Jacob Grimm ostensibly believed that the strong alliteration of the rhyme indicated that it was a survival of the ancient form of Germanic poetry known as Stabreim, but in actuality, it was his liberal adaption of Schulz's direct German translation of Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force's older French version Persinette, Persinette, descendez vos cheveux que je monte. Rapunzel! Rapunzel! Let down your hair That I may climb thy golden stair! In order to visit her, the sorceress stands at the bottom of the tower and calls out:
When she turns twelve, the sorceress locks her up in a tower in the middle of the woods, with neither stairs nor a door, and only one room and one window. She grows up to be a beautiful child with long golden hair. When the wife has a baby girl, the sorceress takes her to raise as her own and names her "Rapunzel" after the plant her mother craved (in one version, her parents move away before she's born in an attempt to avoid surrendering her, only for the sorceress to turn up at their door upon her birth, unhampered by their attempt at relocation). He begs for mercy and she agrees to be lenient, allowing him to take all the rapunzel he wants on condition that the baby be given to her when it's born. As he scales the wall to return home, the sorceress catches him and accuses him of theft. When he returns, she makes a salad out of it and eats it, but she longs for more so her husband returns to the garden to retrieve some more. Her husband fears for her life and one night he breaks into the garden to get some for her. She refuses to eat anything else and begins to waste away. The wife, experiencing pregnancy cravings, longs for the rapunzel that she sees growing in the garden (rapunzel is either the root vegetable Campanula rapunculus, or the salad green Valerianella locusta).
Illustration by Paul Hey, created around 1910Ī lonely couple, who long for a child, live next to a large, extensive, high-walled subsistence garden, belonging to a sorceress.
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