Rapunzel

"Rapunzel" is a German fairy tale in

the collection assembled by the Brothers Grimm,
and first published in 1812 as part of Children's
and Household Tales.The Grimm Brothers' story is
an adaptation of the fairy tale Rapunzel by
Friedrich Schulz published in 1790. The Schulz
version is based on Persinette by Charlotte-Rose de
Caumont de La Force originally published in 1698.
Its plot has been used and parodied in various
media and its best known line ("Rapunzel,
Rapunzel, let down your hair") is an idiom of
popular culture. In volume I of the 1812
annotations (Anhang), it is listed as coming from Friedrich Schulz Kleine Romane, Book 5,
pp. 269288, published in Leipzig 1790.
In the AarneThompson classification system for folktales it is type 310, "The
Maiden in The Tower".
Andrew Lang included it in The Red Fairy Book. Other versions of the tale also
appear in A Book of Witches by Ruth Manning-Sanders and in Paul O. Zelinsky's 1997
Caldecott Medal-winning picture book, Rapunzel and the Disney movie Tangled.
Rapunzel's story has striking similarities to the 10th-century AD Persian tale of
Rudba, included in the epic poem Shahnameh by Ferdowsi. Rudba offers to let down her
hair from her tower so that her lover Zl can climb up to her. Some elements of the fairy tale
might also have originally been based upon the tale of Saint Barbara, who was said to have
been locked in a tower by her father.
The seemingly uneven bargain with which "Rapunzel" opens is a common trope
in fairy tales which is replicated in "Jack and the Beanstalk", Jack trades a cow for beans, and
in "Beauty and the Beast", Belle comes to the Beast in return for a rose. Folkloric beliefs often
regarded it as quite dangerous to deny a pregnant woman any food she craved. Family
members would often go to great lengths to secure such cravings. Such desires for lettuce and
like vegetables may indicate a need on her part for vitamins. From a scientific interpretation
the enchantress Dame Gothel is rather obviously a witch or medicine woman, who had
mastered the use and production of a plant or drug capable of saving Rapunzel's mother from

complications of pregnancy. Ergotics, opioids, or cannabis can be considered candidates in the

original Persian or subsequent versions of the tale, by analogy to the problem of Delphos'
Oracle.
An influence on Grimm's Rapunzel was Petrosinella or Parsley, written by
Giambattista Basile in his collection of fairy tales in 1634, Lo cunto de li cunti (The Story of
Stories), or Pentamerone. This tells a similar tale of a pregnant woman desiring some parsley
from the garden of an ogress, getting caught, and having to promise the ogress her baby. The
encounters between the prince and the maiden in the tower are described in quite bawdy
language. A similar story was published in France by Mademoiselle de la Force, called
"Persinette". As Rapunzel did in the first edition of the Brothers Grimm, Persinette becomes
pregnant during the course of the prince's visits.