I was going to do a blog post about fairy tales and how the original ones are much darker than the ones we know from Disney or kid's books. But I was searching the internet for original versions of fairy tales that I know, and I came across Rumpelstiltskin, which I've always liked until I read it again and realized just how stupid it was.
A miller wants his daughter to marry the king, so he tells the king that his daughter can spin straw into gold. Now first of all, if you're going to lie to someone to impress them, at least make it feasible. Why couldn't the miller just tell the king that his daughter was really pretty? Anyways, the king locks the daughter away in a tower with loads of straw and a spinning wheel and says 'if you don't spin all of this straw into gold by morning, I'm going to lop your head off.' So obviously, she gets a bit upset, because that's something that no one can do. But Rumpelstiltskin appears and says 'I will do it for you, if you give me something nice.' So she says 'I'll give you my necklace,' and he says 'I'll do that.' So he spins all the straw into gold, and the next morning the king is like 'wicked but let's see if you can do it again!'
She's done it once, she's proved she can do it, why make her do it again? That's ridiculous. And again she gets upset because she can't do it, and Rumpelstiltskin appears and says 'I'll do it for you, but what will you give me?' and she says 'I got a ring, do you fancy that?' and he says 'That'd be lovely', he spins all the straw into gold and the king's like 'Well hey that's great but can you do it again?' ...For some reason because twice just isn't enough. So again she gets upset, Rumpelstiltskin appears and says 'What will you give me?' and she says 'I have nothing left to give.' So he says 'How about if you become queen, give me your firstborn child?'
...... That's a bit extreme isn't it? You wanted a necklace and a ring before, how does a child come next in that sequence? But she agrees because she doesn't want to be killed, obviously. And she just thinks, I might not even have kids, so yeah you can have my "firstborn" child. Sure. So the king's really impressed that she's managed to turn all this straw into gold three nights in a row, and he marries her. Now, if you've promised someone your firstborn child, if it was me, I would make sure that I never had kids. But this woman decides a year later to have a kid. I don't know if she thought that the promise she made to Rumpelstiltskin just went away but it didn't. Rumpelstiltskin appeared and said 'give me your kid.' And she says no. You've made a promise, you can't just say no now, that's not how it works. Rumpelstiltskin, being a pushover, doesn't demand the child, he just says well I'll give you a chance, if you can guess my name within three days, we'll call it off.
So she gets a messenger to go and ask all of the town their names so she can have more of a range of names to guess from. Now this is the bit that really gets me, this really.. it just annoys me because it's so ridiculous. The messenger finds Rumpelstiltskin dancing around the fire and singing a song about how his name is Rumpelstiltskin. What? Why would you do that? If you've made it a challenge for someone to guess your name, Surely you'd want to keep that quite close to your chest, wouldn't you?
So obviously then the messenger tells the queen, she guesses his name, and he gets properly annoyed. All I learned from that story is:
A. Don't let people go back on their promises, and
B. If you've made it a challenge for someone to guess your name, don't turn it into a sing-a-long.
Also if you don't know yet I've also started posting more blog bits to tumblr, so here's the link: http://drrosetyler.tumblr.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment