ABSTRACT
Rural-born fairytales became cryptic, even unintelligible, when recited as entertainment to hearth-gathered industrial-age families. For good reason, modern listeners seldom ventured that tales like Rumpelstiltskin’s conveyed hidden satire. Its encrypted allegory was coded to be intuited within the spinnstube while beyond the spinnstuben Rumpelstiltskin’s story proved un-decipherable as a coherent whole. Like other genuinely successful artworks, the Tale of Rumpelstiltskin survives against ever-renewed competition. Schoolroom editions of the Grimms’ stories omitted Rumpelstiltskin because the tale ignored “family values”, the virtues of “family life, comradely relationships and the relationship between master and servant or host and guest”. Removed from its native circumstance Rumpelstiltskin’s Tale became an artifact gawked at, placed in a museum where strangers who wander by casually peruse what is foreign and quaint however urgent or poignant the original message. Mass-marketing offered bulk products, eventually a worldwide junkyard of smothering kitsch, beneath which the inner logic of Rumpelstiltskin’s story lay buried.
