Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty ("La Belle au Bois dormant") is a fairy tale classic, the first in the set published in 1697 by Charles Perrault, Contes de ma Mère l'Oye ("Mother Goose Tales"). Elements of the story are contained in Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone (published 1634), in the tale Sun, Moon and Talia (ch. 39). Professor J. R. R. Tolkien noted that Perrault's cultural presence is so pervasive that, when asked to name a fairy tale, most people will cite one of the eight stories in Perrault's collection. Since Tolkien's generation, however, the most familiar Sleeping Beauty has become the Walt Disney animated film (1959), which draws as much from the Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ballet (Saint Petersburg, 1890) as from Perrault. More than many fairy tales, Sleeping Beauty partakes of many deep European myths, both pagan and Christian.

Uses of Sleeping Beauty

• One of the fairy gifts is sometimes misremebered as Intelligence. No such gift was however offered in Perrault's version: not appropriate in 1697, when a good ear for playing music appeared more essential. More modern versions of the tale might include, apart from Intelligence, Courage and Independence as fairy gifts. This can be compared with the gifts Moll Flanders apparently possessed, in the book with the same name that appeared precisely a quarter of a century after Perrault's Sleeping Beauty (1722).
• Freudian psychologists, encouraged by Bruno Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, have found rich materials to analyze in Sleeping Beauty as a case history of incest and latent sexuality and a prescription for the passive socializaion of those young women who were not destined for work.
• The Princess's sleeping attendants, waiting to accompany her when she wakes in the other world, even to the spit-boys in the kitchens and her pet dog, expresses one of the most ancient themes in ritual burial practices, though Perrault was probably unaware of the Egyptian burials, and certainly unaware of the royal tombs of Queen Puabi of the Third Dynasty of Ur, the courtiers that accompanied early emperors of China in the tomb, the horses that accompanied the noble riders in the kurgans of Scythian Pasyryk. (See grave goods). It is noteworthy that the King and Queen are not included in this analogue of a burial, but retire, while the protective spectral thorn forest immediately grows up to protect the castle and its occupants, as effective as a tumulus.
• The story of the sleeping beauty was loosely the basis for the erotic novel The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty by Anne Rice.
• It was also adapted by Mercedes Lackey into her Elemental Masters novel The Gates of Sleep.
• It was also adapted by Shigeru Miyamoto when he created the Nintendo Entertainment System game '.
• In 2002 the Dutch-speaking author Toon Tellegen published Brieven aan Doornroosje ("Letters to Sleeping Beauty"), leading, in 2005, to a year-long daily series of such letters, imagined to be written by the prince making his quest to Sleeping Beauty's castle, being presented at the Flemish classical radio station (Klara), every morning just before 7 h opening the day program.