Rapunzel: Love, Freedom, and the Power of Truth

A girl with hair so long it could be climbed like a rope; a tower with no door and only one high window; a witch who stole a child for the price of a handful of garden greens; a prince blinded by thorns and led back into the light by his beloved’s tears. Rapunzel is one of the few fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm in which almost every memorable image has entered the common imagination of the world — and almost none of them is quite where the original story put them. Recorded in 1812 in the first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen as tale number 12 (KHM 12), the story belongs to a family of “maiden in the tower” tales that the Brothers Grimm inherited rather than invented, and that they then quietly reshaped over four decades into a parable about love, defiance, and the slow restoration of sight.

1. The Garden Behind the Wall

The story opens with one of the most peculiar economic transactions in all of European fairy tale. A man and his wife, after long years of childlessness, learn at last that they are to have a baby. The wife, in those first weeks of pregnancy, falls into the strange and irresistible hungers known to almost every household. She looks down from a small back window of their cottage into the garden of a witch who lives on the other side of a high stone wall, and she sees, growing in neat beds, the green leaves of Rapunzel — the field-salad herb the Germans call Feldsalat or, in older books, Rapunzelchen — and she conceives such a longing for it that she tells her husband she will die if she does not taste a leaf of it. The Brothers Grimm give us her cry in plain country German: “Sterben müsste ich, wenn ich kein Rapunzel zu essen bekomme.” “I shall surely die if I don’t get some rapunzel to eat.”

The husband loves his wife. He waits for nightfall, climbs the wall of the witch’s garden, and steals a handful of the green leaves. His wife eats them with such hunger that the next day she wants twice as much. He climbs again. The third night the witch is waiting for him on the inside of her own wall. The conversation that follows, brief and almost casual, is the moral hinge of the entire tale. The husband begs for mercy. The witch, who is not unreasonable but is also not merciful, agrees that he may take all the rapunzel he can carry — on one condition. The child his wife is carrying must be given to her at its birth. “Es soll ihm gut gehen,” she tells him — “the child shall fare well; I will care for it like a mother.” Terrified, the husband agrees. When the baby girl is born, the witch comes for her, names her after the herb that bought her — Rapunzel — and carries her away into a wood that nobody from the village can find.

It is worth pausing on this opening, because the Brothers Grimm have done something quietly serious in a few hundred words. They have set up a story in which a child is forfeited not because of cruelty, exactly, but because of a parental promise made in panic over a craving that itself stands for everything the parents could not give the child. The garden of the witch is full; the cottage on the other side of the wall is empty. The wife wants the green of someone else’s plenty so badly that she is willing — through her husband’s mouth — to trade away the one fullness she finally has. Folklorists from Marie-Louise von Franz to Maria Tatar have read the rapunzel-craving as the first stirring of a parent’s ambivalence about a child she has waited too long for, and as the older theme — common in tales classified Aarne–Thompson–Uther type 310 — of a daughter who must be taken into hiding because of a debt the parents themselves contracted.

2. The Tower With No Door

When Rapunzel turns twelve, the witch shuts her up in a tower in the middle of the forest. The Brothers Grimm describe the tower with the unusual specificity of folk memory: it has neither stair nor door, and it has only one small window at the very top. The witch, when she wishes to enter, stands at the foot of the tower and calls upward in a small two-line song that has become one of the most famous couplets in fairy-tale literature:

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel,
lass dein Haar herunter.”
“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.”

And Rapunzel, who has hair so long and so fine that the Grimms compare it to gesponnenes Gold — spun gold — loosens it from the iron pin in which she has fastened it, throws the long braid out of the high window, and lets it fall in a single bright cord twenty ells down the side of the stone tower. The witch climbs up by it. So, eventually, does the prince.

The image of the tower deserves close attention because it is the one element in the tale that almost every reader, child or grown, remembers without prompting, and the one element most thoroughly rooted in folk-tale grammar. The tower is a maiden’s place; it is also a prison. In this story, importantly, it is both at once. The witch’s stated reason for the tower is protection. The reason the Brothers Grimm let stand, page after page, is control. Rapunzel inside the tower is safe from every predator the world contains except the one who put her there. She is fed, clothed, never harmed; she is also never permitted to choose, to leave, or to be seen. Maria Tatar has noted that this kind of “protective imprisonment” reappears across European folklore — in Basile’s Petrosinella, in the seventeenth-century French tale Persinette by Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force, and in the German Rapunzel the Brothers Grimm received from a young friend of theirs named Friederike Mannel of Allendorf, who had read it in Friedrich Schulz’s 1790 volume Kleine Romane. The Grimms knew, in other words, that they were not inventing the tower; they were inheriting it.

The prince is the accident the witch has not planned for. One day a young king’s son, riding through the forest, hears a voice in the air so clear and so sweet that he stops his horse to listen. Rapunzel, alone at the top of her tower, sings to keep herself company. The prince searches for the source of the voice for several days, finds the tower, and watches from the trees until he sees the witch arrive at the foot of it and call out the strange two-line summons. The next evening, when the witch is far away, he comes to the foot of the tower and tries the words for himself: “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, lass dein Haar herunter.” The hair falls. He climbs. And what happens next, in the 1812 first edition of the Grimms, is told with a sober frankness that the brothers themselves later softened in subsequent editions: the prince and Rapunzel fall in love and conduct a secret courtship across many evenings, until at last she agrees to leave with him — if he will only bring her, on each visit, a strand of silk, so that she may weave herself a ladder long enough to climb down to him at the moment of escape.

3. The Witch’s Discovery and the Wild Wood

The discovery, in every version of Rapunzel, comes from a single innocent sentence the girl lets slip. In the 1812 first edition the sentence is plain and revealing: she asks the witch why her clothes have grown so tight at the waist when the prince’s clothes always fit so loosely. In the 1819 and later editions the Grimms, troubled by what country mothers might think of reading aloud, replaced this remark with a different slip: Rapunzel asks why the witch is so much heavier to pull up on the braid than the young prince is. The 1812 line tells us that Rapunzel has conceived; the 1857 line tells us only that she has been receiving a visitor. Both versions arrive at the same furious conclusion. The witch, understanding everything in a single instant, seizes the long golden braid in her left hand, takes a pair of shears in her right, and cuts it off at the nape. “Schnipp, schnapp,” the Grimms say — the small onomatopoeic sound a country child would have known from the hen-yard.

The witch carries Rapunzel, shorn and weeping, out of the tower and abandons her in a desolate wilderness. Then she returns to the tower, fastens the cut braid to the iron pin in the window, and waits for the prince. When evening comes and he calls up the familiar two lines, the witch lets the dead braid fall down. The prince climbs, expecting Rapunzel; he meets, at the top, a woman whose eyes are full of triumph and rage. “Aha,” she tells him, in a line the Grimms underlined for grim emphasis, “du willst die Frau Liebste holen, aber der schöne Vogel sitzt nicht mehr im Nest und singt nicht mehr.” “Aha! You wanted to fetch your sweetheart, but the lovely bird is no longer in the nest, and it no longer sings.” In the despair of her voice the prince hears that Rapunzel is lost to him. He throws himself out of the high window into the thorns at the foot of the tower. The fall does not kill him; the thorns blind him.

For years, the Grimms tell us, the prince wanders blind through forests and over hills, eating roots and berries, doing nothing but mourning the loss of the woman he had meant to take away with him. Rapunzel, in the meantime, has given birth in the wilderness to twins, a boy and a girl, and lives in a small clearing — an exile within an exile — supporting her children with whatever the wild can give her. The Grimms’ instinct here is medieval rather than modern: love is not enough to undo what guilt and pride have done. The two who once stood at the high window of a single tower must now be dragged separately through the lower country of consequence before they can be allowed to meet again.

4. Tears That Restore Sight

The reunion, when it comes, has the small inevitability of a tale that has known where it was going from its first sentence. The prince, blind and weary, hears in the distance a voice he has not heard in seven years: a woman singing to two small children. The Brothers Grimm let the moment settle quietly. He stumbles toward the voice. Rapunzel sees him coming through the bracken. She knows him at once. She runs to him and throws her arms around his neck and weeps for joy. Two of her tears fall into his eyes. The Grimms describe the miracle in a single sentence so plain that every German child memorises it: “Da wurden seine Augen wieder klar, und er konnte damit sehen wie sonst.” “Then his eyes became clear again, and he could see with them as before.”

It is impossible to overstate how unusual this resolution is in the Grimms’ collection. There is no fairy with a wand. There is no kiss that wakes a princess. There is no sword that cuts off a giant’s head. There is only a woman who has lost everything — her hair, her tower, her witch-mother, her prince, the home she might have made — and who, when she finds her ruined beloved at last, weeps openly, and whose tears do the work that no other magic in the tale was able to do. It is a tale that ends, very quietly, with the suggestion that ordinary grief, when it is finally allowed to be expressed, has more healing in it than any of the spells the witch ever cast. The prince leads Rapunzel and the twins back to his kingdom, where they are received with great joy, and where they live, the Grimms add — in a phrase as plain as any other in the tale — “noch lange glücklich und vergnügt”, “still happy and contented for a long time afterwards.”

The Moral: Love Made Visible Restores What Confinement Took Away

“Da wurden seine Augen wieder klar, und er konnte damit sehen wie sonst.”
“Then his eyes became clear again, and he could see with them as before.” — KHM 12, Brüder Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1857)

The moral of Rapunzel is not, despite many retellings, that disobedience must be punished. The witch’s possessiveness is what is finally undone; Rapunzel and the prince, who broke her rules, are exactly the two characters the tale rewards. The deeper lesson the Brothers Grimm let stand, edition after edition, is closer to the German Romantic conviction at the heart of so many of their tales: that truth confined cannot remain hidden, and love made visible restores what confinement took away. The witch tries to keep Rapunzel inside the tower because she fears what the world will do to her. What the witch will not see, until her shears are already in her hand, is that confinement has its own slow injuries; that a girl raised inside a tower cannot pretend the world does not exist; that love — even love conducted in secret, even love that ends in a fall into thorns — is more honest than the protection that pretends nothing is changing. Rapunzel’s slip of the tongue is not a moral failure. It is the first sentence of an honest life.

There is a second moral, more domestic, and the Grimms allow it to live in the small architecture of the tale rather than in any one line: tears are not weakness; they are the last available form of repair. Rapunzel does not save the prince by cleverness, or by a magical herb, or by a bargain with a more powerful witch. She saves him by crying when she finally sees him. The miracle of the restored eyes is not a fairy intervention; it is, in the moral grammar of the tale, the natural consequence of two people who had been forbidden to grieve being at last allowed to grieve together. The Grimms, who had themselves lost their father at eleven and watched their mother struggle for the rest of her life, knew very well what they were saying.

Why It Lasted

Of the more than two hundred tales the Brothers Grimm published between 1812 and 1857, Rapunzel is one of perhaps a dozen that have travelled outside the German-speaking world without losing their distinctive shape. The story is classified as Aarne–Thompson–Uther tale type ATU 310, The Maiden in the Tower, an international type whose oldest written ancestor is generally considered to be Giambattista Basile’s Neapolitan tale Petrosinella in Il Pentamerone (1634), in which the imprisoned girl is named for parsley rather than rapunzel. The French version, Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force’s Persinette (1698), preserved Basile’s herb-name and introduced the long-haired tower scene that the Grimms would inherit. The German step came in 1790 with Friedrich Schulz’s Kleine Romane, in which Schulz adapted La Force’s text into German prose and changed the herb to Rapunzel. From Schulz the tale reached Friederike Mannel of Allendorf, and from Mannel the Brothers Grimm in 1810. Wilhelm Grimm rewrote the tale in his own quiet country-German prose, and the version we know today is essentially his.

The textual history is itself a study in nineteenth-century moral revision. The 1812 first edition makes Rapunzel’s pregnancy plain; the 1819 second edition, prepared after several Lutheran pastors complained, removes the pregnancy detail and replaces it with the lighter “you are heavier than the prince” remark. The seventh and final edition of 1857 keeps the 1819 wording but restores the twins at the end — a small, characteristic Grimm decision to soften the middle of the story while letting the consequences stand. Maria Tatar, in her annotated edition, observes that this is one of the few Grimm tales in which the Brothers’ editorial conscience can be tracked sentence by sentence across nearly half a century, and in which the surviving 1857 text is, for all its softening, remarkably faithful to the moral architecture of the 1812 original.

The story has lasted, finally, because every one of its central images has the quality of something a child can carry whole into adulthood. The garden behind the wall and the green leaf the parents cannot grow themselves. The tower with no door and the long bright braid let down. The witch who is not entirely cruel and not entirely loving and is, in this respect, exactly like every parent who has ever tried to keep a daughter safe by keeping her small. The prince blinded by his own desperate leap. The wilderness of seven slow years. The two tears that fall into the eyes of a man who had given up the hope of seeing again. The Brothers Grimm, who knew that the best fairy tales are the ones we keep returning to without quite understanding why, gave Rapunzel a shape we have never been able to set down. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, lass dein Haar herunter — the line itself, two centuries on, is still a small invitation that any reader can accept.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where does the Rapunzel story originally come from?

Rapunzel is tale number 12 in the Brothers Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (KHM 12), first published in 1812. The Grimms received their version in 1810 from a young friend named Friederike Mannel of Allendorf, who had read it in Friedrich Schulz’s Kleine Romane (1790). Schulz had himself adapted it from Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force’s French tale Persinette (1698), and the oldest written ancestor of the whole family of tales is Giambattista Basile’s Neapolitan story Petrosinella in Il Pentamerone (1634). It is classified internationally as Aarne–Thompson–Uther tale type ATU 310, The Maiden in the Tower.

What does the name Rapunzel actually mean?

Rapunzel is the German country name for the leafy field-salad herb known in modern German as Feldsalat or Rapunzelchen — botanically Valerianella locusta or, in some older sources, Campanula rapunculus. It is a real edible green that was commonly grown in nineteenth-century European kitchen gardens. The witch’s choice to name the stolen baby after the herb that paid for her is a deliberate Grimm touch: the child carries, in her name, the trade her parents made on her behalf before she was even born.

Why did the Brothers Grimm change the story between editions?

The 1812 first edition of Rapunzel made the heroine’s pregnancy plain: she lets slip her secret by asking the witch why her clothes have grown so tight at the waist. After several Lutheran pastors complained that the volume was unsuitable for children, Wilhelm Grimm revised the line for the 1819 second edition, replacing it with the lighter remark that the witch is heavier to pull up on the braid than the prince. The 1857 final edition keeps the 1819 wording but restores the twins at the end of the tale — a characteristic Grimm decision to soften the middle of the story while letting its consequences stand.

What is the most famous line in the Rapunzel tale?

The two-line couplet the witch (and later the prince) call up to the high tower window: “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, lass dein Haar herunter” — “Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.” In every German edition since 1812 these eight words have stood almost unchanged, and they are the line every German-speaking child still learns by heart. The Grimms’ country-German diction — lass rather than the more formal lasse — is preserved in the 1857 final edition, the standard text of all modern Rapunzel translations.

How are the prince’s eyes restored at the end?

After seven years of blind wandering through forests, the prince at last hears Rapunzel’s voice singing in a wilderness clearing where she has raised the twins he never knew about. She runs to him and embraces him weeping for joy, and two of her tears fall into his blinded eyes. The Grimms describe the miracle in a single sentence — “Da wurden seine Augen wieder klar, und er konnte damit sehen wie sonst” (“Then his eyes became clear again, and he could see with them as before”). It is one of the few Grimm endings in which the magic is performed not by a fairy or a wand but by an ordinary woman’s grief at last being allowed to be expressed.