Briar Rose “Sleeping Beauty”

Sleeping Beauty is a classic fairy tale which involves a beautiful princess, enchantment and a handsome prince. It is the first in the set published in 1697 by Charles Perrault, Contes de ma Mère l’Oye (“Tales of Mother Goose”).

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, fairies invited as godmothers offered gifts, such as beauty, wit, and musical talent. However, as her gift a wicked fairy who had been overlooked placed the princess under an enchantment, saying that, on reaching adulthood, she would prick her finger on the spindle of the Spinning Wheel of Death and die. However, one last fairy has yet to give her gift. 0he partially reverses the wicked fairy’s curse, proclaiming that the princess will instead fall into a deep sleep.

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, who was really the wicked fairy in Disguise, 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 they all lived happily ever after.

Part two

Secretly wed by the reawakened… 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 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 then 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.