Rumplestiltskin.

This is my favourite story told by the Grimm brothers. Their version is a masterpiece of narrative economy. If you’ve read the earlier French version you can only admire how much has been stripped out by the time they got to it.

Like most folk stories it won’t survive logical scrutiny, but it moves so swiftly you don’t have time to stop and consider how strange it is, or how inconsistent when you’re going along with the story.

So here is the Ugly Little Man, Rumplestiltskin himself, the only one who doesn’t change in a story about transformations, a three time failure in a story of threes, perhaps feeling a little sorry for himself, or just rightfully indignant. As he says: ‘I saved her life three times/she never once asked me my name’.