What's There in a Name?

Rumpelstiltskin is an intriguing name. It is borne by the chief character in a children’s story of the same name. The story is very popular among children. It revolves around two of the common human traits: greed and importance of one’s own name.


Briefly, there is a miller who goes to the king and lies that his daughter can spin straw into gold. The king puts his daughter in a closed room with plenty of straw and gives her three days to convert the straw into gold. The poor girl weeps and weeps till a kindly out-of-the-world dwarf appears and offers to turn the straw into gold in exchange for her necklace. Both parties honor the deal and the king is surprised when he sees the room full of gold. Being a greedy man, the king puts her into a bigger room having more straw stacked in it. The girl cries and the dwarf appears and again turns straw into gold, this time in exchange for her ring.


The king becomes greedier. He marries the girl and makes her his queen. Then he puts her in a very big hall having a huge stack of straw. The history repeats. The girl cries bitterly during night and the dwarf appears on the scene. This time he offers to convert straw into gold only if she agrees to give her first-born baby to him. It is a very hard bargain. She does not want to do it but there is no way out. She agrees with a heavy heart.


In the due course, the queen gives birth to a baby. The dwarf appears as if from nowhere and demands her newly born baby. She cries bitterly and requests him to forgive her and allow her to keep her baby. She is willing to give him anything in the kingdom except the baby. But the dwarf does not relent. However, as a concession to her, he says that he will return after three days, and if by that time she is able to guess his name he will allow her to keep her baby.


During the next three days, there is hectic activity in the kingdom. The queen scans thousands of names and keeps wondering what the real name of the dwarf might be. As luck would have it, one of her servants reports to her that in a faraway forest he saw a dwarf around a fire and singing a song in which he says his name is Rumpelstiltskin.

The dwarf returns as scheduled after three days. After teasing the dwarf playfully for a little while she tells him that his name is Rumpelstiltskin. The dwarf is stunned, and in a monumental fit of anger vanishes in thin air. The story has different versions which differ in details. But the basic elements of the story are the same.


Legends, myths, and fairy tales have tremendous influence in shaping culture. Often they have a sneaking moral value; but generally they mirror a ground reality. In the above story, the moral is apparent. The miller is a liar and his blatant lie about his daughter lands her in a trap which had no exit. Similarly, the greed of the king led him to marry a woman only because he thought she was a gold mine. Then there was a dwarf who was greedy and had a touch of perversity along with obsession for his name.

There is another angle to the story. Normal greed is associated with ordinary people like king and the miller. Perverse greed is linked to a dwarf, who is believed to be a repository of physical defect and disability. In many cultures, the inadequate and the physically deformed people are thought to be vicious. In Ramayana, the oldest Indian mythological epic, it is Manthra, the hunchbacked maidservant, who deliberately gives a mischievous advice to the Queen Kekayi. One may explain such phenomena by assuming that the physically deformed people need attention and they try to get it by being actively vicious. The authors of the tale of Rumpelstiltskin made the protagonist of their story a dwarf, a victim of ridicule in any cultures. In many circuses, one may find dwarfs performing as clowns. Rumpelstiltskin is greedy and mean. More importantly, he is intensely attached to his own name. This only confirms that he is too human.


In all cultures, including the ancient ones, one’s name has been the supreme identifier of one’s entire existence. One’s identity is a conglomerate of so many factors: face, body shape, age, depth and extent of experience, and their value system. But all these identifiers stand superseded by the name one bears.


Every change of name is a political statement. Contemporary history is full of examples when cities have changed their names. Take the case of St Petersburg in Russia. It was called Petrograd from 1914 to 1924 and Leningrad from 1924 to 1991. After the disintegration of Soviet Union in 1991, it was renamed as St Petersburg. Burmese government even changed the name of their country to Myanmar. In India and China, cities have changed their names to assert their identity aggressively.

Certain communities in India, wives are not allowed to address to or even mention their husband’s name. It is a silent political statement asserting that the power center in society is man. In most cultures a woman changes her last name to that of her husband’s, thereby reinforcing the prevailing male domination in society. In an Indian joint family often a newly married woman is encouraged to change her first name because it happens to be same as that of another woman in the family who has traditionally a higher status. In certain parts of western India, the first name of the woman is changed upon her marriage, regardless. Changing name of a human being is a societal way to create a new identity of that person. It is coercion and a kind of mental cruelty, if done without the willing consent of that individual. In the age of emerging gender equality, it sounds a discordant note when a woman alters fully or partially her name after marriage.


Often people keep their last name or sometimes first or middle name to indicate or highlight a certain part of their cultural, professional or religious identity. All this tends to show that the most visible identifier of a human being is their name.


What’s there in a name? I would say a whole world.