Rapunzel

Sababurg Castle in the Reinhardswald forest is marketed as Sleeping Beauty's castle.

The tower of Trendelburg Castle is called Rapunzel's Tower.

Hesse's public broadcaster recommended that very tower in a travel tip, notes in the same piece that there is no record of whether the Grimms ever visited Trendelburg.

Bergfreiheit is the snow-white village, the Schwalm is Little Red Riding Hood country.

And that's what makes it so insidious.

As the last three episodes showed, those darker layers really do exist.

Rapunzel's pregnancy, the mother in Snow White, the grandmother whose flesh gets eaten.

The real dark roots lie in texts, manuscripts, and farmhouse kitchens.

Certainly you can't live in Western culture without being aware of the general category of fairy tales For better or worse, Disney has brought that into everyone's consciousness.

Now, we could talk about what Disney does to some of these fairy tales, but we know Cinderella and we know Snow White and we know Sleeping Beauty and we know Rapunzel and we are aware of this general category whether or not we've taken the time to go and read the older versions of them, Grimm's or Perrault or Hans Christian Andersen's writing himself.

I think, though, when we look at a fairy tale, we would say a fairy tale brings us into touch with the mysterious side of life.

it allows us to touch what we can't see and of course a fairy by its nature is invisible except in certain circumstances which you know in general that is going to be an analog for a supernatural presence the angelic, the demonic, the mysterious side, the invisible part of our reality.

I think just because they have, we all know them so well, they've got that such a strong basis in children's literature, I suppose, that like it then provides the perfect foil to kind of twist it a little bit.

Tell me, you're Rapunzel.

So we have Rapunzel checking herself in to a tower themed boutique hotel because she needs a little bit of a break.

A man keeps asking her to climb her hair.

So eventually she chops it into a chic little bob so that he can't climb up and get her.

I enjoyed them.

I wish I had come across these and it had been out when I was actually doing my Cinderella book because that rendition would have gone straight in there as something to point readers to.

I really felt for Rapunzel.

Last week we looked over Wilhelm Grimm's shoulder as he spent nearly 50 years rewriting his own book.

Mothers turned into stepmothers and Rapunzel's pregnancy quietly disappeared.

Today we go back behind the book.

Not to what the Grimms changed, but to what was there before them.

But in the end, she regains her hands and everything.

One thing I learned from this, an original version of Rapunzel, it's not the Disney version for sure.

It's premarital sex, right? It's a pregnancy.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

So we find out in the early Rapunzel version, the prince comes to her tower and visits her every night and they spend a joyful time together.

And then later she reveals her secret to the witch by saying, how come that my dress is getting tighter and tighter today? So, you know, indicating that she is pregnant now.

So that was it was too strong of a reference for the Grimm.

Now we're talking about content.

Rapunzel, first edition 1812.

The story begins the way we know it.

A pregnant woman craves the Rapunzel growing in the garden next door.

Her husband steals some, and the garden's owner demands the unborn child in return.

In 1812, by the way, that owner is still a fairy.

The child is locked in a tower without a door.

A king's son hears her singing and climbs up her hair, and then comes a sentence, "The two of them lived happily together for some time, and the fairy didn't suspect a thing until one day Rapunzel said to her, 'Tell me, Mother Gothel, my little dresses are getting so tight, they don't fit me anymore.'" You know what's happening here.

Long before they were sanitized into thousands of animated features and storybooks, these tales were forged in the gritty reality of Renaissance Italy and early modern France.

Writers like Giambattista Basile and Giovanni Francesco Straparola penned wild, visceral early versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Rapunzel, stories dripping with obsession, dark folklore, and adult anxieties.

By the late 17th century, rebellious aristocratic women in the glittering salons of Paris seized the genre, using fairytales as coded manifestos to challenge forced marriages and legal subjugation.

It wasn't until a century later that the Brothers Grimm systematically reengineered these narratives.

Chapter 10.

Rapunzel.

There once lived a man and his wife who wished much to have a child.

At the back of their house was a garden full of choice green food, but there was a high wall, and all round it no one dared to come near it, for a witch owned it, and all were in fear that she might cast a spell on them.

In his fear, he said he would give the child to the witch.

When weeks had passed, a child was born to them, and the witch came and claimed it.

She called it Rapunzel and took it off with her.

Rapunzel grew to be a fair girl and had hair of great length.