I bought at McKay's for fifty cents.
 
[Comparison to the game Gossip, or Telephone, or whatever you called it, and explanation of the mutability of stories passed on orally]

 The story starts with a poor miller telling the king, "My daughter can spin straw into gold."

We are not told how the miller has come to be talking with the king in the first place, or why the miller chooses to say such a thing. In any case, to my mind the reasonable answer for the king to come back with would be: "If your daughter can spin straw into gold, why are you a poor miller?" But the king doesn't say that; he says, "Then she shall come to my castle and spin straw into gold for me, and if she does, I'll make her my queen."

Now, no matter the reason the miller said what he did, you'd think that in reality he would have noticed that his daughter doesn't actually know how to spin straw into gold. (Unless she's lied to him. In which case you'd think that now would be the time for her to set things straight.) But still her brings her to the castle to show off a talent he knows she doesn't have-- which doesn't sound to me like responsible parenting.

At the castle the king locks the girl into a room and tells her, "Spin this straw into gold, or tomorrow you shall die."

Not my idea of a promising first date.

The girl seems smarter than her father. She knows that she can't spin straw into gold, so she's worried. But what does she do? She starts crying. Not a very productive plan.

Still, along comes a little man who, by happy coincidence, knows how to do what everyone wants. "What will you give me to spin this straw into gold for you?" he asks her, and she offers him her gold ring.

Now think about this.

Here's someone who can spin an entire roomful of straw into gold. Why does he need her tiny gold ring? Sounds like a bad bargain to me.

But the little man agrees and spins the straw into gold.

Is the king satisfied?

Of course not.

The next night he locks her into an even bigger room with even more straw and offers her the same deal: "Spin this straw into gold, or tomorrow you shall die."

Again the little man comes, again he gets her butt out of trouble (this time in exchange for a necklace-- apparently the poor miller has a secret stash somewhere, to keep his daughter in all this jewelry), and yet again the king makes his demand: "Straw for gold."

At this point the girl has run out of jewelry, but the little man says he'll spin one more time if she'll promise him her firstborn child. Why he wants this child he never says, and she never asks. Obviously the miller's daughter is no more a responsible parent than her father is, for she agrees to the bargain.

Fortunately for everyone, the next morning the king is finally satisfied with the amount of gold the girl has spun for him, and he asks her to marry him.

Swept off her feet because he's such a sweet talker ("Spin or die"), she accepts the king's proposal.

Eventually the happy couple has a child, and the little man suddenly shows up to demand what has been promised to him.

Again the girl cries, perhaps hoping that yet another little man will step forward to get her out of trouble.

Although the deal clearly was "firstborn child for a roomful of straw spun into gold," the little man now offers the queen a way out: "Guess my name," he says, "and you may keep the child."

And if she doesn't guess his name, what does he get besides the child she has already promised him? Nothing. I told you: this guy doesn't know how to bargain. You wouldn't want to go to a garage sale with him; he'd talk the prices up.

Now, the queen should be able to guess the little guy's name is Rumpelstiltskin by noticing that that's the name of the story, and-- since nobody else in the kingdom has a name-- she might go with that first. But nobody in this kingdom is very smart, so instead the queen sends the servants out into the countryside to look for likely names.

Luckily for her, at the last moment, one of the servants spots the little man dancing around a campfire singing a bad poem that ends with the line, "Rumpelstiltskin is my name." Why is he doing this? Because if he was singing "Kumbaya," the story would go on even longer than it already does.

Being from this kingdom of the mentally challenged, the servant doesn't recognize the importance of what he has observed. "I couldn't find any names," he tells her. "All I found was this little guy dancing around a campfire singing 'Rumpelstiltskin is my name.'" You wouldn't want to put this guy in charge of sophisticated international negotiations.

Now, we aren't told whether the queen is really, really stupid-- which would be my first choice-- or whether she's playing a cruel game with the little man who, after all, three times spun gold for her and then offered her a last-minute chance to get out of her ill-chosen bargain. But when he shows up and asks if she's found out his name, she says first, "Is it George? Is it Harry?" and only then asks, "Is it Rumpelstiltskin?"

Justifiably annoyed, the little guy stamps his foot, which cracks the castle floor. (The king-- who, by the way, has disappeared from the story-- should have asked her to spin that straw into something useful instead of all that gold, like maybe a floor covering that wouldn't crack when a man consistently described as "little" stamped his foot.) But anyway, there's Rumpelstiltskin with his foot caught in the floor, and in a really resourceful case of well-I'll-show-them, he gets so mad he tears himself in two.

Excuse me?

I hope you took the time to read this through. It makes me laugh. Anyway, you can see a preview of the book here. Yes, the book itself is just as entertaining as the introduction (I didn't post ALL of it, just MOST of it). If you don't believe me, just go read it for yourself.