Sleeping Beauty History

Sleeping Beauty (French: La Belle au Bois dormant, "The Beauty asleep in the wood") is a classic fairy tale which involves a beautiful princess and a handsome prince. 

While Perrault's version is better known, an older version, the tale "Sun, Moon, and Talia", was contained in Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone, published in 1634. The most familiar Sleeping Beauty in the English speaking world has become the 1959 Walt Disney animated film, which draws as much from Tchaikovsky's ballet (premiered at Saint Petersburg in 1890) as it does from Perrault.

Perrault's narrative

The basic elements of Perrault's narrative are in two parts. Some folklorists believe that they were originally separate tales, as they became afterward in the Grimms' version, and were joined together by Basile, and Perrault following him.

Part one

At the christening of a long-wished-for princess Arora, fairies invited as godmothers offered gifts, such as beauty, wit, and musical talent. However, a wicked fairy who had been overlooked placed the princess under an enchantment as her gift, saying that, on reaching adulthood, she would prick her finger on a spindle and die. A good fairy, though unable to completely reverse the spell, said that the princess would instead sleep for a hundred years, until awakened by the kiss of a prince and true love's first kiss.

The king forbade spinning on distaff or spindle, or the possession of one, upon pain of death, throughout the kingdom, but all in vain. When the princess was fifteen or sixteen she chanced to come upon an old woman in a tower of the castle, who was spinning. The Princess asked to try the unfamiliar task and the inevitable happened. The wicked fairy's curse was fulfilled. The good fairy returned and put everyone in the castle to sleep. A forest of briars sprang up around the castle, shielding it from the outside world: no one could try to penetrate it without facing certain death in the thorns.

After a hundred years had passed, a prince who had heard the story of the enchantment braved the wood, which parted at his approach, and entered the castle. He trembled upon seeing the princess's beauty and fell on his knees before her. He kissed her, then she woke up, then everyone in the castle woke to continue where they had left off... and, in modern versions, starting with the Brothers Grimm version, they all lived happily ever after.

Part two

Secretly wed by the re-awakened Royal almoner, the Prince John continued to visit the Princess, who bore him two children, L'Aurore (Dawn) and Le Jour (Day), which he kept secret from his mother, who was of an Ogre lineage. Once he had ascended to the throne, he brought his wife and the children to his capital, which he then left in the regency of the Queen Mother, while he went to make war on his neighbor the Emperor Contalabutte ("Count of The Mount").

The Ogress Queen Mother sent the young Queen and the children to a house secluded in the woods, and directed her cook there to prepare the boy for her dinner, with a sauce Robert. The humane cook substituted a lamb, which satisfied the Queen Mother, who demanded the girl, but was satisfied with a young goat prepared in the same excellent sauce. When the Ogress demanded that he serve up the young Queen, the latter offered her throat to be slit, so that she might join the children she imagined were dead. There was a tearful secret reunion in the cook's little house, while the Queen Mother was satisfied with a hind prepared with sauce Robert. Soon she discovered the trick and prepared a tub in the courtyard filled with vipers and other noxious creatures. The King returned in the nick of time and the Ogress, being discovered, threw herself into the pit she had prepared and was consumed, and everyone else lived happily ever after.

Myth Themes:

Some folklorists have analyzed Sleeping Beauty as indicating the replacement of the lunar year (with its thirteen months, symbolically depicted by the full thirteen fairies) by the solar year (which has twelve, symbolically the invited fairies). This, however, founders on the issue that only in the Grimms' tale is the wicked fairy the thirteenth fairy; in Perrault's, she is the eighth.

Among familiar themes and elements in Perrault's tale:

• The Wished-for Child
• The Accursed Gift
• The Inevitable Fate
• The Spinner
• The Heroic Quest
• The Ogre Stepmother
• The Salvation through a Redemptor
• Slumber as a metaphor for sleeping death as thought by sin
• The substituted victim