Sleeping Beauty
European fairy tale
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Key Takeaways
- A good fairy, knowing the princess would be frightened if alone when she wakes, uses her wand to put every living person and animal in the palace and forest asleep, to awaken when the princess does.
- The version collected and printed by the Brothers Grimm was one orally transmitted from the Perrault version, while including own attributes like the thorny rose hedge and the curse.
- The fairy tale has been adapted countless times throughout history and retold by modern storytellers across various media.
"Sleeping Beauty" (French: La Belle au bois dormant, or The Beauty Sleeping in the Wood; German: Dornröschen, or Little Briar Rose, Italian: La Bella Addormentata), also titled in English as The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods, is a fairy tale about a princess cursed by an evil fairy to sleep for a hundred years before being awakened by a handsome prince. A good fairy, knowing the princess would be frightened if alone when she wakes, uses her wand to put every living person and animal in the palace and forest asleep, to awaken when the princess does.
Though a precursor narrative appears in the anonymous romance Perceforest (written in French between 1330 and 1344) and in the Catalan poem Frayre de Joy e Sor de Paser, scholars generally regard "Sun, Moon, and Talia" by Italian author Giambattista Basile as the first fully developed literary version of the story, published posthumously in 1634–36 in the Pentamerone. This was later adapted in French by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697. The version collected and printed by the Brothers Grimm was one orally transmitted from the Perrault version, while including own attributes like the thorny rose hedge and the curse.
The Aarne-Thompson classification system for fairy tales lists "Sleeping Beauty" as a Type 410: it includes a princess who is magically forced into sleep and later woken, reversing the magic. The fairy tale has been adapted countless times throughout history and retold by modern storytellers across various media.
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