Bad Bargains
Illustration of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale "The Girl Without Hands" Philipp Grot Johann (1841-1892)
In the folktale “The Handless Maiden,” a miller meets a strange old man who promises him riches and ease in exchange for what is behind his mill. The miller thinks about it for a moment, pictures the old apple tree behind his mill, and agrees. He is instantly bedecked in jewels. The stranger promises to collect what is his in a year and the miller heads home to find his wife covered in finery and his house a castle. His astonished wife asks him how this has happened and the miller excitedly recounts the tale of the old man in the forest, the bargain, the jewels. But his wife stops him and says, “wait, husband, wait. What exactly did he say he wanted in return for all this?” When he tells her, his wife falls to the earth sobbing, “Oh my husband, our daughter has been out sweeping behind the mill all morning. It most surely was the devil you met and he has traded you for our daughter.”
As the tale unfolds, the devil comes for the daughter but because of her purity is unable to take her. However in the course of the negotiations he convinces the miller to chop off his own daughter’s hands. Finally the devil gives up. The miller and his wife implore their daughter to stay and be taken care of with all the riches they now have but the daughter declines. She bandages the bloody stumps where her hands used to be and she heads out into the forest alone.
This was a bad bargain.
Of course, once we know the story’s ending, we can see its folly and none would take this deal. But the catch is that the devil doesn’t reveal himself as the devil. In the Brothers Grimm tale, he is just “an old man.” As Clarissa Pinkola Estes tells it, he is “a strange man wearing a little green jacket.”
And he doesn’t name his price up front. He talks in circles. He only wants “what stands behind the mill.” The miller thinks for a minute, pictures the space behind the mill, and only remembers an old apple tree. He doesn’t go and look. He doesn’t ask the strange man to state his terms explicitly. He makes an assumption that this strange little man wants to trade riches for old trees and he agrees, and so seals his daughters’ fate.
Now consider this:
Your credit card company promises that you can have that new TV set now even though you don’t have the money.
Amazon will bring you your widget at 30% cheaper than the store down the street.
Your smartphone promises greater efficiency, accessibility, more connection to your loved ones.
Most of us have a sense that these are probably at least questionable bargains. We know that the promises have conditions (increasing interest rates, late fees, impact on our credit score). We are less aware of the more deeply hidden conditions: fees the shop owner pays the credit card company which leads them to increase prices, investments that the credit card company makes that you might not agree with and that contribute to global forces that eventually harm you (e.g. making weapons or fracking for oil.)
I could go on about credit cards, Amazon, smartphones, health insurance, and you probably could too. You could probably name a half dozen bad bargains off the top of your head and the truth is that once you start thinking about it you see them everywhere.
And there are dozens of bad bargains in folk tales. In our series, The Wild Within, we take a deep dive into the medicine of “The Handless Maiden” folktale and what it can teach us on the individual and collective levels. We explore the individual-level bad bargains we get into with our workplaces, our partners, our devices. We discuss the ways our early childhood experiences can impact the clarity of our bargaining, and bad bargains as a rite of passage. We also discuss collective-level bad bargains and the primacy of the bad bargain in the ongoing struggles for human, animal, and natural resource rights around the world.
To go deeper into the wisdom of this story, and that of many others, stay tuned - our much awaited Wild Within Series will be going live soon!
I am also working on a longer piece of writing about bad bargains (I am a little obsessed with the concept to be honest) and that will be posted on my substack here when it is ready.
To get you started thinking on this topic below are some journaling prompts:
Where in your life have you been enticed by a bad bargain?
How have you learned from these experiences?
What sacrifices have you made to stay out of a bad bargain?
Stay Wild,
Molly and Magda