A lonely couple, who long for a child, live next to a walled garden belonging to a sorceress.

[5] The
wife, experiencing the cravings associated with pregnancy, notices some rapunzel (meaning, either
a Campanula rapunculus (an edible salad green and root vegetable) or a Valerianella locusta (a
salad green)) growing in the nearby garden and longs for it. [6] She refuses to eat anything else and
begins to waste away. Her husband fears for her life and one night he breaks into the garden to get
some for her. When he returns, she makes a salad out of it and eats it, but she longs for more so her
husband returns to the garden to retrieve more. As he scales the wall to return home, the sorceress
catches him and accuses him of theft. He begs for mercy and she agrees to be lenient, allowing him
to take all the rapunzel he wants on condition that the baby be given to her when it's born.
[7]
 Desperate, he agrees. When his wife has a baby girl, the sorceress takes her to raise as her own
and names her "Rapunzel" after the plant her mother craved. She grows up to be a beautiful child
with long golden hair.[8] When she turns twelve, the sorceress locks her up inside a tower in the
middle of the woods, with neither stairs nor a door, and only one room and one window. [9] In order to
visit Rapunzel, the sorceress stands beneath the tower and calls out:
Rapunzel!
Rapunzel!
Let down your hair
That I may climb thy golden stair![10]
One day, a prince rides through the forest and hears Rapunzel singing from the
tower. Entranced by her ethereal voice, he searches for her and discovers the
tower, but is unable to enter it. He returns often, listening to her beautiful singing,
and one day sees the sorceress visit and learns how to gain access. When the
sorceress leaves, he bids Rapunzel let her hair down. When she does so, he climbs
up and they fall in love. He eventually asks her to marry him, which she agrees to.
Together they plan a means of escape, wherein he will come each night (thus
avoiding the sorceress who visits her by day) and bring Rapunzel a piece of silk that
she will gradually weave into a ladder. Before the plan can come to fruition,
however, she foolishly gives him away. In the first edition (1812) of Kinder- und
Hausmärchen (German: Children's and Household Tales, most commonly known in
English as Grimm's Fairy Tales), she innocently says that her dress is growing
tighter around her waist, hinting at pregnancy.[11] In later editions, she asks "Dame
Gothel"[12], in a moment of forgetfulness, why it is easier for her to draw up the prince
than her.[13] In anger, the sorceress cuts off Rapunzel's hair and casts her out into
the wilderness to fend for herself.
When the prince calls that night, the sorceress lets the severed hair down to haul
him up. To his horror, he finds himself meeting her instead of Rapunzel, who is
nowhere to be found. After she tells him in a rage that he will never see Rapunzel
again, he leaps or falls from the tower, landing in a thorn bush. Although the thorn
bush breaks his fall and saves his life, it scratches his eyes and blinds him.
For years, he wanders through the wastelands of the country and eventually comes
to the wilderness where Rapunzel now lives with the twins to whom she has given
birth, a boy and a girl. One day, as she sings, he hears her voice again, and they
are reunited. When they fall into each other's arms her tears immediately restore his
sight. He leads her and their twins to his kingdom where they live happily ever after.
[14]

Another version of the story ends with the revelation that her foster mother had
untied Rapunzel's hair after the prince leapt from the tower, and it slipped from her
hands and landed far below, leaving her trapped in the tower. [15]
Themes and characterization[edit]

Rapunzel in Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Many scholars have interpreted “Maiden in the Tower” stories, which Rapunzel is a
part of, as a metaphor for the protection of young women from pre-marital
relationships by overzealous guardians.[16] Scholars have drawn comparisons of the
confinement of Rapunzel in her tower to that of a convent, where women’s lives
were highly controlled and they lived in exclusion from outsiders. [1]
Scholars have also noted the strong theme of love conquering all in the story, as the
lovers are united after years of searching in all versions after Persinette and are
ultimately happily reunited as a family.[17]
The seemingly unfair bargain that the husband makes with the sorceress in the
opening of Rapunzel is a common convention in fairy tales, which is replicated
in Jack and the Beanstalk when Jack trades a cow for beans or in Beauty and the
Beast when Beauty comes to the Beast in return for a rose. [18] Furthermore, folkloric
beliefs often regarded it as dangerous to deny a pregnant woman any food she
craved, making the bargain with the sorceress more understandable since the
husband would have perceived his actions as saving his wife at the cost of his child.
[17]
 Family members would often go to great lengths to secure such cravings and
such desires for lettuce and other vegetables may indicate a need for vitamins. [19][20]
The “Maiden in the Tower” archetype has drawn comparisons to a possible
lost matriarchal myth connected to the sacred marriage between the prince and the
maiden and the rivalry between the maiden, representing life and spring, and
the crone, representing death and winter.[21]

Development[edit]
Mythological and religious inspiration[edit]
Some researchers have proposed that the earliest possible inspiration for the
“Maiden in the Tower” archetype is to the pre-Christian European (or proto-Indo-
European) sun or dawn goddess myths, in which the light deity is trapped and is
rescued.[22][23][24] Similar myths include that of the Baltic solar goddess, Saulė, who is
held captive in a tower by a king.[25] Inspiration may also be taken from the classical
myth of the hero Perseus. Perseus' mother, Danaë, was confined to a bronze
tower by her father, Acrisius the King of Argos, to prevent her from becoming
pregnant, as it was foretold by the Oracle of Delphi that she would bear a son who
would kill his grandfather.
Inspiration may come from the life of Saint Barbara of Nicomedia, who was a
beautiful woman who was confined to a tower by her father to hide her away from
suitors.[26] While in the tower, she converted to Christianity and is ultimately martyred
for her faith after a series of miracles delaying her execution. [26][21] Her story was
included in The Book of City Ladies by Chirstine de Pizan, which may have been
highly influential on later writers, as it was popular throughout Europe. [21]

Literary development[edit]
The earliest surviving reference to a female character with long hair that she offers
to a male lover to climb like a ladder appears in the epic
poem Shahnameh by Ferdowsi.[21] The heroine of the story, Rudāba, offers her hair
so that her love interest Zāl may enter the harem where she lives. Zāl states instead
that she should lower a rope so that she will not hurt herself. [21]
The first written record of a story that may be recognized
as Rapunzel is Giambattista Basile’s Petrosinella, translating to parsley, which was
published in Naples in the local dialect in 1634 in a collection entitled Lo cunto de li
cunti (The Story of Stories).[1] This version of the story differs from later versions as it
is the wife not the husband who steals the plant, the maiden is taken by the villain
as a child rather than a baby, and the maiden and the prince are not separated for
years to be reunited in the end.[1] Most importantly, this version of the story contains
a “flight” scene in which Petrosinella uses magic acorns that turn into animals to
distract the ogress while she pursues the couple fleeing the tower. [16] This “flight”
scene, with three magic objects used as distraction, is found in oral variants in
the Mediterranean region, notably Sicily (Angiola), Malta (Little Parsley and Little
Fennel), and Greece (Anthousa the Fair with Golden Hair).[16]
In 1697, Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force published a variation of the
story, Persinette, while confined to an abbey due to perceived misconduct during
service in the court of Louis XIV.[21][27] Before her imprisonment, de la Force was a
prominent figure in the Parisian salons and considered one of the
early conteuses as a contemporary to Charles Perrault.[21] This version of the story
includes almost all elements that were found in later versions by the Grimm
Brothers.[16] It is the first version to include the maiden’s out of wedlock pregnancy,
the villain’s trickery leading to the prince’s blinding, the birth of twins, and the tears
of the maiden restoring the prince’s sight. The tale ends with villain taking pity on
the couple and transporting them to the prince’s kingdom. [21] While de la Force's
claim that Persinette was an original story cannot be substantiated, her version was
the most complex at the time and did introduce original elements. [27]
Persinette was translated into German by Friedrich Schulz and appeared in 1790
in Kleine Romane (Little Novels). Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm included the story in
their first (1812) and seventh (1857) edition publications of Children's and
Household Tales and removed elements that they believed were added to the
“original” German fairy tale.[16] Although the Grimms' recounting of the fairy tale is the
most prevalent version of the “Maiden in the Tower” in the western literary canon,
the story does not appear to have connections to a Germanic oral folktale tradition.
[16]
 Notably, the 1812 publication retains the out of wedlock pregnancy that reveals
the prince’s visits to the witch, whereas in the 1857 version, it is Rapunzel’s slip of
the tongue to address criticism that the tale was not appropriate for children. [27] It can
be argued that the 1857 version of the story was the first written for a primarily child-
aged audience.[27]