Rapunzel
- "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair."
Rapunzel is a traditional
fairy tale of the
Brothers Grimm, an allegory of a young girl's sexual awakening that is often told to children, in spite of its barely covert eroticism.
Like many fairy tales of village and forest, the tale of Rapunzel is essentially a village tale, for it is set in motion when a wife, pregnant with a long desired child, gazed from her chamber window into the high walled garden of the sorceress next door, where a bed of
rapunzel (Valerianella locusta) was flourishing among the wise herb-woman's finest flowers and herbs. The wife's husband was convinced by her piteous complaints to scale the wall and garner some rapunzel, but a taste of salad only whetted her craving, and on his second nighttime raid, the husband was confronted by the
crone herself. (The "fairy" in the 1812 version was a "sorceress" in the 1857 telling.)
Eating otherworldly food always puts you in the otherworldly power (compare
Persephone and the pomegranate seeds, the tale of
Circe, and many Celtic legends), and in exchange for as much of the rapunzel as his wife demanded, the husband found himself bound to deliver up the child, when it came into the world. When the wife came to term, the witch duly appeared and took away the girl-child, whom she named Rapunzel.
Rapunzel grew into a beautiful child, the most beautiful girl in this particular tale, and was raised in luxurious but protected isolation,
cloistered in the manner of aristocratic females in medieval and early modern Europe; peasant girls and tradesmen's daughters had more independence. The sorceress was not truly wicked, so much as blindly old-fashioned. She believed, as many still do, that the virtues of virginity could be combined with
utterly ignorant innocence. (Compare Prospero and his daughter Miranda in
Shakespeare's
The Tempest.) When Rapunzel came to be twelve, (and so at the moment of her
first flows of
puberty) she was locked at the top of a lonely tower deep in the forest, which had neither stairs nor door. Instead, when the herbal sorceress wished to see her, she stood below in the glade and called:\n:"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair."
Down braid, up witch! she climbed the golden braid of hair.
In a year or two, a Prince was riding in the forest and heard an enchanting song. Drawn by the sound he approached a lonely tower and beheld Rapunzel in her high window, combing her tresses and singing like a
melusine. As he watched unseen, the sorceress arrived and called:\n:"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair."
Down braid, up witch! but seeing the chaste tower was breached by so lovely a scaling ladder, the Prince resolved to try his luck. The next twilight it was he at the base of the tower, calling:\n:"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair."
Down hair, up Prince! Rapunzel's reaction at seeing a man was not unlike Miranda's: "Oh brave new world! that has such people in it!" The 1812 edition of Grimm's tales reports that Rapunzel and the prince lived a while in joy and pleasure, an element that was excised from the 1857 version. Nevertheless, before very many further visits Rapunzel conceived a plan to escape by a silken ladder that she would weave, if the prince would only bring a skein of silk at every visit. Alas, just before the silken ladder was ready, Rapunzel naïvely let the game away, by blurting to the sorceress, "How very slow you are at climing my braid! The King's son is up in a flash!"
In cultures where women cut their hair when they marry (as still in Islam and among Orthodox Jews today), long hair was an emblem of virginity. In the myth of
Lady Godiva, Godivas's long hair, is an emblem of her
chastity. Thus the sorceress grabbed a pair of shears and cut Rapunzel's tresses. Leaving Rapunzel shamefully cropped, she braided the hair and waited. At evening, the Prince called from below:
- "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair."
This time, the braid was attached to a window hook, and when the Prince was almost at the window ledge, the sorceress let him fall into a thorn bush that scratched him blind.
While the Prince wandered blinded in the wilderness, Rapunzel bore beautiful twins. After many heartaches, she recognized the Prince as a dusty roadworn tramp. Her tears of joy and love restored his sight.\n \nThe story of Rapunzel is an example of Aarne and Thompson's (see link) type 310
The Maiden in the Tower. It contains many fairy tale fragmentary themes: the Forbidden Fruit, the Womanly Wiles, a Hard Bargain, the Changeling Child, Enchanting Singing, the Unseen Watcher, the Princely Rescue, and Healing Tears.
What is "Rapunzel"?
It is difficult to be certain which plant species the Brothers Grimm meant by the word Rapunzel, but the following listed in their own dictionary are candidates.
- Valerianella locusta, common names: Corn salad, mache, lamb's lettuce, field salad. Rapunzel is called Feldsalat in Germany and Nusslisalat in Switzerland. In cultivated form it has a low growing rosette of succulent green rounded leaves when young, when they are picked whole, washed of grit and eaten with oil and vinegar. When it bolts to seed it shows clusters of small white flowers. Etty's seed catalogue states Corn Salad (Verte de Cambrai) was in use by 1810.\n# Campanula rapunculus is known as Rapunzel-Glockenblume in German, and as Rampion in Etty's seed catalogue, and although classified under a different family, Campanulaceae, has a similar rosette when young, although with pointed leaves. Some English translations of Rapunzel used the word Rampion. Etty's catalogue states: "Noted in 1633. A highly esteemed root for salad. ... should be sown (in the open air) in April or May...". Other sources describe the root as edible. [1] has: "CAMPANULA RAPUNCULUS Roots are extremely tasty. First year roots and tender basal leaves are edible. Blue bell-flowers in June or July."\n# Phyteuma spicata (picture), known as Ährige Teufelskralle in German.
Sources for Grimm "Rapunzel"
An influence for Grimm's Rapunzel was Petrosinella, written by\nGiambattista Basile in his collection of fairy tales in
1634, Lo cunto de li cunti (The Story of Stories), or Pentamerone.\nThis tells a similar tale of a pregnant woman desiring some parsley\nfrom the garden of an ogress, getting caught and having to promise the ogress her baby.
See also: Rapunzel syndrome
External links
\n*Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Household Tales, (English translation by Margaret Hunt, 1884: Rapunzel\n*
Annotated version of the Grimm brothers' Rapunzel, with bibliography of Rapunzel variations\n*
D.L. Ashliman's Grimm Brothers website. The classification is based on Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson,
The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography, (Helsinki, 1961).\n*
Translated comparison between 1812 and 1857 versions\n \nCategory:Fairy tales
