Rump: The True Story of Rumpelstiltskin

Rump feels a “weighty, guilty, heart-pounding, sick-to-[his]-stomach dread” as he hides the gold under his blankets (40). He briefly considers telling Gran what happened. However, he intuits that she knew he had the potential to spin gold and tried to stop this from happening. In addition, she looks so frail that he cannot bear to burden her with more worries. Rump decides that the only person he can confide in is Red.

At the end of their shift in the mines, Rump asks to talk with Red somewhere private, and she leads him into the Woods. The girl seems more comfortable in the eerie forest than she does in the Village, and a path magically appears before her. Red retrieves a chunk of honeycomb from a beehive and shares it with Rump. She could exchange the honey for a large quantity of grain, but she prefers to keep it a secret rather than sell it, and she makes Rump promise to keep the hive’s location a secret. Rump tells her that he spun straw into gold, and she reveals to him that his mother was a spinner from the region of Yonder and faced problems because of her magic.