Sleeping Beauty
Told by Charles PerraultFranceTale type ATU 410
- Age
- 4 to 9
- Reading time
- 9 minutes
- Scariness
- 1 of 5Mild tension, resolved at once
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The story
Once there was a king and a queen who wanted a child for a very long time, and then had one, and could not think of a single thing that would be enough to mark it.
So they held a christening and invited seven fairies to be godmothers, and had seven cases made for them in gold, each holding a spoon, a knife and a fork of the same gold, set with small stones.
There was an eighth fairy. Nobody invited her, because nobody remembered her. She had not come out of her tower in fifty years and most people at court had settled the matter privately by deciding she was dead.
She was not dead. She arrived halfway through dinner.
There was no eighth case. The king had one more place laid and gave her the ordinary plate and the ordinary cutlery, and she looked at it for a while and said nothing at all, which was worse than if she had.
The youngest of the seven fairies saw the look. She got up quietly and went and stood behind the curtain, because she had worked out that whatever was coming, somebody ought to still have a gift left afterwards.
The gifts began. Beauty. A temper like an angel. Grace in everything she did. A singing voice. A gift for every instrument anybody could name.
Then the old fairy stood up and said that the princess would prick her hand on a spindle, and that she would die of it.
The room went as quiet as a room can go.
And the seventh fairy came out from behind the curtain and said that she could not undo it, because no fairy can undo another fairy's work. But she could argue with it. The princess would prick her hand on a spindle. She would not die. She would sleep for a hundred years, and at the end of the hundred years a king's son would come and wake her.
The king went home and had every spinning wheel in the kingdom broken and burned, which is exactly what you would do, and which made no difference whatsoever.
Fifteen years later the princess was running about an old part of the castle that nobody used. At the top of a small tower she found a door, and behind the door an old woman spinning, who had not heard about the spindles, or had not been told, or had not been asked.
The princess had never seen anybody spin. She asked if she could try.
She took the spindle, and it went into her hand, and she fell.
They carried her to the finest room in the palace and laid her on a bed embroidered with gold and silver, and she lay there with her colour still in her face and her breath still going, and she looked like somebody asleep, because she was.
The seventh fairy was twelve thousand leagues away, in a kingdom called Mataquin. A dwarf went and told her, wearing boots that cover seven leagues at a step, and she was there within the hour in a chariot of fire drawn by dragons. She thought about what the princess would feel, waking alone in an empty palace in a hundred years, among people a hundred years dead. And then she went round the whole building and touched everything in it, and put the entire household to sleep exactly as it stood.
The governesses, the ladies of honour, the gentlemen, the officers, the stewards, the cooks, the kitchen boys, the guards, the pages, the footmen. The horses in the stable. The dogs in the yard. Even the princess's own little dog, asleep on the bed beside her. Even the fire went down and slept.
She left the king and the queen awake, because they were not going to be there in a hundred years, and it would have been unkind.
Then a wood came up around the castle. Trees, and brambles inside the trees, and thorns inside the brambles, so thick that nothing could get through it, and so tall that only the tops of the towers showed, and only from a long way off.
A hundred years is a long time. The family on the throne changed. The story stayed, and got worse in the telling, the way stories do.
A king's son was out hunting and saw the towers over the trees and asked what they were. Everybody told him something different. It was a ruined castle. It was where ghosts met. It was an ogre's house, and he carried children in there and ate them at his leisure.
Then a very old countryman said that his father had told him there was a princess in there, the most beautiful in the world, and that she had to sleep a hundred years and would be woken by a king's son.
The young man did not weigh it up. He went towards the trees, and the trees opened for him, and closed behind him once he was through, so that he was walking up a wide clear path alone.
He came into the courtyard, and it was full of people lying exactly as they had fallen, and every one of them breathing.
He went through the rooms. He found the guards asleep standing up with their guns on their shoulders. He found the ladies and the gentlemen. At last he came to the room with the gold and silver bed, and there was a girl of about fifteen or sixteen lying on it, and something about her that he had no word for.
He knelt down beside the bed.
There was no kiss. The hundred years was up, that was all, and she opened her eyes and looked at him as though she had been expecting him for some time.
"Is it you," she said. "You have kept me waiting."
They talked for four hours and did not get through half of it.
Meanwhile the whole palace had woken with her, and none of them had any idea anything had happened, and all of them were extremely hungry.
They were married that evening in the chapel of the castle, and the princess's little dog, who had slept a hundred years on the bed beside her and had noticed nothing at all, was there too.
What is the moral of Sleeping Beauty?
The person you forget to invite is still somebody.
The curse in this story is not caused by wickedness. It is caused by an oversight. Nobody at that court decided to insult the old fairy; they simply stopped thinking about her, and being forgotten turned out to be the thing she could not forgive. The story is unusually honest about how ordinary that is. It also quietly rewards the one person who plans for trouble instead of enjoying the party: the seventh fairy wins not by being more powerful than the old fairy, but by holding something back and standing behind a curtain.
Talk about it
- The old fairy was not invited because everybody forgot her. Is forgetting somebody as bad as leaving them out on purpose?
- The seventh fairy could not undo the curse. She could only make it smaller. Is that still helping?
- The king burned every spinning wheel in the kingdom and it did not work. Why do you think the story includes that?
- The fairy put the whole palace to sleep so the princess would not wake up alone among strangers. Was that the kindest part of the story?
- In this version nobody kisses anybody and the sleep just ends. Does that change how the ending feels?
Who is in the story
The Princess
protagonist · human
The girl the whole story is about, who is asleep for most of it and has no name at all.
The Old Fairy
antagonist · fairy
The fairy nobody invited, because nobody remembered she was alive.
The King
supporting · human
A father who does absolutely everything within his power and is not helped by any of it.
The King's Son
supporting · human
A young man out hunting who hears four different stories about a tower and picks the least sensible one.
The Seventh Fairy
helper · fairy
The youngest of the seven, who saw what was coming and quietly went and stood behind a curtain.
In a nutshell
A fairy nobody remembered to invite curses a newborn princess to die on a spindle. A younger fairy, hiding behind the curtain with her gift still unspent, cannot undo it and argues it down to a hundred years of sleep instead. In Perrault's original there is no kiss at the end. The hundred years is simply up.
Scene by scene
20 moments from the tale.
- Scene 1The Great Hallceremonial
Seven cases of gold
The king has waited a long time for this child and cannot think of anything grand enough to mark it, so he settles on gold. Seven fairies are invited to be godmothers and each is given a case with a spoon, a knife and a fork inside.
Seven fairies. Seven cases. Nobody counted to eight.
- Scene 2The Great Halluneasy
Halfway through dinner
Nobody invited the eighth fairy because nobody remembered her. She had not come out of her tower in fifty years and the court had quietly agreed she was dead. She was not dead, and she comes in with the dinner half eaten.
She had not left her tower in fifty years.
- Scene 3The Great Hallwounded
The ordinary plate
Only seven cases were made. The king has another place laid and gives her the ordinary plate and the ordinary cutlery, and she looks at it for a long time and says nothing at all.
There was no eighth case.
- Scene 4The Great Hallwatchful
Behind the curtain
The youngest of the seven fairies sees the old fairy look at the plate, gets up without a word and goes and stands behind the curtain, so that whatever happens, somebody will still have a gift in hand afterwards.
The youngest one saw the look and left the table.
- Scene 5The Great Hallbright
The gifts began
The six remaining fairies give their gifts one after another. Beauty, a temper like an angel, grace in everything, a singing voice, and a gift for every instrument anybody can name.
Beauty. Grace. A voice. A gift for every instrument.
- Scene 6The Great Hallfinal
She will die of it
The old fairy stands when her turn comes and says that the princess will prick her hand on a spindle and die of it. Then the room goes as quiet as a room can go.
She took her turn like everybody else.
- Scene 7The Great Hallresolute
She could argue with it
The seventh fairy comes out from the curtain and says plainly that she cannot undo it, because no fairy can undo another fairy's work. What she can do is argue with it. The princess will sleep a hundred years, and a king's son will wake her.
No fairy can undo another fairy's work.
- Scene 8The Great Hallfutile
Every wheel in the kingdom
The king goes home and has every spinning wheel in the kingdom broken and burned. It is exactly what anybody would do in his position, and it changes nothing at all.
Burn all of them. It made no difference.
- Scene 9The Tower Roominnocent
A part of the castle nobody used
Fifteen years later the princess is running about an old part of the castle that nobody uses. At the top of a small tower there is a door, and behind the door somebody is spinning.
At the top of a small tower she found a door.
- Scene 10The Tower Roomcurious
She had never seen anybody spin
There is an old woman in the room spinning, who never heard about the spindles, or was never told, or was never asked. The princess has never seen anybody spin in her life. She asks if she can have a go.
She asked if she could try.
- Scene 11The Tower Roomsudden
She took the spindle
She takes the spindle, and it goes into her hand, and she falls. The whole thing is over in one sentence.
It went into her hand, and she fell.
- Scene 12The Bedchamberstill
The gold and silver bed
They carry her to the best room in the palace and lay her on a bed embroidered with gold and silver. Her colour is still in her face and her breath is still going. She looks like somebody asleep, because she is.
Her colour was still in her face.
- Scene 13The Bedchamberurgent
Fifteen leagues in an hour
The seventh fairy is fifteen leagues away and gets there in an hour by chariot. What she is thinking about on the way is not the spell. It is what it would be like to wake alone in an empty palace among people a hundred years dead.
A chariot of fire, and one very practical thought.
- Scene 14The Bedchambertender
Even her little dog
She goes round the entire building and touches everything in it. Governesses, ladies of honour, officers, cooks, kitchen boys, guards, pages and footmen. The horses. The dogs in the yard. The little dog on the bed. Even the fire.
Even the fire went down and slept.
- Scene 15The Bedchamberbleak
She left them awake
She leaves the king and the queen awake. They would not have lasted the hundred years, and waking them into a world that had gone on without them would have been unkind.
They were not going to be there in a hundred years.
- Scene 16The Thorn Woodenclosing
The wood came up
A wood comes up around the castle. Trees, with brambles inside the trees and thorns inside the brambles, so thick nothing can get through and so tall that only the tops of the towers show, and only from a long way off.
Only the tops of the towers showed, and only from far off.
- Scene 17The Thorn Woodcurious
Everybody told him something different
A hundred years go by, the family on the throne changes, and the story gets worse in the telling. A king's son out hunting sees the towers over the trees and asks what they are. He gets four different answers, and believes the fourth.
A ruined castle. A meeting place for ghosts. An ogre's house.
- Scene 18The Thorn Woodquiet
The trees opened
He does not stop to think about it. He walks at the trees, and the trees open for him, and close again behind him once he is through, so that he is going up a wide clear path on his own.
He did not weigh it up. He went.
- Scene 19The Great Halleerie
Exactly as they had fallen
He comes into a courtyard full of people lying exactly as they fell, all of them breathing. Then he goes through the rooms, past guards asleep standing up with their guns on their shoulders, past the ladies and the gentlemen, and nobody stirs.
Every one of them breathing.
- Scene 20The Bedchamberwry
You have kept me waiting
At last he comes to the room with the gold and silver bed and a girl of about fifteen or sixteen lying on it. He kneels down beside her. There is no kiss. The hundred years is up, and she opens her eyes and greets him as though he is late.
There was no kiss. The hundred years was up, that was all.
Where it happens
The Bedchamber
bedroom
The finest room in the palace, where she is laid down and where she stays for a hundred years.
The Great Hall
hall
Where the christening dinner is held, and where the whole disaster is set in motion by a missing box.
The Thorn Wood
forest
A hundred years of growth, standing between the road and the castle, which opens for exactly one person.
The Tower Room
tower
A small forgotten room at the top of a stair in a part of the castle nobody uses.
How they are connected
The Old FairyThe Seventh Fairyrival
The two of them never argue, and the entire plot is the argument between them.
The Seventh FairyThe Princessguardian
She is the only person in the story who thinks about what waking up would actually be like.
The PrincessThe King's Sonfriend
They meet at the exact moment the clock runs out, and she blames him for the wait.
The KingThe Old Fairyneighbour
He did not snub her. He simply did not think of her, which turns out to be worse.
Things you might not know
There is no kiss in Perrault's original. The prince kneels down beside the bed and the hundred years is simply up. The kiss comes from the Grimms' German version, published over a century later.
The princess has no name in Perrault. Aurora is the name of her daughter in the second half of the tale. She only became Aurora herself through Tchaikovsky's 1890 ballet.
The old fairy's curse was death. The hundred years of sleep everybody remembers was not her spell at all, but a younger fairy's amendment, made from behind a curtain.
Perrault's tale has a second half that almost nobody tells. After the wedding the prince's mother turns out to be an ogre, and tries to have the children cooked while he is away at war. A cook hides them and serves lamb instead.
The title La Belle au bois dormant means the beauty, in the wood, sleeping. It is the beauty who is sleeping, not the wood. It is written that way because the Academie francaise ruled in 1679 that present participles do not change form, and Perrault was a member.
Perrault's 1697 collection contained eight prose tales, and Sleeping Beauty came first. The others were Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Diamonds and Toads, Cinderella, Riquet with the Tuft and Hop o' My Thumb.
Perrault published the collection under the name of his son, Pierre Perrault Darmancourt, probably because he was in the middle of a literary war and feared being mocked by the traditionalists he was arguing with.
The oldest known version of the story is in Perceforest, an anonymous French romance from the 1330s, where the sleeper is called Zellandine. She is woken when her own newborn child draws the flax out of her finger.
What things stand for
- The eighth case
- The one that was never made. The whole disaster fits in the gap where an object should have been and was not.
- The curtain
- Foresight, which in this story looks like leaving the party early. The seventh fairy wins by being the only one who assumed something would go wrong.
- The burned spinning wheels
- A parent doing everything in his power, and it counting for nothing. The story is not interested in whether he tried hard.
- The sleeping dog
- Kindness at its least necessary and most convincing. Nobody would have checked whether the dog was included, and Perrault names him anyway.
- The wood
- A hundred years made visible. It is not a prison; it opens for the one person who walks at it without weighing it up.
The same story elsewhere
Folk tales are not owned by whoever wrote them down first.
Sun, Moon, and Talia
Italy, 1634-36
Giambattista Basile's version, published after his death, and generally regarded as the first fully developed literary telling. It is far darker than Perrault and is not told to children. The sleeper is woken not by a prince but by one of her own newborn twins.
Little Briar Rose (Dornroschen)
Germany, 1812
The Grimms' version, KHM 50. The fairies are wise women, there is a hedge of thorny roses, and the prince does wake her with a kiss. It stops at the wedding and has no second half.
Perceforest
France, c. 1330s
An anonymous courtly romance containing the oldest known form of the story, with a sleeper named Zellandine and a knight named Troylus. She is woken when a child draws the flax from her finger.
Sleeping Beauty and Her Children
Italy, traditional
A Calabrian version recorded by Italo Calvino in which the sleep is caused by the girl's own mother making a wish, and the one who tries to kill the children afterwards is the king's mother.
Where you might already know it from
Most children meet a screen version first. Here is what those changed.
The Sleeping Beauty
ballet, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, choreographed by Marius Petipa, 1890
Premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg on 3/15 January 1890, conducted by Riccardo Drigo. The ballet is where the princess first gets the name Aurora, which in Perrault belongs to her daughter.
Dornroschen
opera, Engelbert Humperdinck, 1902
A fairy-tale opera for children by the composer of Hansel and Gretel, first performed in Frankfurt on 12 November 1902. It gives the wicked fairy a name, Damonia, and adds a fairy queen, the Sun and even singing flowers.
Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant
other, Maurice Ravel, 1910
A slow, quiet dance for the sleeping princess, and the first of the five pieces in Ravel's Ma mere l'Oye, written for two children to play on one piano and first performed in Paris on 20 April 1910.
Questions parents ask
- What is the moral of Sleeping Beauty?
- The person you forget to invite is still somebody.
- What is Sleeping Beauty about?
- A fairy nobody remembered to invite curses a newborn princess to die on a spindle. A younger fairy, hiding behind the curtain with her gift still unspent, cannot undo it and argues it down to a hundred years of sleep instead. In Perrault's original there is no kiss at the end. The hundred years is simply up.
- What age is Sleeping Beauty for?
- Sleeping Beauty suits ages 4-9.
- How long does Sleeping Beauty take to read?
- About 9 minutes read aloud.
- Where does Sleeping Beauty come from?
- Sleeping Beauty is a traditional tale from France.
Sing it
Every story here has its own song. This one is patient, hushed, quietly funny, about 72 beats a minute.
A Hundred Years
gentle acoustic lullaby in 6/8
There is no recording yet. The words are here so you can sing it yourself.
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