A pause for a story...

Do you remember Sleeping Beauty?  I' not talking the Disney film, I mean the actual fairy tale.  Well, pull up a chair children, it's story time.

Sleeping Beauty, while featured (in a mildly altered form) in the Grimm's fairy tales, is pretty much a solidly French story.  Turns out, like most fairy tales, there are quite a few different versions of it floating around, but typically again, the core remains true, whilst the details flop all around.

Barest bones, there is a king and queen who are blessed somewhat later in life with a lovely little girl, their only child.  They invite everyone in the kingdom to come and celebrate and all local fairies come and bless little what's her name with multitudinous virtues--wit, beauty, grace, etc.  Unfortunately, the one person who wasn't invited was the wicked fairy, who crashes the party anyway and curses the child that upon the even of her adulthood she will prick her finger and die.  The best the good fairies can do is to transform death into 100 years of enchanted sleep, at the end of which she will be awakened by a kiss from her one true love.

That is the core of the story, that most people will tell you, if they remember it at all.  Here are some of the variations.  First, there is no certain name for the sleeping princess.  There is evidence that I can blame those Grimm boys for the cutesy "Briar Rose" of Disney fame.  Equally, "Aurora" is likely from Perrault, not the first to tell the story, but generally accepted as the most fundamental French source.  Actually, L'Aurore is possibly the name of the princess' daughter.  From more primitive versions you get names like "Talia" and "Moon".  Names are just the beginning however.  For instance, it is not set in stone that Rosamund (my favorite of the various names) was woken by a kiss from her prince.  This is where we get into that tradition of forgotten darkness in the original tales.  You see, early versions of the story describe two other possibilities.  On the one hand, the prince wakes the princess by raping her, and in the other, she remains asleep and he simply impregnates her.  She gives birth to twins, and it is one of them, sucking on her finger, who removes the enchanted flax and thus awakens her.  Odd, don't you think, that Disney didn't go with one of these options?  The story doesn't stop here though.  In fact, the whole rest of Rosamund's relationship with her prince is forgotten.  Once she is woken up, she marries the man and returns with him to his kingdom.  However, in typical princely fashion, he leaves her, and their two children, in the care of his mother and takes off on some sort of vague adventure.  In his absence, his mother (some sources call her his step-mother, others claim that she is part ogress) becomes overwhelmed with jealousy for her daughter-in-law and banishes her and her children into the wilderness.  This is not enough, however, and she ends up demanding first one child, then the other, and finally Rosamund herself be served to her for dinner.  Rosamund and children are spared by the whiles of the royal cook who fools the mother with various animal meats drowned in essentially the most delicious sauce ever (this part, the part where really good cooking saves the protagonist's life, seems so very French to me).  However, the mother eventually figures out that she's been duped and sets up a pit filled with snakes to throw them all into.  Fortunately, our gadding prince finally returns home at this point and puts a stop to his mother's shenanigans.  One version had the mother throwing herself into the pit upon discovery by her son.

Ultimately I don't particularly find these more archaic variations to have much bearing on the significance of Sleeping Beauty in contemporary society, simply because they are forgotten and hence essentially irrelevant.  But for just a moment it is interesting to give them a little thought.
*Disclaimer* Though I will give most of my ideas some cursory internet research (Wikipedia WIN) the bulk of my thoughts and interpretations are based solely on my own ideas, and in no way built off of either legitimate sources or real original thought.  Which is to say, it is quite likely that anything I come up with will either be egregiously misguided, or just plain out of date.  So sue me.  This is a blog for my own enjoyment, not a dissertation.  *Disclaimer*
Particularly, I am intrigued by the sheer mass of traumatic experiences in Rosamund's life, all of which are essentially out of her control.  The prevalence of inescapable fate in her story reminds me more of a Greek tragedy than anything else.  Generally we accept that fairy tales were told to teach some sort of moral, but her story seems much more a...not an explanation exactly, but a...justification of the harshness of fate.  I am hesitant to say this, as it is so purely based on my own fancy, but the complete powerlessness of Rosamund, as I said, the story feels like it has its roots in the same idea as Greek literature.  The people could not understand the vagaries of "luck" and chance, so they concocted explanations for these things.  The Greeks had gods; the French used fairies.  Either way, I feel like Sleeping Beauty comes from an particularly archaic culture that was trying to form patterns and construct meaning in a chaotic world.  In the end, good does prevail.  The prince comes home and restores order.  The princess is woken up and the evil queen is defeated.