A Summary and Analysis of the Sleeping Beauty Fairy Tale
By Dr Oliver Tearle
‘Sleeping Beauty’ is, depending on which version of the story you read, called Sleeping Beauty, Talia, Little Briar Rose, Rosamond, or Aurora. This is because, like many other classic fairy tales, the tale of Sleeping Beauty exists in numerous versions, each of which is subtly – or, in some cases, quite strikingly – different from the others.
In the Italian version published in the Pentamerone , an Italian collection of fairy tales published in 1634, the heroine is named Talia. Charles Perrault, in his version published later in the century, calls her the Sleeping Beauty. The Brothers Grimm call her Dornröschen or ‘Little Briar Rose’, which is sometimes adapted as ‘Rosamond’. In the Disney film, the adult heroine is named Aurora. For the purposes of clarity here, we’re going to call her ‘Sleeping Beauty’ or ‘the princess’.
Nevertheless, the overall plot of these different versions of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ remains broadly the same, so it might not prove entirely impossible to offer a short plot summary.
‘Sleeping Beauty’: plot summary
A king is protective of his beautiful daughter, the princess. An evil fairy curses the princess, pronouncing that she will die when she is pricked by a spindle. However, a good fairy manages to intervene so that the prophecy is softened: the princess will not die if she is pricked with a spindle, but she will fall unconscious for a hundred years. The king bans flax and spinning equipment from his palace, so as to protect his daughter from such a fate.
However, around fifteen or sixteen years later, when the king and queen were away from the palace, the princess was exploring many rooms when she came upon an old woman with a spindle, who knew nothing about the spinning ban.
The princess asked if she could have a go, and the old woman let her – you can guess what happened next. The princess pricked her finger on the spindle, and dropped down unconscious. The old woman fetched help, and everyone tried to revive the princess, but to no avail. So there was nothing for it but to let the princess sleep for a hundred years.
The good fairy cast a spell that essentially protected the princess in the palace, with trees grown up around the building and all of the princess’s servants, attendants, and pets made to sleep for a hundred years too.
After the century had elapsed, another king (of a different royal family) sits on the throne. His son, the prince, heard tales of the palace where the princess slept, and became interested in what he’d find if he ventured there. So he cut a path through to the palace and at length came upon the sleeping form of the princess, falling to his knees at the sight of her beauty.
His timing couldn’t have been better. For at that moment, the hundred years came to an end and the spell was lifted; the princess woke, and seeing the prince she fell in love with him, and they talked a great deal (well, after all, the princess had missed out on a hundred years of news).
The whole of the palace then woke up – the servants and animals that had been put under the spell by the good fairy – and the prince and princess lived happily together, having two children, a daughter and a son whom they called Morning and Day respectively.
The prince returned to his parents, the King and Queen, but said nothing about the princess whom he had fallen in love with, because the Queen was part ogress and there were rumours that she had ‘ogreish’ tendencies – in other words, she wanted to eat people. The prince married Sleeping Beauty in private, without his parents’ knowledge.
A couple of years later, the King died and his son, the prince, became King, and brought his wife publicly to the court. But shortly after this he had to go to war with the emperor of a neighbouring country.
In his absence, his mother, the Queen Mother, sent away Sleeping Beauty to the country, and sent the cook to kill Morning, the young daughter of the King and Sleeping Beauty, and cook her so that the Queen Mother could eat her with a nice sauce. But the cook was a kind man, who instead slaughtered a lamb and dished it up for the Queen Mother to eat. (She couldn’t tell that it was Lamb and not Little Girl that she was eating.) Meanwhile, the cook sent away Morning to be kept safe by his wife in their chambers in the palace.
But the Queen Mother was soon hungry again, and wanted to have Day for her dinner this time. Once again, the cook sent away the little boy and served up a young kid or baby goat for the Queen Mother to feast upon instead. But the Queen Mother’s appetite was insatiable, and next she wanted to eat the Queen, Sleeping Beauty, herself. The cook despaired of being able to deceive the Queen Mother a third time, so he went up to Sleeping Beauty’s chambers with the intention of slitting her throat.
When the Queen saw him, she told him to kill her, so she might join her children, whom she feared dead. The cook told her that her children were alive and well and of how he had tricked the ogreish Queen Mother, and he took her to where his wife was looking after the Queen’s children. Then the cook dished up a hind for the Queen Mother to eat, thinking it was Sleeping Beauty.
But soon after this, the evil Queen Mother heard Sleeping Beauty and her children in the palace, where they were concealed, and she realised she had been tricked! She set about plotting her revenge, ordering that a huge tub be placed in the courtyard and filled with vipers and venomous toads and other dangerous creatures, so that Sleeping Beauty, Morning, Day, the cook, his wife, and his maid, might be thrown in there the next day, and suffer a horrible death.
Next day, the prisoners were brought out for the sentence to be carried out – but just as they were about to be thrown into the tub, the King returned, and, angry that her plan had been foiled, the ogreish Queen Mother threw herself in the tub and was killed by the snakes and toads. The King was reunited with Sleeping Beauty and his children, and they all lived happily ever after.
‘Sleeping Beauty’: analysis
This summary of ‘Sleeping Beauty’ is based on the tale that the Opies include in their The Classic Fairy Tales ; there are some minor differences between the various versions of the tale, which has been told by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, among others.
Indeed, the only reason the Brothers Grimm didn’t throw out ‘Sleeping Beauty’ from their catalogue of fairy tales for being too French was the tale’s suggestive affinities with the myth of Brynhild in the Völsunga saga, which was the inspiration for Wagner’s Ring Cycle among other things. (Brynhild was imprisoned in a remote castle behind a wall of shields and doomed to sleep there in a ring of flames until a man comes along, and rescues and marries her.)
It was Charles Perrault, however, who first made the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty famous, when he included it in his landmark 1697 collection of fairy stories. Yet as we remarked at the beginning of our summary and analysis of this, one of the most famous of all fairy tales, the basic story predates Perrault, and a similar version can be found in the 1630 Pentamerone .
Yet even by this stage, the story of Sleeping Beauty was a few centuries old: one of the stories in the anonymous fourteenth-century prose romance Perceforest features a princess named Zellandine who, like Sleeping Beauty after her, is cursed to end up being pricked by a spindle, an accident which prompts her to fall asleep until – you’ve guessed it – a dashing prince, in this case a chap named Troylus, arrives to wake her up. (Unfortunately, this important medieval collection of tales remains criminally out of print and in need of a good translation/edition: Oxford University Press or Penguin, please commission one!)
‘Sleeping Beauty’ features many of the common tropes of classic fairy tales: the beautiful princess, the evil stepmother figure (the evil Queen Mother), the handsome prince, the good fairy, and the patterning of three (the Queen Mother’s planned meals of Morning, Day, and Sleeping Beauty respectively).
Throw in a palace and a bit of suspended animation, not to mention a cunning servant (that enterprising and kindly cook) and you have all of the ingredients of a classic.
Continue to explore the world of fairy tales with these classic Victorian fairy stories , our history of the ‘Puss in Boots’ fairy tale , our discussion of the Bluebeard myth , and our analysis of the ‘Hansel and Gretel’ fairy tale .
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8 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of the Sleeping Beauty Fairy Tale”
Reblogged this on Greek Canadian Literature .
There was me thinking that the story ended when the prince and princess got married. This is marvellous and, indeed, very Wagnerian with the Queen Mother hurling herself to a horrible death, for no real reason, actually. This has cheered up my afternoon no end!
I’m with you. I didn’t realise that at all. I love the Queen Mother’s ‘Ogreish’ tendencies. Many of us have a MIL like that!
I’m glad I’m not the only one! The story is actually much better with the ogre Queen Mother… I can certainly relate!
I think you will find that the story ended once they had married, immediately after the wedding in fact. Who would call their children Morning and Day? Someone has made it up.
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Reblogged this on The Slavic Polytheist and commented: Another take on history of Sleeping Beauty
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Just found and love this series about fairy tales! (which I found by looking for the source of Alladin being Chinese.) I own the Opies’ book and it’s indeed lovely. The post about Rumplestildkin was especially fascinating and makes sense in mythic terms– I never saw an analysis we suggests this, but it makes sense. One of the best discussions of fairy tales I have read is the first chapter in Rodger Sale’s book “Fairy tales and after” which features a wonderful chapter on fairy tales. (He analyses Snow White from the angle of the rivalry between an aging and a young, flowering girl displacing her, and suggests that it’s because beauty and youth was the power source for women in those times.) I also read Bruno Bettelheim but at this point I think he’s full of it! I believe that fairy tales are best analyzed in terms of their historical and social context and origins.
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Figuring “Sleeping Beauty”: Metamorphosis of a Literary and Cultural Trope in European Fairy Tales and Medicine, c. 1350-1700
Sarnyai,, Lili (2016) Figuring “Sleeping Beauty”: Metamorphosis of a Literary and Cultural Trope in European Fairy Tales and Medicine, c. 1350-1700. Doctoral thesis, Birkbeck, University of London.
This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to a recurrent cultural trope: the figure of the sleeping beauty. Sleeping beauties are young women—paradigms of femininity, paragons of virtue and physical perfection—who lose consciousness and become comatose and catatonic, for prolonged periods. In this unnatural state, these female bodies remain intact: materially incorrupt, aesthetically unblemished. Thus can the body of the sleeping beauty be defined as an enigma and a paradox: a nexus of competing and unanswered questions, uniquely worthy of investigation. This thesis examines the metamorphoses of the figure of the sleeping beauty in literature and medicine between c.1350 and 1700 in order to interrogate the enduring aesthetic and epistemological fascination that she exercises in different contexts: her potency to entrance, her capacity to charm, in both literary and philosophical realms. The widespread presence of the sleeping beauty in literature and art, as well as in the broader social sphere, over the centuries, indicates the figure’s important and ongoing cultural role. Central to this role is the figure’s dual nature and functionality. On the one hand, conceptualized as allegories, sleeping beauties act as receptacles for a complex matrix of patriarchal fears, desires and beliefs about the female body in general, and the virgin and maternal bodies in particular. On the other hand, understood as material or bodily entities, sleeping beauties make these same ideological questions incarnate. Sleeping beauties are, therefore, signs, treated as material bodies, a tension which this thesis explores. As such, they are prime subjects for cross-disciplinary correlational study and historicist analysis: vehicles for comparison and dialogue between literature, medicine, and religion on the issues of power and passivity, sexuality and gender difference, mortality and beauty, nature and the unnatural or supernatural. Sleeping beauties negotiate the boundaries of human desire for, and capacity for belief in, miracles and wonders.
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‘Sleeping Beauty’: plot summary. A king is protective of his beautiful daughter, the princess. An evil fairy curses the princess, pronouncing that she will die when she is pricked by a spindle.
In this thesis I analyze how the tale evolves from the original oral tale to the literary story, and how various perspectives of culture and authors, with particular audiences in mind, adapt their versions.
Sleeping Beauty. meets the structural and cultural expectations of the Grimms’ tale are examined. INDEX WORDS: Fairytale, Grimm Brothers, Sleeping Beauty, Little Briar-Rose, Dornröschen, Märchen, Disney, Children’s literature, Holocaust literature, Jane Yolen
This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to a recurrent cultural trope: the figure of the sleeping beauty. Sleeping beauties are young women͂paradigms of femininity, paragons of virtue and physical perfection͂who lose consciousness and become comatose and catatonic, for prolonged periods.
The story of Sleeping Beauty, specifically the Disney version, has become a tale as old as time, known by most of the old and new generations and recognized as one of the old Disney classics. But what makes this specific feature different from the works of the golden age?
Analysis. Charles Perrault's "The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood" presents a captivating yet perplexing tale, layered with symbolism and themes, making it open to various interpretations. The central conflict in the story revolves around the concept of fate versus free will.
Analysis. Themes. Symbols. Setting. FAQs. Plot Summary. In a faraway kingdom, a king and his queen are delighted at the birth of their daughter, whom they have had after years of prayers, vows, and pilgrimages.
the Grimm tales, I read the German versions of the fairy tales of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Hansel and Gretel. In my honors project on these stories, I deduced that there is an emphasis on family structures and society's yearning for social mobility.
Sleeping Beauty: Dreaming and Awake. In May 1999, I agreed to take part in a panel discussion on the role OF fairy tales in modern literature at Wiscon 23, a convention for feminism in speculative fiction held in Madison, Wisconsin.
This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to a recurrent cultural trope: the figure of the sleeping beauty. Sleeping beauties are young women—paradigms of femininity, paragons of virtue and physical perfection—who lose consciousness and become comatose and catatonic, for prolonged periods.