Everyone learns a valuable lesson – one supposes.Īs with another Grimm fairy story, ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, which we’ve analysed and discussed here, Rapunzel’s story has striking similarities to other tales from around the world: in the 10th-century Persian tale of Rudāba, included in Ferdowsi’s epic poem Shahnameh by Ferdowsi, Rudāba is in a tower and offers to let down her hair so her lover Zāl can climb up to her. The only cure for Rapunzel and her beau is contrition and repentance, which comes in the form of her tears, which then restore his sight to him. It appears to have been considered unlucky to deny a pregnant woman any food that she craved, so if the mother of Rapunzel is already pregnant when she develops her taste for the forbidden rampion, one can understand the husband’s readiness to commit burglary in order to secure some of the food for his wife.Įveryone ends up punished for their lust: not just Rapunzel’s mother and father, but Rapunzel herself (who loses her beautiful hair and finds herself a single mother with twins to look after in a barren wasteland) and the prince (whose eyes had lusted after Rapunzel, so he ends up losing them for his trouble Sigmund Freud would no doubt say that this blinding, like Rochester’s in Jane Eyre, is a form of symbolic castration). It is this inability to control her desires that leads to her husband agreeing to forfeit their as-yet-unborn child to an evil witch. (In the original version, the witch discovers Rapunzel’s nightly trysts with the prince when she notices that Rapunzel has fallen pregnant.)Įven if we buy the Grimms’ reference to Rapunzel as the prince’s ‘wife’ in the bowdlerised version, and assume that they got married while she was still imprisoned in the tower, it probably wasn’t very wise to fall pregnant while trapped in a tower.įor another, the mother’s craving for rampion (or ‘rapunzel’) in the witch’s garden is ripe with sexual symbolism, suggesting a woman who is unable to control her lustful desires: her ‘appetite’ for the stuff leads her to nag her husband into agreeing to trespass into the forbidden garden, in a none-too-subtle echo of the Adam and Eve story (it’s all there: the garden, the man and woman, the forbidden zone, the inexplicable hankering for fresh produce).

Yet the version we’ve summarised above is very much the child-friendly version which the Brothers Grimm published in 1857, rather than the original from 1812, although even the sanitised version contains signs of the more adult content contained in the original tale.

The story of ‘Rapunzel’ is among the most famous fairy tales compiled by the Brothers Grimm. He takes Rapunzel and their children to his kingdom, where they proceeded to live happily ever after, as is often the way with these things. She weeps to see her lover without eyes, but when her tears fall on his face, his sight is magically restored.

Rapunzel sun sketch