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Sleeping Beauty (La Belle au bois dormant), or Little Briar Rose (Dornröschen), also titled in English as The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods, is a classic fairy tale which involves a beautiful princess, a sleeping enchantment, and a handsome prince. The Aarne-Thompson-Uther Classification of Folk Tales system classifies Sleeping Beauty as being a 410 tale type, meaning it includes a princess who is forced into an enchanted sleep and is later awakened by a prince breaking the magic placed upon her. The earliest known version of the story is found in the narrative Perceforest, composed between 1330 and 1344. The tale was first published by Giambattista Basile in his collection of tales titled The Pentamerone (published posthumously in 1634). Basile's version was later adapted and printed by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697. The version that was later collected and published by the Brothers Grimm was an orally transmitted version of the literary tale published by Perrault. The story has been adapted many times throughout history and has continued to be retold by modern storytellers throughout various mediums.

Plot
The folktale begins with a princess whose parents are told that their daughter will die when she pricks her finger on a particular item. In Basile's version, the princess pricks her finger on a piece of flax. In Perrualt's and the Grimm Brothers' versions, the item is a spindle. The parents rid the kingdom of these items in the hopes of protecting their daughter, but the prophecy is fulfilled regardless. Instead of dying, as was foretold, the princess falls into a deep, magical sleep. After some time, she is found by a prince and the princess is awakened.

According to Maria Tatar, there are versions of the story that include a second part to the narrative detailing the couple's troubles after their union and some folklorists believe the two parts were originally separate tales.

The second part begins after the prince and princess have had children. Through the course of the tale, the princess and her children are introduced in some way to another woman from the prince’s life. This other woman is not fond of the prince’s new family, and calls a cook to kill the children and serve them for dinner. Instead of obeying, the cook hides the children and serves livestock instead. Next, the other woman orders the cook to kill the princess. Before this can happen, the other woman’s true nature is revealed to the prince and the she is subjected to the very death that she had planned for the princess. The princess, prince, and their children live happily ever after.

Origination
Early contributions to the tale include the medieval courtly romance Perceforest (published in 1528). In this tale, a princess named Zellandine falls in love with a man named Troylus. Her father sends him to perform tasks to prove himself worthy of her, and while he is gone, Zellandine falls into an enchanted sleep. Troylus finds her and impregnates her in her sleep; when their child is born, the child draws from her finger the flax that caused her to sleep. She realizes from the ring Troylus left her that he was the father, and Troylus later returns to marry her.

The second part of the Sleeping Beauty tale, in which the princess and her children are almost put to death but instead are hidden, may have been influenced by Genevieve of Brabant. Even earlier influences come from the story of the sleeping Brynhild in the Volsunga saga and the tribulations of saintly female martyrs in early Christian hagiography conventions. Following these early renditions, the tale was first published by Italian poet Giambattista Basile who lived from 1575-1632.

Basile's version
In Basile's version of Sleeping Beauty, Sun, Moon, and Talia, the sleeping beauty, Talia, falls into a deep sleep after getting a splinter of flax in her finger. When she is discovered in her castle by a wandering king, he "...gathers the first fruits of love." and leaves her there where she later gives birth to a set of twins. Talia awakens from her sleep when one of her twins sucks out the flax that was stuck in her finger. The king later returns and, finding Talia awake, promises Talia that he will return again to take her to his kingdom.

Basile’s variation of the tale includes the tale’s second part which depicts the couple’s struggles after their meeting. In his version, the king’s wife is the one who seeks to harm Talia and her children by attempting to have the cook serve them and feed them to the king.



Perrault's version
Perrault’s adaptation also includes part one and part two of the tale, though, according to folklore editors Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek, Perrault’s tale is a much more subtle and pared down version than Basile’s story in terms of the more immoral details. An example of this is depicted in Perrault’s tale by the prince’s choice to instigate no physical interaction with the sleeping princess when the prince discovers her.

In Perrault’s tale, an upset fairy places a curse on the princess that says she will die when she pricks her finger on a spindle. The curse is changed at the last minute and she simply falls into a deep sleep. The curse comes to an end at the same time as she is discovered by a prince, and the two are wed.

Part two of Perrault’s version introduces the prince’s mother, an ogress, who desires to eat the princess and her children. She does not succeed due to the intervention of the cook she hired, and is instead punished for her actions.

Grimm Brothers' version
The Brothers Grimm included a variant of Sleeping Beauty,  Little Briar Rose, in their collection (1812). Their version ends when the prince arrives to wake Sleeping Beauty and does not include the part two as found in Basile's and Perrault's versions. The brothers considered rejecting the story on the grounds that it was derived from Perrault's version, but the presence of the Brynhild tale convinced them to include it as an authentically German tale. Their decision was odd on one point because in none of the Teutonic myths, meaning the Poetic and Prose Eddas or Volsunga Saga, are their sleepers awakened with a kiss, a fact Jacob Grimm would have known, since he wrote an encyclopedic volume on German mythology. It is the only known German variant of the tale, and Perrault's influence is almost certain.

The Brothers Grimm also included, in the first edition of their tales, a fragmentary fairy tale, "The Evil Mother-in law". This story begins with the heroine, a married mother of two children, and her mother-in-law attempting to eat her and the children. The heroine suggests an animal be substituted for the children in the dish, and the story ends with the heroine's worry that she cannot keep her children from crying and getting the mother-in-law’s attention. Like many German tales showing French influence, it appeared in no subsequent edition.

Other early variations
The princess's name has varied from one adaptation to the other. In Sun, Moon, and Talia, she is named Talia (Sun and Moon being her twin children). She has no name in Perrault's story, but her daughter is called "Aurore". The Brothers Grimm named her "Briar Rose" in their 1812 collection. However, some translations of the Grimms' tale give the princess the name "Rosamond". Tchaikovsky's ballet and Disney's version named her Princess Aurora; however, in the Disney version, she is also called "Briar Rose" in her childhood, when she is being raised incognito by the good fairies. John Stejean named her "Rosebud" in TeleStory Presents.

Besides Sun, Moon, and Talia, Basile included another variant of this Aarne-Thompson type in his book, The Pentamerone, called The Young Slave. The Grimm's collection also included a second, more distantly related one titled The Glass Coffin.

Italo Calvino included a variant in Italian Folktales. The cause of the princess's sleep is a wish by her mother. As in Pentamerone, the prince rapes her in her sleep and her children are born. Calvino retains the element that the woman who tries to kill the children is the king's mother, not his wife, but adds that she does not want to eat them herself, and instead serves them to the king. His version came from Calabria, but he noted that all Italian versions closely followed Basile's.

In his More English Fairy Tales,Joseph Jacobs noted that the figure of the Sleeping Beauty was in common between this tale and the Gypsy tale The King of England and his Three Sons.

The hostility of the king's mother to his new bride is repeated in the fairy tale The Six Swans, and also features in The Twelve Wild Ducks, where the mother is modified to be the king's stepmother. However, these tales omit the attempted cannibalism.

Media


Sleeping Beauty has been popular for many fairytale fantasy retellings. Some examples are listed below:

In film and television

 * The Sleeping Princess (1939), a Walter Lantz Productions animated short parodying the original fairy tale.
 * Prinsessa Ruusunen (1949), a Finnish film directed by Edvin Laine and scored with Erkki Melartin's incidental music from 1912.
 * Dornröschen (1955), a German film directed by Fritz Genschow.
 * Sleeping Beauty (1959), a Walt Disney animated film based on both Charles Perrault and the Brother's Grimm's versions.
 * Some Call It Loving (also known as Sleeping Beauty) (1973), directed by James B. Harris and starring Zalman King, Carol White, Tisa Farrow, and Richard Pryor, based on a short story by John Collier.
 * Sleeping Beauty (1987), a direct-to-television musical film directed by David Irving.
 * Bellas durmientes (Sleeping Beauties) (2001), directed by Eloy Lozano, adapted from the Kawabata novel.
 * La belle endormie (The Sleeping Beauty) (2010), a film by Catherine Breillat.
 * Sleeping Beauty (2011), directed by Julia Leigh and starring Emily Browning, about a young girl who takes a sleeping potion and lets men have their way with her to earn extra money.
 * Once Upon a Time (2011), an ABC TV show starring Sarah Bolger and Julian Morris.
 * Maleficent (2014), a Walt Disney live-action adaptation starring Angelina Jolie as Maleficent and Elle Fanning as Princess Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty.
 * Ever After High, episode Briar Beauty (2015), an animated Netflix series.
 * The Curse of Sleeping Beauty (2016), an American horror film directed by Pearry Reginald Teo.
 * Archie Campbell satirized the story with "Beeping Sleauty" in several Hee Haw television episodes.

In literature

 * Sleeping Beauty (1830), and The Day-Dream (1842), two poems based on Sleeping Beauty by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
 * The Rose and the Ring (1854), a satirical fantasy by William Makepeace Thackeray.
 * The Sleeping Beauty (1919), a poem by Mary Carolyn Davies' about a failed hero who did not waken the princess, but died in the enchanted briars surrounding her palace.
 * The Sleeping Beauty (1920), a retelling of the fairy tale by Charles Evans, with illustrations by Arthur Rackham.
 * Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty) (1971), a poem by Anne Sexton in her collection Transformations (1971), in which she re-envisions sixteen of the Grimm's Fairy Tales.
 * The Sleeping Beauty Quartet (1983-2015), four erotic novels written by Anne Rice under the pen name A.N. Roquelaure, set in a medieval fantasy world and loosely based on the fairy tale.
 * Beauty (1992), a novel by Sheri S. Tepper.
 * The Gates of Sleep (2012), a novel by Mercedes Lackey from the Elemental Masters series set in Edwardian England.
 * Enchantment (1999), a novel by Orson Scott Card based on the Russian version of Sleeping Beauty.
 * Alex Flinn's novel "A Kiss In Time"
 * Robin McKinley's novel Spindle's End
 * Neil Gaiman's novel The Sleeper and the Spindle
 * Jane Yolen's novel Briar Rose
 * Sophie Masson's novel Clementine

In music

 * La Belle au Bois Dormant (1825), an opera by Michele Carafa.
 * La belle au bois dormant (1829), a ballet in four acts with book by Eugène Scribe, composed by Ferdinand Hérold and choreographed by Jean-Louis Aumer.
 * The Sleeping Beauty (1890), a ballet by Tchaikovsky.
 * Dornröschen (1902), an opera by Engelbert Humperdinck.
 * Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant (1910), the first movement of Ravel's Ma mère l'Oye.
 * Sleeping Beauty Wakes (2008), an album by the American musical trio GrooveLily.
 * Sleeping Beauty: You Are the One You Have Been Waiting On (2010), an album by Abby Dobson loosely based on the fairy tale.

In video games

 * Kingdom Hearts is a video game in which Maleficent is one of the main antagonists and Aurora is one of the Princesses of Heart, together with the other Disney princesses.
 * Dark Parables, game one, Curse of Briar Rose is a computer game series where the player's mission is to find Briar and wake her up, thus ending the curse for good.
 * Little Briar Rose is a point-and-click adventure inspired by the Brothers Grimm's version of the fairy tale.

In other

 * In Tales from the Crypt (1954), the December/January issue featured a version of Sleeping Beauty with a macabre twist.
 * Sleeping Beauty is mentioned in passing in a companion to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The New Traveller's Almanac.
 * In the Sailor Moon anime, Awaken, Sleeping Beauty! Mamoru's Distress, Sailor Moon is fighting two of the Ayakashi sisters from the Black moon when she is put into a deep sleep from which only Mamoru's kiss can wake her.