A Quiet Moment by the Window

About this drawing

A princess braiding her hair is a natural nod to Rapunzel, the tale Americans usually know from the Brothers Grimm. Jacob and Wilhelm printed it in Germany in 1812, but they were far from the first to tell it.

The story had already crossed Europe by then. In seventeenth-century Naples, Giambattista Basile wrote about a girl named Petrosinella, locked away in a tower. A French noblewoman, Charlotte-Rose de La Force, later published a similar tale called Persinette. Parsley, in fact, gives both of those names their root, which is a fun clue that the plot always started in a garden.

Each version opens the same way. Expecting parents crave plants from a neighbor's garden, get caught, and pay a terrible price. What changes is the ending, the villain, and how much the heroine does for herself.

That hair ladder is the part nobody forgets. It turns something ordinary into the one bridge between a locked room and the outside world, and it hands the heroine a strange kind of power. The Grimms kept polishing their text through later editions, softening details for younger readers. Even so, the heart of the story stayed put, and it still works at bedtime more than two centuries later.

• princesses
• fairy tales
• braids
• castles