Rapunzel

6-8 min read
16 pages

Rapunzel, the Brothers Grimm tale to read aloud. A tower with no stairs and no door, and a plait of hair long enough to climb.

Next to a certain house there was a garden with a high wall, and in the garden grew rampion — a green thing like lettuce, which the woman in the house could see from her window and wanted so badly that she could not eat anything else.

The garden belonged to an enchantress, and everyone in that street knew it. But the woman would not stop asking, and so one evening her husband went over the wall.

He went over twice. The second time the enchantress was standing among the beds waiting for him. «Take it,» she said. «Take as much as you like. But the child your wife is expecting comes to me when it is born.» He was so frightened that he agreed.

The child was a girl, and the enchantress called her Rapunzel, which is the name of that green plant, and took her away the day she was born.

When Rapunzel was twelve the enchantress shut her in a tower in the middle of a wood. The tower had one room at the top and one window, and no stairs and no door at all.

When she wanted to come up she stood at the bottom and called, «Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.» And Rapunzel's hair was long and the colour of spun gold, and she would wind it round the window hook and let it fall, and the enchantress would climb it.

Rapunzel sang, because there was nothing else to do in a room at the top of a tower. She had a very good voice and she had had years to practise it.

A king's son riding through the wood stopped his horse and listened, and came back the next day, and the day after that. He could find no way in, and he did not dare call out.

Then one evening, hidden in the trees, he watched the enchantress arrive and heard exactly what she said.

The next night he stood under the window and said the same words, and the hair came down, and he climbed it.

Rapunzel had never seen a man before and she was badly frightened. But he spoke to her gently and stayed until it was light, and after that he came every evening.

«I will take you away from here,» he said. «But I can't climb down the way I came up — you can't hold your own hair. Bring me a thread of silk each time and I will bring a strand, and we'll make a ladder.»

It would have worked. It did not work, because one afternoon Rapunzel, thinking of something else entirely, said to the enchantress, «You are so much heavier to pull up than he is.»

The enchantress took the scissors out of her belt and cut the plait off at the neck in four strokes, and that same evening she carried Rapunzel out into a wilderness at the edge of the country and left her there.

Then she went back to the tower, tied the cut hair to the hook, and waited. The king's son climbed up in the dark and came in at the window and found her sitting in the chair. What she said to him was short, and when he heard it he went out of the window without waiting to be pushed, and the briars below caught him across the eyes and he could not see.

He walked blind for a long time, a year or more, living on whatever the country gave him. Then one morning, far out in the wilderness, he heard somebody singing, and he knew the voice, and he went towards it with his hands out. She held his face and cried, and her tears ran into his eyes, and he could see again — and the first thing he saw was her, and two children sitting in the grass behind her, and no tower anywhere in sight.

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Text source: Plot by the Brothers Grimm (1812), public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

Rapunzel characters

Rapunzel: Named after the plant her father stole from the witch's garden — the price of which was the child herself.
Dame Gothel: The enchantress who raises her in a tower with no door and no stairs, and who climbs by Rapunzel's hair.
The prince: Hears her singing, learns the way up, and is thrown from the tower into thorns that blind him. He wanders for years.
The father: Steals the rampion for his pregnant wife and agrees to the bargain. The whole story is the cost of that one theft.
The tears: Not a character, but the ending turns on them: Rapunzel's tears fall into the blind prince's eyes and he can see again. No fight, no rescue — only that.

Where «Rapunzel» comes from and who wrote it down

Rapunzel

Rapunzel characters

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