Folklore and Fairy Tales: Sleeping Beauty
“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.” — Neil Gaiman
Most people love stories. Why? Children, and also adults, use stories to interpret the events of our daily lives. Classic stories, like comic books, give us ways to see ourselves as heroes, tricksters, and ways to recognize villains. Stories give us ways to interpret the foes and obstacles we encounter and to defeat them first in story, which gives us some ideas on how to defeat those dragons, so that we can go out with the strength to take them on them in reality.
There are various genres of folktales. Folktales are stories that people told each other over the fire, late at night, or before their children went to sleep. Animal folktales usually contain an animal or animals that talk. They might also show other human-like traits, like living in a village, with a house etc. like the Three Little Pigs, or the bear family in Goldilocks.
“Pourquoi Stories” are origin stories, which explain why things are the way they are, like why dogs live with humans, or why tigers have stripes, or why snakes have no legs. “Pourquoi” means “why” in French. Fables are short stories, usually with animals, which imparts a moral lesson. Aesop’s fables are probably the most well-known collection of these tales like the tortoise and the hare, the boy who cried wolf, and the goose that laid the golden eggs.
Legends are stories that come down to us from history, sometimes believed by people, but not proven. Some of them are obviously untrue, like the legends of King Arthur and his knights of the round table.
Myths are traditional stories, often about the early history of a group of people, or a story that explains a natural or social phenomenon, often involving supernatural beings and events, like Greek mythology with its stories of the titans, the gods of Olympus, and heroic figures like Hercules, Jason, Achilles, and Odysseus, to name just a few.
Fairy tales are children stories that contain magic and magical beings like fairies, trolls, and ogres, for example.
Fairy tales often deal with themes like rites of passage, tricksters, heroes, and even trickster heroes. There is often a difference between the oral stories, how they were originally transmitted, and the written texts. Often the same kinds of stories are told slightly differently at different times and places across the world.
A good example is the story of Sleeping Beauty.
The full title of the French story is “The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood.” It goes like this:
There once was a king and queen who desperately wanted to have a baby. They tried and tried without success. The couple went on pilgrimages and on health cures, and finally they had a cute little baby girl. The happy couple invited seven fairies to the child’s christening. Afterwards everyone sat down for a feast. Each fairy received a gift of golden cutlery which they could take with them after the meal. While everybody was enjoying the frivolities, a nasty old fairy came through the door and interrupted the festivities. She was mad that the royals did not invite her. However, it was an honest mistake, because they thought she was already dead for a long time. In some versions she is cursed. They offer her the same food as the other fairies, but, since they only budgeted for seven fairies, she does not receive a gift of golden cutlery. She sulks through the meal.
After the meal, each of the fairies gets a chance to bestow a gift on the little girl. One by one, they approach and bless her. One gave her the gift of beauty, another gave her the gift of wit, which, according to the French definition, is intelligence combined with humor, the ability to make people laugh. Another bestows her with grace; she gets the ability to dance, to sing, and to play music. The seventh fairy, who was smart and wise, had overheard the grumblings of the old fairy, so she hid behind a curtain to see what would happen.
The old fairy approached the cradle and said, “I will give you a gift — as nice as the one that was given to me. You will be beautiful, sing, dance, and play the music — for a time. But in your sixteenth year, you will prick your finger on the spindle of a spinning wheel, and you will die!” Then she cackled and left.
Shocked, the seventh fairy stepped from behind the curtain and said:
“I cannot undo this curse. But! I can soften it. When she reaches sixteen years of age, she will prick her finger on a spinning wheel, but she will not die. No, she will fall into a deep sleep for a hundred years — and at the end of a hundred years, she will wake up, and there will be a prince beside her, the son of a king. Do not fear.”
Horrified by the prophecy, the king and queen had every spinning wheel in the kingdom destroyed. All the predictions came true. The girl grew up to be beautiful, she became an accomplished dancer, and she sang and played music. Eventually she turned sixteen. On that fateful day, she explored a part of the castle she had never been, and here, lo and behold, she found a woman using a spinning wheel that had not been destroyed. Curious and impressed by the skill of the spinster, she asked if she could have a go, and unsurprisingly, she pricked her finger on a spindle and fell asleep.
The King and Queen send a dwarf to fetch the fairy, who rushed to the castle in her coach that is pulled by dragons. At the castle, she used her wand to put everyone, the cooks and undercooks, the butler and the governess, all the servants, asleep. The royals order that the place must be shut up. Then the fairy raises high vines and hedges, covered with brambles and ferns, around the castle. In another version the castle is covered with roses and thorns. It became so thick that people could no longer see the castle from the outside.
A hundred years passes.
Then, one day, a prince rides by. He makes out the turrets and spires of the castle and says:
“Oh, I have never noticed that castle before. What is there?”
Some peasants tell him that an ogre lives there. Others say that witches and sorcerers meet there. However, an old, wise man comes over, and he says:
“I have heard that there is a princess sleeping in that castle, waiting a hundred years for a prince to come and rescue her.”
The son of the king says:
“Well I am a prince — perhaps it is me!”
He uses his sword to cut through the brambles. Then he searches the castle for the princess. He finally finds her bedchamber, goes over and knees. At that moment, her eyes open and she sits up.
She says: “Oh, so you are the prince? You have waited a long time to come, eh?” It is love at first sight between these two. The cooks, undercooks, butlers, all the servants who had been sleeping, all wake up. The two lovebirds, the son of the king and the princess, marry each other that very day. Couples don’t waste any time in fairy tales. When you know, you know.
In this version of the story, the French version, it is not the prince that wakes her up. The princess wakes up on her own and at the right time, and finds her prince. This reflects the wish of many parents. Most parents do not wish that some stranger will rescue their daughter, but that her eyes will be opened at the right time, and that she will find the person she is meant to be with.
The beauty of many folktales is that their meaning changes as we get older. Some of these great stories are so rich, so layered, so profound, that they give us meaning throughout our lives. You will also find that many of the stories that you loved as a child, have a darker, more adult version that can give you a whole different perspective on them. For example, my mother read me the tales of 1001 Arabian Nights, a collection of folktales from the Islamic world. Yet, I only recently learned that she read me the version for children. The original version contains many erotic stories of an adult nature that I can now, as an adult, appreciate much more.
In many versions of Sleeping Beauty, the story ends with the marriage of the princess and the prince, but in some versions, the story continues. These versions go something like this:
The prince and princess marry in secret because, although the prince’s father, the king is a human, his mother is an ogress who would not like the princess. I bet there are plenty of brides who view their new mother-in-law as an ogress. Perhaps this tale plays on those fears. I guess that also makes the prince a half-breed, half human and half ogre. Since the king married an ogress, it seems that inter-species marriages were common or at least acceptable in fairy land. On the other hand, since the queen seems to be a horrible woman, it might not be a happy union.
Whenever the prince went to visit his wife, he gave his parents some excuse like he would tell them he was visiting a woodcutter or a friend. Then he would leave and spend some time with his wife. He carried on with this façade for years. Eventually, the young couple had two children, a little girl that they named Aurora, which means morning, and a son called Day.
One day, the king died. The prince was crowned as the new king. He felt that he now had enough power to protect his wife and his children, so he brought them with him to come and live in the main castle. It is sad that the king died without ever having met his grand-children.
However, the royal couple was very happy to live together in the open. Things went well until, one day, a war broke out. The young king had to leave to lead his troops into battle, leaving his wife and children at home with the former queen, the ogress. The ogress did not like children, except to eat them. Taking a chance, she ordered the cook to catch Aurora and bring the girl so that she, the Ogress can eat her for breakfast. Horrified, the cook hid the girl and prepared a lamb in her place. He served the lamb with a delicious sauce to the ogress, who devoured it.
I don’t understand why the cook did not go to the queen and tell her everything. Surely the queen has the power to command the castle guard to arrest the ogress, but I digress.
The next day, the ogress ordered the boy, Day, for dinner. The cook hid the boy too and served another lamb, which the ogress stuffed her face with. Next, the ogress demanded to eat the queen. Surely this is treason and the queen should have had her arrested. However, according to the story, the cook warned the queen, hid her, and served the ogress a deer in place of the beautiful queen.
The cook thought that was the end of it, that he’d gotten away with it, until one day, the ogress stomped around and overheard the boy, Day, crying through the wall where the cook had hidden them.
Furious, the ogress ordered that the guards bring the cook, the queen, and the children to her. Perhaps this shows that the palace guards were still loyal to her. How they expected to explain this to the king when he returns, is not clear. Heads would definitely roll. In the courtyard, the ogress filled a pot with frogs, toads, snakes, scorpions, poisonous spiders, and all kinds of horrible things. Just as she was about to throw the queen and her siblings into this witch’s brew, the king rode into the courtyard.
He took one look at the scene and demanded:
“What is happening?”
The ogress, seeing that she would now not get away with her scheme, got hopping mad and starting jumping up and down with anger, so angry that she jumped into the pot. The snakes, spiders and scorpions bit, stung, and devoured her. That was the end of the ogress.
The king and queen lived happily ever after then, with their two children, Aurora and Day.
The fate of the ogress in this story is an old trope: She suffers the selfsame fate that she had planned for others. This motif occurs in a long line of stories throughout history.
In the book of Esther in the Bible, an ambitious and evil man called Haman orders the construction of a platform from which he plans to hang the good man, the Jew Mordecai. However, Mordecai finds out about it, he informs his cousin, Queen Esther, who tells the king about the plot. The king confronts Haman, and in the end, Haman is hung in the very noose he intended for Mordecai. The bard of Avon, Shakespeare, the greatest playwright who ever lived, included this motif in Act 3 scene 4 of his enigmatic play Hamlet, where a character is “hoist by his own petard,” or gets blown up by his own container of gunpowder.
Another example of this is when Hansel and Gretel push the witch into the oven that she was heating for them. Perhaps this motif serves as a warning to those with evil intensions that they should stop before they become the victim of their own schemes.
“Every man’s life is a fairy tale written by God’s fingers.” — Hans Christian Andersen
It is useful to read, listen to and watch different versions of these and other stories, because they give us different roles for the heroes and the heroines and they have different lessons to teach us. In the first part of Sleeping Beauty, the princess and the prince are mostly passive, actors in a script written and their fates decided for them by the fairies. Perhaps the most active and most important protagonist of the first part is the seventh fairy, who, with her wisdom and foresight and magic, saves the life of the princess.
The parents are also active, looking for different ways to become pregnant. The king, queen and the fairies are the ones who act and make decisions. However, the prince is also active, refusing to be discouraged by the sinister stories about the castle, then cutting his way through the barrier of plants, and finally searching for the sleeping princess, to ultimately be rewarded with a wife.
The prince and princess grow up, have children of their own, and model the love that they saw in the princess’s parents. The prince eventually goes off to defend his wife and children by battling against enemies in the war, while the princess has to deal with enemies at home. However, here I think the story can be improved by giving the princess a more active role. She and her children are saved by the cook, whereas a story is usually better if the actions of the protagonist lead to him or her overcoming their obstacles, hardship and enemies.
“Life itself is the most wonderful fairy tale.” — Hans Christian Andersen
The story of Sleeping Beauty portrays a repeating cycle of nurturing, protecting, and eventually letting go of the ones we love. The names of the children, Aurora, which means Morning and
Day symbolically makes us think of the future, since they represent the next generation.
The second part of “Sleeping Beauty” probably represents the challenges that a young bride might face when her mother-in-law does not like her. It is also a reminder that getting married does not automatically mean that you will live happily ever after. There are still trolls, ogres, and other monsters to confront. I would have preferred if the queen took a more active role to save her children. I don’t understand why the palace guards obeyed the old queen and not the new one. They will surely pay for this, now that the king is back.
The prince who becomes the king is definitely an active man, first finding his wife, then keeping her hidden from his parents, and then going off to war to protect his wife, his children, and his kingdom. I would suggest that his human side is dominant over his ogre side.
It is sad that the princess’s parents were not there to see her mature into a woman, that the prince’s father never met his grandchildren, and that we do not know what happened to the good fairy that saved the day. The princess’s parents had to trust that the fairy’s magic would work. It must have been hard for them to give up their daughter, but they did not have much of a choice. Likewise, in real life, parents have to raise their children as good as they can, but eventually they have to let them go and hope for the best.
These stories were written for children whose brains have not been fully formed, so perhaps it is not necessary for the tale to be fully integrated, to be completely logical, or to be neatly wrapped up. In the end, it was just lucky that the prince returned when he did. Otherwise it would have been a tragedy, not a fairy tale.
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Bibliography
Harvey, H.B. (2017). A Children’s Guide to Folklore and Wonder Tales. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.