The Three Spinners
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The Three Spinners is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. It is tale no 14 and Aarne-Thompson type 501.
It has obvious parallels to Rumpelstiltskin, and obvious differences, so that they are often compared.
Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales included a variant, And Seven!.
[edit] Synopsis
A lazy girl would not spin and her mother was berating her for it when the Queen overheard her and asked what she was scolding. Ashamed to admit that her daughter was lazy, the woman claimed that the girl spun so much that she could not buy enough flax. The Queen offered to take her with her.
Once at the castle, the queen showed her a room filled with flax. If she spun it all in three days, she could marry the queen's oldest son. Two days later she returned and was astounded to find it all untouched. The girl pled that homesickness kept her from spinning, but knew that excuse would not serve twice.
Three women appeared in the night. One had a grotesquely swollen foot; another, a thumb; the third, a lip. They offered to spin it if she would invite them to the wedding, say they were her aunts, and sit them at the high table. She agrees, and they do.
In the morning, the queen arranges for the wedding, and the girl asks to invite her aunts. When they appear, the king asks how they came to have such swollen body parts, and they explain that it comes from their endless spinning. The king forbade his beautiful bride from spinning again.
[edit] And Seven!
In the Italian tale, the parts of the queen and the king her son are taken by a merchant, who hears the mother berating her daughter for "seven" -- which are seven bowls of soup, but the mother claims they are spindles of hemp.
In addition, the women instruct her to invite them by calling their names. She forgets the names and puts off the wedding, and puts it off, trying to remember the names. The merchant sees the three women cavorting in the forest, like Rumpelstiltskin, and calling their names; he tells this to his bride in hopes of amusing her and getting her to agree to the wedding. She is therefore able to invite them and precipitate the ending as in the Grimms' tale.
