ABSTRACT
Rumpelstiltskin’s need for a surrogate procreator means that without mentioning longing or pleasure the king performed sexual congress for him. Rumpelstiltskin was delegated to do a woman’s spinning while the King was delegated a man’s role in screwing. Some miniature supernaturals exhibited one or more of Rumpelstiltskin’s characteristics but none bore all his traits. In many ways, he’s in a category by himself and apparently belongs to no dwarfish nation. Rumpelstiltskin may be gnomic in his aphoristic way of speaking—terse, verging on riddles, no-nonsense negotiations—but he is not of the cavern-dwelling race of short men called Gnomes. Contrasting with agile elves and often beautiful fairies, gnomes appear in medieval mythologies as dwarfish and often physically deformed subterranean goblins. Unlike warmly appealing fairytales the spinnstube’s women did not devise the Tale of Rumpelstiltskin to essay the merits of true love, that tenderly imagined surcease from a sexual desert.
