Rapunzel

I remember when I was really quite young and a precocious reader, having a book of Grimms’ fairy-tales. it wasn’t a modern lightweight version, but a heavy old book with small dense writing and not many pictures (which I think is what Alice in Wonderland complained of with her sister’s book!) I don’t know if I remember this correctly, but I associate reading that book with a green cover, at my grandparents’ house. It was old, I could tell, and had that musty old book smell,  so I wonder if it had belonged to either of my grandparents when they were children, or whether it had just been acquired for my mum and her sisters when they were young?

There were, of course, many tales I found very disturbing, I remember one about a young girl having to weave cloth from nettles, and having had a few painful encounters with nettles myself I thought that was vile and horrible and very cruel. Of course I know now that nettles would have been processed into a material which could be spun and ultimately woven into fabric without any of the ouch stinging bits!

I always thought with Rapunzel that it would have been terribly painful to have someone climb up your hair, so even without the evil witch, and definitely without knowing the originally nasty story, I didn’t like it. Stories like this go way back and although there are theories of their origin – the story of Saint Barbara who may have been a third century Christian martyr, could have been where the story of Rapunzel came from.

In some stories the father has to give his daughter to the wicked witch because he has stolen bitter greens from her garden to give to his pregnant wife, but as with many ‘fairy’ stories there are many other versions. Whichever version, I still didn’t like it as a child, and seeing the beautiful sand sculpture of the story at last year’s festival, still gave a little creepy feeling!