Array The Brothers Grimm - Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm - A New English Version

The sleep was so deep that it spread through all the castle. The king and queen had just returned, and as soon as they walked into the hall they fell down where they stood. Their servants and attendants fell down too, like dominoes in a line, and so did the horses in the stables and the grooms looking after them, and the pigeons on the roof and the dogs in the courtyard. One dog was scratching himself: he fell asleep just like that, with his back paw behind his ear. The flies on the wall fell asleep. Down in the kitchen the very flames under the roasting ox fell asleep. A drop of fat that was about to fall from the sizzling carcass stayed where it was and didn’t move. The cook had been about to clout the kitchen boy; her hand fell still six inches from his ear, and his face remained screwed up waiting for the blow. Outside the wind stopped blowing; not a leaf stirred; the very ripples on the lake stayed as they were, as if made of glass.

In all the castle and its grounds the only thing that moved was a thorny hedge. Every year it grew a little more, and it slowly grew and grew till it reached the castle walls, and then it climbed and climbed year by year till it covered the entire castle. Nothing of the building could be seen, not even the flag on the roof.

Of course people wondered why this was happening, and where the king and queen and their beautiful daughter were. But there were a few people who’d been guests at the celebration of the princess’s birth, and who remembered the Wise Women and their gifts, and the curse of the one who’d been left out.

‘It’s all because the beautiful princess fell asleep,’ they said. ‘She must be in there still. Anyone who makes his way in and rescues her will marry her, you’ll see.’

Naturally, as time passed, various young men came — princes, soldiers, farmers’ sons, beggars — all kinds of them, trying to cut their way in through the hedge and find the door of the castle. They were sure that once they were inside they’d find the princess and wake her up with a kiss and break the spell.

But none of them managed it. The hedge was immensely thick, and the thorns so long and sharp that they dug into the clothes and the flesh of anyone trying to force his way through. All the young men got stuck. The more they struggled the deeper the thorns stabbed them, and they couldn’t go on and they couldn’t turn back and they couldn’t get free, and they all died helplessly in the hedge.

Many, many years later, after the story of the sleeping princess had been almost forgotten, a young prince came to that country. He was travelling incognito, and when he stayed at a humble inn not far from the castle, nobody knew who he was. One night he listened to an old man telling a story by the fire. It was a story about the great thorn hedge: inside the hedge there was a castle, and inside the castle was a tower, and inside the tower was a room where a lovely princess lay asleep.

‘And there’s many a brave young man has tried to get through the hedge,’ he said, ‘and not one of ’em made it. If you go up close you can see their skeletons, or bits of ’em that’s close enough to see. But no one’s seen the princess, and she’s lying there asleep to this day.’

‘I’ll try!’ said the young man. ‘My sword’s sharp enough to deal with thorns.’

‘Don’t do it, son!’ said the old man. ‘Once you get in that hedge, no power on earth will get you out. You’ll blunt your sword on a hundred thorns before you’ve gone a yard.’

‘No,’ declared the prince. ‘I’m going to do it, and that’s that. I’ll start in the morning.’

As it happened, the very next day was the day when the hundred years were up. Of course the prince didn’t know about that, but he set off with a heart full of courage. He came to the great thorn hedge and found it not at all as the old man had said, because as well as thorns the hedge was bearing pretty pink flowers, thousands upon thousands of them. For all that, though, he could see the skeletons of many other young men tangled deep in the briars. A sweet fragrance like apples filled the air, and as the prince came close to the hedge, the branches pulled apart by themselves to let him through, closing up behind him afterwards.

He came to the courtyard and saw the pigeons asleep, the dog still with its paw behind its neck, the flies asleep on the wall; he went down into the kitchen and saw the kitchen boy’s face still screwed up waiting for the clout from the cook’s hand, the flames standing quite still in the hearth, the drop of fat still about to drop from the roasting ox; he wandered through the rooms upstairs and saw servant after servant asleep in the middle of whatever they’d been doing, and the king and the queen asleep on the floor of the hall, exactly where they’d fallen.

Then he came to the tower. He climbed the dusty spiral staircase, he found the little door, he turned the rusty handle. The door opened at once. There on the bed lay the most beautiful princess the young man had ever seen, or could ever imagine.

He bent over her and kissed her lips, and Briar Rose opened her eyes and gave a little sigh of surprise and smiled at the young man, who fell in love with her at once.

They went downstairs together, watching everyone wake up all around them. The king and the queen woke up, and stared all around wide-eyed, because of the great hedge that had grown all over the castle. The horses woke up and shook themselves and neighed; the pigeons on the roof woke up, the dog in the courtyard carried on scratching, the cook boxed the kitchen boy’s ears so hard that he yelled, the drop of fat fell into the fire with a sizzle.

And in due course the prince was married to Briar Rose. The wedding was celebrated with great splendour, and they lived happily together to the end of their lives.

Tale type:ATU 410, ‘Sleeping Beauty’

Source:a story told to the Grimm brothers by Marie Hassenpflug

Similar stories:Giambattista Basile: ‘Sun, Moon and Talia’ ( The Great Fairy Tale Tradition , ed. Jack Zipes); Italo Calvino: ‘The Neapolitan Soldier’ ( Italian Folktales ); Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: ‘The Glass Coffin’ ( Children’s and Household Tales ); Charles Perrault: ‘The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood’ ( Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales )

Bruno Bettelheim, as might be expected, takes a thoroughly Freudian view of this tale. According to him, the sleep of a hundred years that follows the unexpected loss of blood ‘is nothing but a time of quiet growth and preparation, from which the person will awake mature, ready for sexual union’ ( The Uses of Enchantment , p. 232).

Furthermore, it’s no use trying to forestall what is bound to happen to a growing child. The king tries to destroy all the spindles in the kingdom ‘to prevent the princess’s fateful bleeding once she reaches puberty, at fifteen, as the evil fairy predicted. Whatever precautions a father takes, when the daughter is ripe for it, puberty will set in.’

Bettelheim’s interpretation is persuasive. But whether it’s the underlying symbolism that is responsible for the enduring popularity of this story or the wealth of delightful detail (the poor little kitchen boy, doomed to wait a hundred years for the clout the cook is lining up), it remains one of the most well loved of all the Grimms’ tales.

And the princess needs her hundred years and her hedge of thorns. At fifteen, she’s not grown up yet; or as Louis Jordan used to sing: ‘That chick’s too young to fry.’

One winter’s day, when the snowflakes were falling like feathers, a queen sat sewing at her window, which had a frame of the blackest ebony. She opened the window to look up at the sky, and as she did so she pricked her finger, and three drops of blood fell into the snow on the windowsill. The red and the white looked so beautiful together that she said to herself, ‘I wish I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood in the window frame.’