Spinning Silver

Spinning Silver is Rumpelstiltskin argued with, and Rumpelstiltskin is tale 55 in the Grimms' collection. That is the text Naomi Novik is working from: a miller's daughter whose father's boast puts her in a locked room, and a small malevolent creature who spins straw into gold and then comes to collect. Novik keeps the bargain and changes who can make it. Miryem is a moneylender's daughter who really can turn silver into gold, by being good at her job and by being owed, and when the winter king arrives she negotiates rather than guesses his name. She has written about the antisemitism inside the original: a figure who lends at a price, is owed, and is destroyed for it, and what that figure stood in for in the villages the Grimms collected from. Her Miryem is Jewish, her family are the village's lenders, and the hostility they meet is the tale's own subtext made explicit. Recorded as a reaction rather than an influence because the book is a rebuttal of its source and not a retelling of it. The Staryk, the winter king who comes down the frozen road, is Slavic and Baltic rather than Grimm, which is why the real-world folklore edge stays where it is.

Naomi Novik's Spinning Silver grew from a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, the Grimms' tale of a miller's daughter who boasts she can spin straw into gold. Novik turns it round: her heroine, a moneylender's daughter, turns silver into gold, and the bargain is struck with a king of winter.

Spinning Silver is Rumpelstiltskin argued with. In the tale a miller's daughter is claimed by a creature who spins straw into gold; Naomi Novik gives the claim to a moneylender's daughter who really can turn silver into gold, by being good at her job, and who then negotiates. Novik has written about the antisemitism inside the original: the small malevolent figure who lends at a price and is owed, and what that figure stood in for. Her Miryem is Jewish, her family are the village's lenders, and the hostility they meet is the tale's own subtext made explicit. The Staryk, the winter king who comes down the frozen road, comes from Slavic and Baltic folklore rather than from Grimm.