Rumpelstiltskin's Baby

No longer a children's fairy tale, Rumpelstiltskin's Baby is a fun and rewarding, intelligent work of literary fiction with a bit of relevant fantasy time travel. Our version has the traditional miller trigger all the action by bragging to the ruling Count (we don't have a king) that his daughter, Alma, can spin straw into gold. Rump then comes up with a scheme – a plausible caper consistent with his time and place, but worthy of films of five hundred years later – for the Count to receive, each of three mornings, gold he believes the miller's daughter has spun from straw. After they take us through delivering the gold, the Count, satisfied for the time being with three nights of spinning by "the miller's daughter" (it's questionable whether he even knows her name), declares that she is to marry him. To some degree that frees Alma to take responsibility and action on her own behalf. She is uninhibited by any so-called "traditional tale," in that over a thousand years or more of Rumpelstiltskins and related tales there's not a lot we know about this stage of her life. She grows up. First she travels to Sweden to visit Queen Karin Månsdotter, a real historic person. Alma tells us why and we go along and join her in what follows on that visit. Then there's another visit orchestrated by Gertrude, Hamlet's mom. She plays a key role, important to our plot. And remember, Gertrude was a queen in Denmark before Alma went to Sweden. Shakespeare may not have written her play yet, but he'll soon get around to it. Then she'll be an historic figure predating our tale. That's a good enough rationale for Gertrude's staying in our story. And remember, at the outset of our tale Rump acknowledges to us, the readers, that he and Alma conceived the baby over the first three straw-spinning nights. Of course she doesn't know it yet, and as she's marrying so quickly, how will she know it's not the Count's child . . . ? But she marries the Count . . . and then fate or happenstance take over and scenes change. The plot shifts to center around how Rump and Alma maintain a safe, close "family" relationship, plausible to the nobility and the world. As a Count, more easily than a king, can become friendly with Rump, that's what they do. They then can discuss all sorts of things, from the roles of elves and trolls, to the Papal Bulls allowing the Portuguese to inflict hereditary enslavement on the people of Africa. They even embrace Rump's clearly feminist view in discussing women and the game of chess. We've eliminated name secrecy as a factor, though it is discussed and analyzed in relation to a Norse tale that Alma tells. Rump adopts our author's disparagement of name secrecy, and does so quite nicely, I might add. But what about a "beard" as a partner to a gay man, meant to hide his orientation. While we include a bit of that, the word itself wasn't used until the 20th century. That's too great a reach, so, though the thought stays, the word "beard" is out.