Illustration by Anne Anderson in Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1922)

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Merrily the feast I’ll make.
Today I'll brew, tomorrow bake;
Merrily I'll dance and sing,
For next day will a stranger bring.
Little does my lady dream
Rumpelstiltskin is my name!

(The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales)

There he is. In time without end. Wheeling around a burning fire in front of a modest hut, he sings a song of sheer joy. That diminutive form, at whose fingertips solid strands of gold materialise, cavorts in a manner I do not understand, croons in expressions that baffle me. And yet, I receive him, all, in a complete experience. Little man, if you value your mystery so much why do you make so indiscreet a spectacle?

The story of Rumpelstiltskin hinges on the fateful moment where a messenger of the Queen stumbles across Rumpelstiltskin ecstatically merry-making in the forest outside his home. He dances with delight at the certainty that the Queen will not be able to guess his name — she will be obliged, instead, to honour the rules of his game and give up her first-born to him. He roars his name with pleasure. The question to bask in, if you’ll join me reader, is this: what is at stake in discovering Rumpelstiltskin’s name in this way and what has it to do with the enchanting possibilities of storytelling?

Experts believe that the origins of the ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ fairy tale can be traced back over 4,000 years. It is older, then, than the modern languages that convey it to us today. Older, then, than classical mythology. Older, then, than the convention of confining a story to a written form. To tell stories is to create disconfirmable truths: truths that can make our bafflingly brief lifespans familiar to us and that can be tirelessly renovated so that this familiarity need never expire in old age. Frank Kermode distils this thought to its bare essentials when he comments that people in the “middest” — that is, us, always in the middle of time, yet always living at the end of our own specific timeframe — divert the greater part of their imaginative power to a coherent pattern of time that makes a “satisfying consonance” between origins, middles, and ends.1 Since all endings are speculative by virtue of their deferred possibility, what consoles us in the face of time’s disregard for the importance of our lives is not that the endings we predict become fact, but that they exert on time an orderly human pattern. Thus, we can say we know time even as all the evidence contradicts this. As we know, the apparent veracity of our historical accounts seldom survives the drying of the ink that commits it to time — and so it is with the cultural emphases from which stories emerge too.

For a story to live quite so long as 4,000 years — both in oral and then literary traditions — it cannot help but be attended by a swarm of dominant moments that have had their heyday. Think of a story as a storm: it gorges greedily on warm waters and, above them, it lives wildly and abundantly. But when it finds itself above the dry salvages where the funny creatures that live there give it a name like the names they give themselves, it cannot die quickly enough, dumping its considerable load in petulant floods upon those who got lost beneath it. The impulse to domesticate the story, to make it ours, not only brings about the story’s end, but our end too.

Rumpelstiltskin is enchanted while we, proudly believing ourselves to be disenchanted, fashion the fantastical tales of others’ enchantment as if to reassure ourselves of the truth of this proud belief. Rumpelstiltskin knows the underside of the storyteller’s aspirations. After all, Rumpelstiltskin knows how to spin straw into gold. Rumpelstiltskin knows, intimately, how plain transitory matter can repetitively (even tediously) be spun into imperishable matter that gazes back at the unprepared eye, and so consumes it. Finally, Rumpelstiltskin knows that the further our fictions tread in the domain of the fantastic, the more they reveal about our innermost selves.

I have just said that storytelling is a creative act. Its creation, disconfirmable truths. Forgive me this banal and florid indiscretion, reader, and allow me to highlight the caveats. Creative, yes, but its creations are rarely fully-formed and even more rarely reflect the storyteller’s exact intention. Since storytellers create from within their creation they must always leave a barely perceptible storyteller-shaped hole from which to escape or else be entombed in their creation (also not uncommon).

Describing with admiration the story-telling artistry of his new friend, Katsimbalis, while travelling around Greece during the first knockings of WW2, Henry Miller pinpoints Katsimbalis’ “complete disregard of the element of time” as the fundamental component of the story’s vivacity. Miller, telling a story about story-telling, conjures a wonderful picture of his friend’s art:

…his eyes becoming glazed by the surge of inward light, he would actually tumble backwards into the deep well in which all his stories had their source and, gripping the slippery walls of his narrative with finger and toe, he would slowly clamber to the surface, puffing, gasping, shaking himself like a dog to free himself of the last remaining particles of wrack and slime and stardust. Sometimes, in taking the backward plunge, he would hit the bottom with such a thud that he was speechless: one could look into the pupil of his eyes and see him lying there helpless as a starfish, a great sprawling mass of flesh lying face up and counting the stars, counting and naming them in fat, unbroken stupefaction as if to make a colossally unthinkable pattern on which to weave the story which would come to his lips when he would catch his breath again.2

Storytellers, both Miller and Katsimbalis, excavate. And they excavate, ostensibly, in the faith that there is something to be found. But again, what counts is not whether anything is ultimately found. Instead, what counts is the distinctly human pattern of digging that gives meaning to the world on the surface. Indeed, were gold to be found just an inch below, the shock might just be unbearable, the pattern still-born. This goes some of the way to explaining the disconfirmable nature of the truths; John Berger’s notes upon hearing Yasmine Hamdan sing bring further clarity:

Much of what happens to us in life is nameless because our vocabulary is too poor. Most stories get told out loud because the storyteller hopes that the telling of the story can transform a nameless event into a familiar or intimate one.3

In other words, for the truth of our stories to bear any relevance to lives that are constantly at the end of an ever-unfurling history, we must be able to disconfirm them, acknowledge the poverty of the materials used to construct them at a later (‘wiser’) date, and ceaselessly renovate. What would happen if the “nameless event” could suddenly be named, if our stories broke the spell that gave them possibility in the first place? This is the question, I think, that Rumpelstiltskin magnificently engages.

There’s something utterly charming about the fact that, if we were to ask of the Brothers Grimm version of the story the same question the Queen asks its hero-villain, “Can your name be Rumpelstiltskin?”, the answer is at once both ‘yes’ and ‘no’. It mirrors the very tale it tells in this respect. Yes, you can call it Rumpelstiltskin. No, Rumpelstiltskin is not its true name. For there are many stories of enchanted figures playing this name-guessing game, and many bear the credentials of Rumpelstiltskin — and there is no recorded Ur-text. In this way, the story of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ rolls out a boundless tapestry upon which reader and story-teller can play the game of fiction: the game of the nameable and the unnameable; of enchantment and disenchantment.

Let’s focus on the “droll-looking little man” whose appearance is necessarily exoticised like this in the vain attempt to maintain his otherness. Rumpelstiltskin bores of gold, you know, he bores of promises of the Lady’s future riches, bores of the like-for-like exchange that characterises his relationship with the Lady. He yearns for something immaterial, something that grows beyond itself. So he makes of the Queen an impossible request — one she knows “may never be” — her first-born child. The very impossibility of this is what makes Rumpelstiltskin’s peculiar game possible. Moved by her distress, he gives three day’s grace to guess his name and alter this terrible fate.

Compassion being the genesis of this game should not be forgotten. It is playful — both Rumpelstiltskin and the Queen are great competitors and take great pleasure in outwitting one another. It is an act of love — Rumpelstiltskin has given the Queen a chance (albeit of very slim probability) to keep her child. And it is potentially endless despite being plausibly concludable — the Queen only has to guess a name and the choices are infinite. The game of correctly naming Rumpelstiltskin supposedly expires after three days, but since he has given the Queen every opportunity to fulfil the promise, it is not so far-fetched to imagine this deadline being eternally deferred: the name itself standing as a disconfirmable truth.

All the while, Rumpelstiltskin is gleefully singing and dancing in his secluded nook. For all the attempts to paint him as perverse and unnaturally cruel — what was a “droll-looking little man” is eventually described as a “hobgoblin” and a “manikin” and a “funny little dwarf” — he is a truly happy creature and expresses it in rather a uniquely human way. His new song (see preface) sharply contrasts the “old song” that spins the wheel: “Round about, round about, / Lo and behold! / Reel away, reel away, / Straw into gold!” His private song addresses a feeling or experience: that of excitement, of euphoria, of defiance against his solitary existence. His work song expresses none of these things — it is merely the song that programmatically spins out gold.

Berger also has this to say about songs:

A song, when being sung and played, acquires a body. It does this by taking over and briefly possessing existing bodies […] Again and again the song takes over the body of the singer, and after a while the circle of listeners who, as they listen and gesture to the song, are remembering and foreseeing.

Once more, Rumpelstiltskin tires of the repetitive song that acquires the body of gold. His namelessness becomes the means by which he can sing and acquire his own body — acquire his own body by dancing around the fire “on one leg”. He can sing of “tomorrow” and the “next day” with that foreseeing air. But his song is so exultant that it acquires additional bodies — the Queen’s messenger’s and, through this, our own bodies. We are all seduced by Rumpelstiltskin’s song. Thus, we are all privy to the forbidden knowledge it dispenses about his name. This name (Rumpelstilzchen), very significantly, translates literally from German to something like little rattle stilt and so becomes more like noisy limping goblin. It shows that he is not self-nominated: it is the hollow name given to the unnamable in which nothing inheres but the external namer’s own biases and desires. What’s remarkable about this, then, is that the name is, itself, a fiction thrust upon him — a name that attempts to describe his namelessness and so make him familiar in his over-egged otherness.

I wonder, consequently, if being seen to sing is part of Rumpelstiltskin’s plan. It is a moment that takes us by surprise and our instinct is to say A-ha! He has foolishly given the game away; but what if Rumpelstiltskin says to himself A-ha! Now they know how the enchanted sing I can give up my name, for why should they want to believe in their disenchantment? His is a philosophy of taking the serious playfully and taking play seriously, where semantics, not signs, more appropriately name things. This is a philosophy that runs counter to the logic of the disenchanted world.

And so the Queen duly ends the game and even the Brothers Grimm underline that she does so “slyly”, deliberately making wrong guesses to prolong the end and demonstrate back to Rumpelstiltskin her own mastery over disconfirmable truths. The act of naming him is fundamentally disenchanting, and his subsequent rage reflects this. In the Brothers Grim variation, Rumpelstiltskin kicks his foot “so deep into the floor, that he was forced to lay hold of it with both hands to pull it out”. His reaction, from a disenchanted perspective, is the consonant physical comedy that satisfyingly recompenses him for his cruel desire to snatch the child. But from an enchanted perspective this is the death knell. Rumpelstiltskin can no longer excavate, can no longer dig away at his own fiction as it is circumscribed in the act of being named. All events are essentially nameless: intimacy is not forged by finding the name, but in the shared experience of namelessness that conditions our existence.

So, what is at stake in covertly discovering Rumpelstiltskin’s name and using it to banish him? The end of enchantment is the end of fiction. The story ends once our happy little helper is named. Disenchantment is the state of being de-magicked. As Katsimbalis says to Miller: “…the best stories are those which you don’t want to preserve. If you have any arrière-pensée the story is ruined.” The impulse to name the unnamable is to attempt to preserve it, but preservation comes not through containing the living thing within exacting boundaries, it comes from living so fully as to forget the defensive need for preservation. The living, enchanted story in unafraid of change and self-contradiction.

To name and speak the thing is to kill it stone dead, to tear it apart, to deny its existence. The name is the spell of the disenchanted that holds the enchanted captive to have it make our gold that seduces the greedy king and secures our marriage. All nameless things sing and dance and enrapture us precisely because they are free to do so. I read Rumpelstiltskin as a cautionary tale about the rupture caused by naming the nameless — it is a presumptuous and inevitably constraining attempt to call into presence that which is absent. Let’s remind ourselves of Berger’s observation: “songs are sung to an absence. Absence is what inspired them, and it’s what they address.” False attempts to tease absence out by name surely, then, leads us into a silent, and songless, world.