Sleeping Beauty by Henry Meynell Rheam, 1899
You probably think you know the story of the cursed girl hidden away in the castle overgrown with thorns. There’s an evil, jealous fairy and a magical spinning wheel, and it all turns out well due to true love’s kiss. It’s one of our most famous, well-loved, and most often retold fairy tales. But “Sleeping Beauty” actually has a long and complicated past, one filled with goddesses, magic rings, astrology, and atrocities far beyond anything you’d ever see in a Disney film.
“Sleeping Beauty” has existed in countless versions around the world, and its roots go back to at least early French medieval texts. We can even connect it to earlier stories about the seasons. The idea of the beauty of nature undergoing a temporary death in the autumn, only to return to life with the arrival of spring, is a cross-cultural concept perhaps best exemplified by the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone. It’s also easily applied to the story of the cursed sleeping maiden who reawakens to a world born anew. This is a tale that repeatedly raises questions of cycles, propriety, and what love really means.
Folklorists Sara Cleto and Brittany Warman of the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic explore “Sleeping Beauty,” delving into how people tell the story around the world, what changes it has undergone, and how it has been retold to tackle new ideas in recent times. What captivates us so much about this tale, and how might we take possibly the most passive fairy-tale princess of all and make her relevant for modern audiences? The lecture also includes a few prompts for audience interaction.
Cleto and Warman are former instructors of folklore and literature at Ohio State University and co-founders of the Carterhaugh School of Folklore and the Fantastic.
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