The Rapunzel that most people know has long golden hair, a tower, a prince and a happy ending. The tale the brothers Grimm printed in their first edition is darker, and the best-known difference concerns a single line. This is a story about a book rather than a person, and the account below separates what the editions record from the stories told about them.
The Horror
The Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Children’s and Household Tales, first appeared on December 20, 1812. The first volume held 86 tales, and Rapunzel was one of them. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were living in Kassel and collecting tales from friends and acquaintances. The German Wikipedia states that Jacob took the text of Rapunzel from a 1790 adaptation by Friedrich Schulz, who had adapted the older tale and turned its parsley into rampion, Rapunzel.
Behind Schulz stand two earlier versions with the same bones. Giambattista Basile published Petrosinella in Naples in 1634, in which the wife steals the plant and the girl is later taken from her parents. Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force wrote Persinette, dated 1697 or 1698, while she was confined to an abbey. It contains almost every element the Grimms later used: the pregnancy, the blinding, the twins and the healing tears.
In the Grimms’ version a woman craves rampion, a green plant growing in a sorceress’s garden, and her husband steals it. To save himself he promises the child. The sorceress takes the girl, names her Rapunzel after the plant and shuts her in a tower with no stairs and no door, only a window high up. She is called Dame Gothel in the tale, a name that is a dialect word for a godmother or midwife. The Grimms call her a sorceress, not a witch. She climbs the tower by Rapunzel’s long hair. A king’s son hears the girl singing, learns the trick and begins to visit her.
The line that was removed is this. In the 1812 first edition Rapunzel, who has been raised alone and understands nothing, asks Dame Gothel why her clothes have grown tight around the waist. The question reveals the visits and the pregnancy. In later editions the question is replaced by a slip of the tongue: Rapunzel asks the sorceress why she is harder to pull up than the young prince. Sources differ on when the change was made. The German Wikipedia says Wilhelm Grimm removed the pregnancy in the second edition, which was the 1819 edition, and the English article places the slip of the tongue in the 1857 edition, partly in answer to complaints that the tale was unsuitable for children.
What follows is bleak under either wording. The sorceress cuts off Rapunzel’s hair and sends her into a wilderness. When the prince comes and calls up to the tower, the sorceress lets the severed braid down and meets him. He falls or throws himself from the tower, lands in thorns and is blinded. He wanders for years. Rapunzel gives birth in the wilderness to twins, a boy and a girl. Years later he hears her singing, finds her, and her tears restore his sight.
The Modern Relic
The relic is the book itself. Across its seven editions the Grimms removed sexual references and made many punishments more violent, and the tight dress of Rapunzel is a standard example of what disappeared. Whether the brothers cut the line out of caution or in answer to readers, the effect was the same: a tale collected as folklore became a book for children.
Several towers in Germany are linked to the tale in illustration or quotation, and the German Wikipedia names the tower at Schloss Amönau, which inspired an illustration by Otto Ubbelohde, and a Rapunzel quotation on the Diebsturm in Lindau. These are later associations and not the origin of the story, which comes from a line of printed tellings that runs through France, Italy and Germany.
