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Study 071 - The Elves & Rumpelstiltskin (Patreon)

Published:
2023-12-21 14:00:02
Edited:
2023-12-22 02:07:28
Imported:
2026-06
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Content

It's a double-feature of Grimm's Fairy Tales!

First up, The Elves, a tale in three parts, followed by our headliner: Rumpelstiltskin.

Special thanks to our reader, Heather Klinke!

We are reading this month's selections in The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, translated and annotated by Jack Zipes.

Non-Fifer musical selections: Carnival of the Animals: XIII. The Swan and VII. Aquarium by Camille Saint-Saëns | Nocturne in C-Sharp Minor by Frédéric Chopin | It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas by Meredith Willson.

And here's all the info you need on the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index!

Next up: Hansel and Gretel

Comments

Steven Vincent

If you guys like the story about the elves and the shoemaker you’ll love the retelling of the elves and the shoemaker from PLOP! comics #18 circa 1975. It’s quite funny and very macabre. PLOP! was a humorous weird horror themed comic book from DC back in the mid 1970s. It ran for 24 issues and featured many famous comic artists like Sergio Aragones, Berni Wrightson, Wally Wood, and others. When I was a kid I loved reading it because its dark humor appealed to my monster kid sensibilities. In fact a discussion on PLOP! might make for some good bonus episode material. And who knows… a quick google search might even find a pdf copy of issue #18 for your reading pleasure.

Jeremey Guttilla

Elves getting their freedom from work when they get clothes, Dobby the elf is another direct jk Rowling pull from the classics.

It's a Ghost.

The changeling in the third elf story reminded me of Maurice Sendak’s children's book “Outside Over There,” where a baby is stolen by goblins and is replaced by a changeling that clearly does not past muster. Plus, it’s made of ice, so it melts. It makes me wonder what the point is of replacing the baby with a changeling if it so clearly isn’t the original baby? Is it just a rule that the elves, goblins, etc. have to replace the baby with something that kinda sorta looks like the original baby?

Corey Wittig

The last couple of years I taught a unit in my middle school library class on oral storytelling which culminated in groups of students picking a story from one of the Aaarne-Thomson Uther “tale types” then learning and telling their own version which they recorded with added sound effects. It was a fun project! Always interesting (and inevitable) to see how the story changed with the different groups (one of the points). Some of the tale types are so funny like number 34- “the wolf dives into the water for reflected cheese.”

Sweatin' to the Great Oldies

I can remember reading these when I was much younger and being confused by the lack of a clear moral lesson. Perhaps the cobbler is rewarded for his piety, but I'm not sure that it is made clear that he is any more pious then many another cobbler out there. So much depends on luck. But I very much appreciate your take that these might be at least somewhat instructive to folks in business. Respect the workers. Pay them well. Success will follow. Unless your worker is Rumpelstiltskin. In that case, work out his secrets and get him to kill himself. Success will follow.

Eric S. Vallone, M.D.

Wait a minute. In the original Grimm Brothers version, the young queen actually thinks that Rumpelstiltskin is named after one of the Three Wise Men from the Nativity story? Well at least that kind of makes this a Christmas story. Maybe if he spun one room of straw into frankincense and another into oil of myrrh.

REO Jackwagon

Ya ever get so mad that you stomp a hole in the ground and tear yourself in half? Boy, if I had a nickel...

chase hansel

I am grateful you guys read my name after 4+ years of waiting. That said, couldn't you wait until next episode so it could be on the story about me!?

Jim Cannon

Redcaps, Chris. *Red*caps.

Drix

Whenever Elves and creepy fairies come in on the show, I'm always reminded by a great Terry Pratchett quote on the matter: “Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder. Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels. Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies. Elves are glamorous. They project glamour. Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment. Elves are terrific. They beget terror. The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad.” ― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

Patrick W

Laird Barron has a really good twist on Rumplestiltskin in his novel “The Croning”, I highly recommend it.

Steve

There are quite a few names in lore for all the little folk, see this list from the Denham Tracts (https://archive.org/details/denhamtractscoll02denhuoft/page/76/mode/2up?q=Grose): Grose observes, too, that those born on Christmas Day cannot see spirits ; which is another incontrovertible fact. What a happiness this must have been seventy or eighty years ago and upwards, to those chosen few who had the good luck to be born on the eve of this festival of all festivals ; when the whole earth was so overrun with ghosts, boggles (1), bloody-bones, spirits, demons, ignis fatui, brownies (2), bugbears, black dogs, spectres, shellycoats, scarecrows, witches, wizards, barguests (3), Robin-Goodfellows (4), hags (5), night-bats, scrags, breaknecks, fantasms, hobgoblins, hobhoulards, boggy-boes, dobbics (6), hob-thrusts (7), fetches (8), kelpies, warlocks, mock-beggars (9), mum-pokers, Jemmy-burties, urchins, satyrs, pans, fauns, sirens, tritons, centaurs, calcars, nymphs, imps, incubusses_, spoorns, men-inthe-oak, hell-wains, fire-drakes, kit-a-can-sticks, Tom-tumblers, melch-dicks, larrs, kitty-witches, hobby-lanthorns, Dick-a-Tuesdays, Elf-fires, Gyl-burnt-tails, knockers, elves (10), rawheads, Meg-with-tlie-wads, old-sliocks, ouplis, pad-fooits, pixies, picirees (II), giants, dwafs, Tom-pokers, tutgots, snapdragons, sprats, spunks, conjurers, tlmrses, spurns, tantarrabobs, swaithes, (12), tints, tod-lowries, Jack-in-tlie-Wads, mormos, changelings, redcaps, yetli-hounds, colt-pixies, Tom-thumbs, black-bugs, boggarts, scar-bugs, shag- foals, hodge-pochers, hob-thrushes, bugs, bull-beggars, bygorns, bolls, caddies, bomen, brags, wraithes (13), waffs (14), flay-boggarts, fiends, gallytrots, imps, gytrashes, patches, hob-and-lanthorns, gringes, boguests, bonelesses, Peg-powlers (15), pucks, fays, kidnappers, gallybeggars, hudskins, nickers, madcaps, trolls, robinets, friars' lanthorns, silkies (16), cauld-lads (17), death-hearses, goblins (18), hob-headlesses (19), buggaboes, kows (20), or cowes, nickies, nacks, [necksj waiths (21), miffies, buckles, gholes, sylphs, guests, swarths, freiths, freits, gy -carlins [Gyre-carling], pigmies, cliittifaces, nixies (22), Jinny-burnt-tails, dudmen, hell-hounds, dopple-gangers (23), boggleboes, bogies, redmen, portunes, grants, hobbits, hobgoblins, brown-men (24), cowies, dunnies (25), wirrikows (26), alholdes, mannikins, follets, korreds, lubberkins, cluricanns, kobolds, leprechauns, kors, mares, korreds, puckles, korigans, sjlvans, succubuses, blackmen, shadows, banshees, lian-hanshees, clabbernappers, Gabrielhounds, mawkins, doubles (27), corpse lights or candles, scrats, mahounds, trows, gnomes, sprites, fates, fiends, sybils, nicknevins (28), whitewomen, fairies (29), thrummj-caps (30), cutties (31), and nisses, and apparitions of every shape, make, form, fashion, kind and description, that there was not a village in England that had not its own peculiar ghost. Nay, every lone tenement, castle, or mansion-house, which could boast of any antiquity had its bogle, its spectre, or its knocker. The churches, churchyards, and cross-roads, were all haunted. Every green lane had its boulder-stone on which an apparition kept watch at night. Every common had its circle of fairies belonging to it. And there was scarcely a shepherd to be met with who had not seen a spirit!

Rafe Ball

I may have to take issue with the claim that the shoemaker is poor “through no fault of his own.” When the customer comes in to buy the shoes the elves made he buys them for twice the normal price, which is enough for the shoemaker to buy leather to make two more pairs of shoes. That means that normally he sells shoes at a price that allows him to buy enough leather to make one pair of shoes - in other words, he’s selling his shoes at cost! Someone skipped Economics 101!

Thunk

A fantastic make believe tale of a business greatly increasing the markup on shoes while exploiting the workers who make them.

It's a Ghost.

Aha! Brownies are a kind of household elf or spirit! Which explains why the Cleveland Browns’ elf mascot is named Brownie.

Sir Snoozelot

Yeah I always pictured Rumpelstiltskin as hideous and deformed too - and strangely also naked from the waste down. Like Donald Duck. But unlike the duck he's got it alllll on display, completely unself-conscious. Seems a bit unnecessary now I think about but i guess it was different times back then.

Paul Meagher (Ma-her)

Hey guys, unrelated to recent studies, but I went back and listened to the Copping Squid collection with guest host Patton Oswalt, and it occurred to me that you never covered the story, "The Presentation". I heard Patton talking about the story on his French-language Michael Shea podcast of powerlifting videos for puerile actors, “Shea-a-Le-Buff” Any chance you'll bring him back to cover the last story?

Doc Singles

The young godmother disappeared for seven years, but I don't believe she aged for seven years. I believe she was only three days older when she reappeared with a pocketful of gold, which probably set her up for life. I'd take that deal!

Eric - Speaker in Digressions

Just last night we happened on a Coronet Instructional Films stop-motion version of "The Shoemaker and the Elves" on the Rifftrax YouTube channel. It's about 13 and a half minutes long. The elves, as my girlfriend pointed out, are already dressed (probably because it's 1962), so they just get outfit upgrades.

Pagurus

Looking for the definitive moral in fairy tales is bound to be difficult, as they are often an amalgam of an old heathen core with Christian and later Early Modern bits added according to changing sensibilities. I'm only guessing here, but the original message of the shoemaker's tale (like so many others) could have just been "Don't meddle with the supernatural (as long as it works in your favor)!" with a Christian addition of the protagonist being "poor but honest" and an early capitalist ending where it all works out fine in the end in terms of wealth accumulation.

Nic Wassell

I enjoyed Chris' moral for the story of Rumpelstiltskin - if someone owes you a child, don't take pity on them and give them a chance to get out of it. Take that baby!

Nic Wassell

I was going to make a joke about the story with the young godmother going missing for seven years as being the source material for Flight of the Navigator, but actually it kind of is! I feel like alien visitation and abduction stories have definitely taken the place of elves and gnomes and such in our modern folklore, and somewhere in the back of our minds is the need to have small mischievous pseudo-magical beings running around behind the scenes of our society who we can blame for the bad or inexplicable things that go wrong with our lives. Also I was just commenting the other day to my partner about how fat and glaring our young son's head and eyes are looking recently so thanks for the tutorial on changelings. I did put some egg shells filled with water on the induction hob but he looked very unimpressed - I guess they're wise to that technique these days.

Alex Liggett

Weirdly, episodes of three different podcasts I have listened to in the last fortnight (this one, Three Bean Salad and the Socially Distant Sports Bar) have discussed Rumpelstiltskin, all rather dwelling on the matter of him tearing himself in half at the end, a detail which I don't recall scarring my own childhood. On the other hand, growing up we had an LP of Hillaire Belloc's 'Cautionary Tales for Children' in which (inter alia) Jim runs away from nurse and is eaten by a lion, and Matilda habitually tells lies and naturally enough is burned alive - all gleefully expressed in rhyming couplets. We also had Struwwelpeter, another cheery teutonic meisterwerk in which wayward children are variously maimed, incinerated, blown away suspended from an umbrella, or simply starve themselves to death. I wonder if it's a coincidence that most of my siblings and I chose not to have kids....

Pam Winkler

There’s been a lot of discussion online about how changelings may be an explanation for autism. Your kid gets to a certain age, and then they suddenly change and they’re not the same anymore. Many of the changeling tests will basically kill the child. Also, apparently not all cuckoos are bad? They’ve found in some cases, they’re found to be beneficial to their nest mates. Apparently they’re really good at preventing predators from eating any of the chicks in the nest.

Pam Winkler

Also, Naomi Novik wrote a book referencing Rumplestiltskin called “Spinning Silver” in which one of the narrators comments on Rumplestiltskin being a reference to Jews and specifically Jewish money lenders. One of the main characters is a young woman who begins working as a Jewish money lender in order to keep her family alive.

Jeb Card

I did not know that ending to Rumpelstiltskin. It must have been an influence on Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow, by Alan Moore, which has a very similar ending to a very related character. SPOILER: Mister Mxyzptlk reveals himself as something of a cosmic abomination orchestrating the destruction of Superman, and preparing to send the universe into a period of terror. He reveals himself as something hurtful and wrong to look at due to his Lovecraftian extradimensional nature. Superman hits him with the Phantom Zone projector and when he tries to flee back into his own dimension by saying his name backwards, he gets split in two between the two dimensions and dies.

REO Jackwagon

Wait a sec. He sells each pair for twice what it cost him so he can make 2 shoes for every sale, minus labor. So he was originally selling shoes at cost? No wonder he was poor.

REO Jackwagon

Heather absolutely crushes these readings.