Rumpelstiltskin: A Wee Little Tale

A radio storyteller named Wilhelm Holstein, the new owner of Holstein's Books, welcomes listeners to a Kids Radio program of fairy tales and begins the classic Grimm story of Rumpelstiltskin, with plenty of jokes, interruptions, and arguments with the characters along the way.

Once upon a time, a poor miller bakes such a rotten loaf of bread that the hot-tempered king orders his head chopped off. Begging for mercy, the flustered miller brags about his daughter Goldie, and in his panic he blurts out a wild lie: she can spin straw into gold. The greedy king perks up at once, declaring, "Now you're talking my love language," and commands that Goldie be brought to the palace. She is locked in a room stuffed with straw and told to spin it all into gold by morning, or lose her head.

Alone and weeping, Goldie is startled by a strange wee little man, who hates being called a wee little man but is quite proud of his handsome head. He offers to spin the straw into gold for a price, and Goldie hands over her aluminum necklace. He spins bobbin after bobbin all night, and by morning every straw has become gleaming golden thread. But the king is not satisfied. He fills a room ten times bigger, a whole silo, and demands she spin again. The little man returns and does the job in exchange for Goldie's ring, the last thing she owns.

Still greedy, the king shows Goldie an enormous warehouse holding every scrap of straw in the land. Goldie cleverly flatters him into offering a reward, and the king promises that if she succeeds, he will make her his wife and give her half the kingdom. When the little man appears a third time, Goldie has nothing left to trade, so he demands something terrible: her first child. Sure her head will roll otherwise, Goldie sadly agrees.

The straw becomes gold, Goldie becomes queen, and after a year she has a baby boy. "His name is Bert, and I will call him Bert, and I will be his mother," she declares. But one night the little man returns to collect what she promised. When she pleads and weeps, he softens just enough to offer a bargain: if she can discover his name within three days, Bert stays with her.

Goldie guesses name after name all night, every one wrong. She sends a messenger across the kingdom for more names, then to distant lands, but nothing works, and the little man leaves each time grinning, certain the child is his. Then the messenger returns with a book called How to Know the Name of the Person Extorting You for Dummies, which points her to another book the little man himself wrote, Spinning Straw into Gold for Dummies. Goldie checks its About the Author page. On her final guess she announces the name: Rumpelstiltskin. The little man sputters in disbelief, accuses her of cheating, and moans, "I knew I should have used a pseudonym." Furious, he stomps his big foot so hard the ground splits open and he tumbles into a chasm - though the narrator admits it isn't a very deep one.

Before the story ends, the characters gather to talk about what they have learned. Rumpelstiltskin, the miller, and the king all grumble that they don't get it, but Goldie sets them straight: the king and the little man let greed corrupt them and manipulated people to get what they wanted, and her father's lies put her life in danger. She admits her own mistakes too. First, never make a promise you can't keep, like promising away her firstborn. Second, "in order to conquer evil, you have to first recognize it," because if we can't see things for what they really are, we won't know good from evil. The king later squanders the kingdom's riches on bingo night, but Goldie isn't worried - she simply opens Spinning Straw into Gold for Dummies to page one and gets to work herself, as Wilhelm Holstein signs off with a cheerful good night.