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A childless couple who wanted a child lived next to a walled garden which belonged to an enchantress. The wife, at long last pregnant, notices some rapunzel planted in the garden and longs after it to the point of death. Her husband goes to gather some for her, and encounters the enchantress, Dame Gothel, who accuses him of thievery. He asks for mercy, and the enchantress gives him some rapunzel to take home on the condition that the child his wife is pregnant with be surrendered to her at birth. He agrees; the child is born; the enchantress appears, names the child Rapunzel, and takes her away. When Rapunzel reaches her twelfth year, the enchantress shuts her away into a tower in the middle of the wood. When she goes to visit each day with Rapunzel, the enchantress bids Rapunzel let down her long plaited gold hair, and then climbs up it into the tower.
One day a King's son hears Rapunzel singing from the tower, looks for an entrance, and leaves, finding no way in. He often returns to listen to her sing, and one day sees the enchantress visit, learning thusly how to gain access to Rapunzel. He bids Rapunzel let her hair down, and he climbs up, makes her acquaintance, and asks her to marry him. She agrees.
Together they plan a way to get her out of the tower: he will come each night, avoiding the enchantress, who visits in daylight: each night he will bring silk, which Rapunzel will gradually weave into a ladder.
The enchantress learns of the King's son's visits when Rapunzel asks why it is easier for her to draw him up. Dame Gothel cuts off Rapunzel's braided hair and sets her in a desert.
When the King's son calls that night, the enchantress lets the braids down, and he climbs up. She tells him he will never see Rapunzel again. He leaps in despair from the tower and is blinded by the thorns below.
He wanders about for some years before he hears Rapunzel's voice, and finds her with twins to which she has given birth. Her tears restore his sight, and he leads her to his kingdom, where they lived contentedly for some years.
The following interpretations, as with other readings in mythology and scripture are widely, though not universally accepted.
Rapunzel is a traditional fairy tale of the Brothers Grimm, an allegory of a young girl's sexual awakening that is often told to children, in spite of its barely covert eroticism.
Like many fairy tales of village and forest, the tale of Rapunzel is essentially a village tale, for it is set in motion when a wife, pregnant with a long desired child, gazed from her chamber window into the high walled garden of the sorceress next door, where a bed of rapunzel (Valerianella locusta) was flourishing among the wise herb-woman's finest flowers and herbs. The wife's husband was convinced by her piteous complaints to scale the wall and garner some rapunzel, but a taste of salad only whetted her craving, and on his second nighttime raid, the husband was confronted by the crone herself. (The "fairy" in the 1812 version was a "sorceress" in the 1857 telling.)
Eating otherworldly food always puts you in the otherworldly power (compare Persephone and the pomegranate seeds, the tale of Circe, and many Celtic legends), and in exchange for as much of the rapunzel as his wife demanded, the husband found himself bound to deliver up the child, when it came into the world. When the wife came to term, the witch duly appeared and took away the girl-child, whom she named Rapunzel.
Rapunzel grew into a beautiful child, the most beautiful girl in this particular tale, and was raised in luxurious but protected isolation, cloistered in the manner of aristocratic females in medieval and early modern Europe; peasant girls and tradesmen's daughters had more independence. The sorceress was not truly wicked, so much as blindly old-fashioned. She believed, as many still do, that the virtues of virginity could be combined with utterly ignorant innocence. (Compare Prospero and his daughter Miranda in Shakespeare's The Tempest.) When Rapunzel came to be twelve, (and so at the moment of her first flows of puberty) she was locked at the top of a lonely tower deep in the forest, which had neither stairs nor door. Instead, when the herbal sorceress wished to see her, she stood below in the glade and called:
Down braid, up witch! she climbed the golden braid of hair.
In a year or two, a Prince was riding in the forest and heard an enchanting song. Drawn by the sound he approached a lonely tower and beheld Rapunzel in her high window, combing her tresses and singing like a melusine. As he watched unseen, the sorceress arrived and called:
Down braid, up witch! but seeing the chaste tower was breached by so lovely a scaling ladder, the Prince resolved to try his luck. The next twilight it was he at the base of the tower, calling:
Down hair, up Prince! Rapunzel's reaction at seeing a man was not unlike Miranda's: "Oh brave new world! that has such people in it!" The 1812 edition of Grimm's tales reports that Rapunzel and the prince lived a while in joy and pleasure, an element that was excised from the 1857 version. Nevertheless, before very many further visits Rapunzel conceived a plan to escape by a silken ladder that she would weave, if the prince would only bring a skein of silk at every visit. Alas, just before the silken ladder was ready, Rapunzel naïvely let the game away, by blurting to the sorceress, "How very slow you are at climing my braid! The King's son is up in a flash!"
In cultures where women cut their hair when they marry, long hair was an emblem of virginity. In the myth of Lady Godiva, Godivas's long hair, is an emblem of her chastity. Thus the sorceress grabbed a pair of shears and cut Rapunzel's tresses. Leaving Rapunzel shamefully cropped, she braided the hair and waited. At evening, the Prince called from below:
This time, the braid was attached to a window hook, and when the Prince was almost at the window ledge, the sorceress let him fall into a thorn bush that scratched him blind.
While the Prince wandered blinded in the wilderness, Rapunzel bore beautiful twins. After many heartaches, she recognized the Prince as a dusty roadworn tramp. Her tears of joy and love restored his sight.
The story of Rapunzel is an example of Aarne and Thompson's (see link) type 310 The Maiden in the Tower. It contains many fairy tale fragmentary themes: the Forbidden Fruit, the Womanly Wiles, a Hard Bargain, the Changeling Child, Enchanting Singing, the Unseen Watcher, the Princely Rescue, and Healing Tears.
