Sleeping Beauty

"Sleeping Beauty" (, or The Beauty in the Sleeping Forest; , or Little Briar Rose), also titled in English as The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods, is a fairy tale about a princess cursed by an evil fairy to sleep for a hundred years before being awakened by a handsome prince. A good fairy, knowing the princess would be frightened if alone when she wakes, uses her wand to put every living person and animal in the palace and forest asleep, to awaken when the princess does. The earliest known version of the tale is found in the narrative Perceforest, written between 1330 and 1344. Another was the Catalan poem Frayre de Joy e Sor de Paser. Giambattista Basile published another in his collection titled The Pentamerone, published posthumously in 1634 and adapted by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697. The version collected and printed by the Brothers Grimm was one orally transmitted from the Perrault. The Aarne-Thompson classification system for fairy tales lists Sleeping Beauty as a Type 410: it includes a princess who is magically forced into sleep and later woken, reversing the magic. The fairy tale has been adapted countless times throughout history and retold by modern storytellers across a variety of media. Origin Early contributions to the tale include the medieval courtly romance Perceforest (published in 1528). In this tale, a princess named Zellandine falls in love with a man named Troylus. Her father sends him to perform tasks to prove himself worthy of her, and while he is gone, Zellandine falls into an enchanted sleep. Troylus finds her and rescues her after waking her up with a kiss. Then they conceive and when their child is born, the child draws from her finger the flax that caused her sleep. She realizes from the ring Troylus left her that he was the father, and Troylus later returns to marry her. Another early literary predecessor is the Provençal versified novel.