The Three Spinners
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The Three Spinners is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm.[1] It is tale no 14 and Aarne-Thompson type 501. It is widespread throughout Europe.[2]
It has obvious parallels to Rumpelstiltskin, and obvious differences, so that they are often compared.
Older than the Grimms' variant, Giambattista Basile wrote an Italian literary fairy tale, The Seven Little Pork Rinds.[3]
Italo Calvino's Italian Folktales included a variant, And Seven!.[4]
The first edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales contained a much shorter variant, Hateful Flax Spinning, but it is the later version that became well-known.
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[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] Hateful Flax Spinning
A king orders his queen and daughters to spin all the time. One day, he gives them a great box of flax to spin, to his daughters' distress. The queen invites three hideous old maids to come to the castle and spin. The king sees them and asks the cause of their deformities. They answer, from spinning. The king forbids his wife and daughters to spin again.
[edit] The Seven Little Pork Rinds
The girl in this story ate seven pieces of bacon before the meal, so that none was left for her mother; when the mother beat her for her gluttony, a merchant rather than a king asked, and the woman claimed her daughter was ruining her health by working too hard.
When the merchant went on a journey, leaving spinning for his wife, she eventually tried to spin, and flicked passers-by with water; this hit some fairies, who were so amused that they do the spinning for her. They do not help her with her husband's expectations; she feigns that the spinning has made her ill, convincing him that her mother was right about her overworking.
[edit] And Seven!
In this version also, the part of the king is taken by a merchant; similarly, the mother berates 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.
[edit] References
- ^ Jacob and Wilheim Grimm, Grimm's Fairy Tales, "The Three Spinners"
- ^ Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales p 716 ISBN 0-15-645489-0
- ^ Jack Zipes, The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm, p 585, ISBN 0-393-97636-X
- ^ Italo Calvino, Italian Folktales p 14-18 ISBN 0-15-645489-0
