Rapunzel is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. A childless couple craves lettuce from a witch’s garden, and in exchange for it, the witch demands their child. The girl, named Rapunzel, is locked in a tower and falls in love with a prince who is blinded by the witch. The story explores themes of pregnancy, abandonment, and violence.
Rapunzel is the character and title of a story collected by the Brothers Grimm for their 1812 work Children’s and Household Tales. It is a classic fairy tale of what is believed to be German in origin, although there are other stories of European people who bear some resemblance to Rapunzel. Like many fairy tales, it features a lot of emotion and a few cautionary notes.
The basic plot of this story is that a childless couple is eventually blessed by their wife becoming pregnant. During pregnancy the wife craves the lettuce (lettuce, cabbage, or sometimes a Rapunzel plant) that grows in the neighbor’s garden. Unfortunately the neighbor is a witch who catches her husband on his night run to get this food for his wife, and she agrees to let him go only if she promises to deliver her child after he is born.
The child is entrusted to the witch who calls the girl Rapunzel. When the girl is in her early teens, the witch becomes incredibly jealous of her attentions and locks her up in a tower. The only way the witch can access this tower is to ask Rapunzel to lower her thick golden hair to use as a ladder.
Enter the prince, who hears the witch, and calls for Rapunzel to let her hair down. The two fall in love. The witch unfortunately discovers this and cuts off Rapunzel’s hair, setting a trap for the prince. Believing that she is joining his beautiful love, the prince instead is dismayed by the witch, and leaps down from the high tower, blinding himself on the brambles below.
In some versions, Rapunzel has been exiled to the forest and has two children. She eventually she is able to find her prince of hers and save him. Her kiss or sometimes her tears heal him completely and the two live happily together in the prince’s kingdom.
There are several elements to interpret in this fairy tale. Cravings for pregnancy can be seen as a potentially dangerous thing, although there is some suggestion that German folk medicine and wisdom helped make sure pregnant women got everything they wanted. There’s also the classic element of the prince needing to win over his fair lady, but here’s an interesting twist. It is Rapunzel who saves the prince, and not the other way around.
People are often surprised by how vicious, violent, and explicit many fairy tales are, and this one is no exception. Rapunzel conceives a child out of wedlock and the prince’s fate is truly horrible. There is some anxiety expressed in the way he monitors adolescents and also a common theme of having to abandon children, which may be related to high infant mortality rates. Polished versions of the story are often available in children’s books, but reading the original version, at least as presented by the Grimms, can really make you aware of the complexity of fairy tales from long ago.
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