The poor girl’s father lies to the king and told him that she could spin straw into gold, so the king locks her in a room full of straw with a spinning wheel and tells her that he will behead her if she doesn’t spin all the straw into gold by morning. She is doomed to fail until the impish creature shows up and promises to do the task in return for her necklace.  The next day the imp spins another roomful of straw into gold in exchange for the girl’s ring. On the third day, the girl has nothing left to trade the imp but still wants him to spin the straw into gold since the king promised to marry her if she completed the final task. She ends up promising her firstborn child to the imp and marries the king. When the imp comes to claim her firstborn child, he says that he will release her from the agreement only if she can guess his name in three days. When she is unable to guess his name for two days, she sends a messenger to find out his real name. The messenger happens upon the imp’s cottage and watches as he sings this song around his fire:

          “Today do I bake, to-morrow I brew,

          The day after that the queen's child comes in;

          And oh! I am glad that nobody knew

          That the name I am called is Rumpelstiltskin!”

     The queen at first pretends that she still doesn’t know then reveals the imp’s true name when he comes on the third day, and Rumpelstiltskin loses the agreement and his temper. He runs away and never returns according to the 1812 version of the Brothers Grimm fairytales, but in the 1857 version, Rumpelstiltskin "in his rage drove his right foot so far into the ground that it sank in up to his waist; then in a passion he seized the left foot with both hands and tore himself in two." (4)

     Gollum is a character that appears in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and all three novels in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. He was originally a hobbit named Sméagol but after becoming obssessed with the One Ring, which he calls “my precious,” he acquires the nickname Gollum. It should be said that most, if not all, of Gollum’s trickery stems from the effects of the ring from which he suffers, but I don’t think this fact disqualifies him from consideration. The effects of the ring are immediate; Sméagol strangled his relative Déagol when the unfortunate hobbit refused to let him keep it. The ring twisted and corrupted Sméagol’s mind as well as his body, and he used the ring for all sorts of trickery early on, spying on and provoking his fellow hobbits and stealing from them before they cast him out.

     The trickery that Gollum is perhaps best known for occurs when he agrees to lead Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee to Mordor while secretly plotting ways to get the ring back from them. He swears an oath to help the hobbits, and even develops somewhat of a multiple personality situation when he begins to argue with Sméagol (his former self) over it, but Sam is still wary of him as are other characters that they encounter on the way to Mordor. Gollum leads them into a cave that he claims is a shortcut around the well-guarded Black Gate, only for the hobbits to encounter the giant spider Shelob, whom Gollum worshipped, and Frodo was stung by the spider before being taken prisoner by Orcs.

      After Sam rescues Frodo and they continue toward Mount Doom, Gollum attacks, and Sam defeated him but left him alive out of pity. This demonstrates Gollum’s skills in deception since he goes on to attack Frodo one more at the Crack of Doom. In his efforts to get the ring back, he bites off Frodo’s finger and retrieves it. However, he was too clever for his own good, also a recurring trickster theme; as he dances around, gloating in having “his precious” in his possession again, he steps off the edge and plunges with the ring into the lava below. Inadvertently, he destroyed the One Ring and defeated the evil Sauron in the end, saving the day and becoming a hero to the peoples of Middle Earth. (6)

     As stated in his bio on Thurman’s website, Robin “currently makes his living as a used car salesman, a perfect role for a trickster, and is shunned by the other supernatural races for his lying, stealing, tricking, and general fun-loving ways.” (7) And there is no love lost between Robin and the other occupants of the building where he owns a penthouse. After millennia of tricking and hosting sex parties, it was bound to happen. Robin’s constant companion is Salome, an undead mummy cat to whom he grew attached when she followed him home from the basement of the museum where she was created by a bored and malignant mummy. Though he doesn’t admit it, Robin adores this cat, especially after she kills the ancient dog of his equally ancient neighbor, which he thinks is a fantastic trick. In Moonshine, Robin comes face to face with a puck called Hobgoblin, or simply the Hob, who is even more ancient than he is and has been driven to a dark madness by the many years he has lived. He must out-trick the ultimate trickster, who has concocted such a twisted, elaborate plan that he was never even a suspect, or risking losing one of the only friends he’s ever had.

      Most of the time, his pranks and trickery are purely for his own entertainment, but sometimes he and his companions use his lying and his deceptive ways in their efforts to defeat the bad guy and restore a sense of balance and justice to the world. Perhaps the best quality Robin has is that he knows when it’s time to trick and when it’s time to be serious. When one of his only friends is suffering from amnesia and is trying to make sense of his life (in Blackout), Robin elects to give it to him straight, so to speak, instead of lying to him, though he does soften the blow a bit with some clever language that his friend must figure out. Robin Goodfellow is the ultimate trickster, and he would be the first to tell you so…and remind you how gorgeous he is at the same time.

     As you read a little further, you come across a scene where a man has somehow gotten into the wolf pen at the zoo and has been eaten alive. The news report states that the man was a pedophile, convicted multiple times, and shows video evidence of him using a leash and dog collar to convince a little girl to help him look for his lost puppy. A little girl all alone with a red balloon. (hint, hint) As it turns out, it was Trixa (remember that she’s a shapeshifter) who tricked the man and disposed of him in the wolf pen while she was supposedly out running errands. What does she have to say about it? “I have to say I love it when a pervert gets what’s coming to him. And the puppies got a nice treat too. It’s a win-win.” While she has an admittedly dark sense of humor, it is this sort of trickery in which justice is ultimately served that would earn her the title of culture hero.

     And in the end of the book, after the quest for the Light referenced by the book’s title has been recovered, Trixa reveals her true identity to her enemy Solomon in a flash of fur and fangs, claws and feathers, as she assumes each of the forms in her trickster heritage – Coyote, Kitsune, Crow, Akamataa, Amaguq, and Iktomi – before violently beheading him because he had murdered her brother in cold blood years earlier. Before she kills him, she says, “I lie, but I lie to make others see the error of their ways. I trick to make things right. I even kill, if I have to, to balance the scales. But I need proof. Now I have it.” But that Light that I mentioned (you’ll have to read the book to get the whole story on that) decided that she needed a lesson as well; for getting carried away with assuming all her shapes at once and torturing Solomon instead of just killing him, she would be unable to change forms at all for the next four or five years.

     In The Grimrose Path, Cronus (yes, the Titan) has picked up the habit of ripping wings off demons because once he collects a certain number of them, they will provide him with a map to Hell. Cronus in Hell is a very bad thing for everyone, so Trixa and company set out to stop him. This entire novel is one big trick, and as with the first novel you really have to read it to understand everything that happens, but she robs a museum in order to get the stone from which such indestructible weapons as Mjollnir were created, gets the better of some shady characters who were terrorizing the homeless with baseball bats, and has a dead soul retrieve a pitcher of water from the River Lethe for her. Fun times. But perhaps my favorite trick of the novel was when she convinced Hell to release all the souls with the name or similar name of Rose, and all because she told them that Cronus was looking for someone named Rose…when it had just been a clever play on his actual words. (8)