The Original Rapunzel: A Secret Pregnancy and a Blinded Prince
The popular story, checked against the evidence.
The Real Story
- Popular claim
- The original Rapunzel is more adult and darker than modern versions.
- Verdict
- True
- The record
- Early Grimm editions imply a pregnancy from the prince's visits; the prince is later blinded by thorns.
The Rapunzel most people know is a girl in a tower, a long braid, and a rescue. The Brothers Grimm told a story with sharper adult edges — one they quietly sanded down across successive editions when they realised who was reading.
The tower and the visits
The familiar setup holds: a couple’s craving for a plant called rapunzel from a witch’s garden costs them their daughter, who is locked in a doorless tower and reached only by climbing her hair. But when the prince begins visiting, the early tellings do not leave things chaste. In the first edition of the Grimms’ collection (1812), the consequences of those visits are made plain in a startlingly frank way: Rapunzel, innocent of what is happening to her body, asks the witch why her clothes have grown too tight. It is a pregnancy, betrayed by an artless question.
Later Grimm editions cut that line, replacing it with a more decorous slip — Rapunzel absent-mindedly mentioning that the prince is easier to pull up than her guardian. The revision is a small window onto how these tales were domesticated over time, the same tidying visible in Snow White and Cinderella.
Exile and blindness
The witch’s revenge is severe. She cuts off Rapunzel’s hair and casts her out into a barren wilderness, where Rapunzel gives birth to twins and struggles to survive alone. When the prince climbs the tower and finds the witch waiting, he falls — or throws himself — from the height and lands in thorns that pierce his eyes, blinding him. He wanders the world sightless for years until, by chance, he finds Rapunzel, and her tears fall on his eyes and restore his sight. Only then does the story reach its reunion.
The verdict
True. The original Rapunzel is a story of seduction, a secret pregnancy, exile, and mutilation before it is a story of reunion — considerably more grown-up than the tower romance we inherited. For the wider pattern of tales softened on their way to the nursery, see the dark origins of fairy tales.
Sources
- Brothers Grimm, “Rapunzel,” Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1st ed. 1812; later revised).
- Maria Tatar, The Annotated Brothers Grimm (2004).
- “Rapunzel,” Wikipedia.
