Why does Rumpelstiltskin want your first-born?
This never made any sense to me. Why would Rumpelstiltskin want a child? What benefit does he get from that? If he needed a child for labor, or for adorable faces and cooing, or for baking into pies (because, sometimes that’s a thing in fairy tales), couldn’t he just get an orphan right away, instead of having to wait years for one woman to have a baby? Did the Germans (I think Rumpelstiltskin is a German tale?) think first-borns have some kind of magical power? Or that was a common thing to trade in their culture? Why not “give me 3 years of hard, manual labor” or “give me the map to El Dorado” or something that seemed to have an actual benefit to Rumpelstiltskin, not just a downside to whomever makes the deal? Or… What’s going on where Rumpelstiltskin says “Give me your first born”?
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If you sacrifice the first born of your children to the ghost of your ancestors (early middle east and lower Europe), your family would stay strong and vibrant.
Judaic, and later, Christian thought replaced the sacrifice with rituals and animal sacrifice.
Rumpelstiltskin is going to use the firstborn to steal the power of your family using old, pre-Christian magical traditions to make it his own.
“No, a living thing is more dear to me than all the treasures of the earth.” Rumpelstiltskin says why he wants to take the child from the greedy King and Queen who would give up her own child.
I don’t remember clearly, but seems to me he was blackmailing the king and he queen somehow.It wasn’t about the rituals…
According to tradition, fairies are unable to have healthy children of their own, which is why they steal human babies and leave changelings in their place. Presumably a first-born child is more wanted and therefore more valuable?
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