10 Differences Between The Sleeping Beauty by Charles Perrault and Brothers Grimm

While most of us know this fairy tale just like The Sleeping Beauty, actually none of the presented variations is titled with exactly those words. Perrault wrote The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood (La Belle Aus Bois Dormant) and Grimms titled it Little Brier-Rose (Dornröschen). This is a very important difference because it describes the content in two very different ways.

The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood focuses on the sleeping and the wood as the mysterious act and place where forbidden things may happen. The story is much more focused on the prince than the princess. It's a story about jealousy.

Brier-Rose is about a thorn flower with two obvious meanings: you need to overcome an obstacle / defeat an enemy to find the right person and it's about a beautiful girl who is becoming a woman. It's a story about growing up.

Just remember - there are hundreds of known versions of the story about Sleeping Beauty.

There are seven fairies invited to a christening at Perrault. It's the eight one who caused problems. In the version by Brothers Grimm twelve fairies are invited and the thirteenth throws a curse.

While the numbers twelve and thirteen obviously allude to the last supper of Jesus Christ, numbers seven and eight need more explanation. Seven is probably the most magic of all numbers (even more than three) and is derived from the four moon phases, each lasting seven days. But several old cultures used eight-day weeks in their calendars, including Burmese, Celts, and Etruscans. In Rome eight- and seven-day weeks coexisted and competed for several centuries until Emperor Constantine declared the seven-day week as the only legal way of counting days in calendars.

If we return to both fairy tales about the Sleeping Beauty, we can see Perrault used more pagan and Grimms more Christian relationships with numbers, but both with strong symbolic meaning.

You can always explore more facts about The Sleeping Beauty, just don't forget to return!

In Perrault's version they simply just found seven fairies. They believed the eighth is already dead because nobody saw her for decades. At Grimms, they know there is one more, but they have only twelve golden plates for the fairies and they naively believed the thirteenth won't know she was left from the list.

Perrault's seventh fairy anticipated something bad may happen when the eight one came to the christening and hides with a plan to repair it if necessary. When the death by pricking with a spindle is declared, the seventh fairy softens the curse into one hundred years long sleep.

The time of the princess's accident is not specified. Only later we find out it happened when she was fifteen or sixteen (legal age of marriage in 17th century France). When the princess falls asleep, the fairy is informed by a dwarf with seven-league boots and she instantly came to the castle (in a chariot drawn by dragons) and puts to sleep most of the court too.

While that part sounds picturesque and attractive, it really loosens the dramatic structure by including unnecessary characters and subplots into the story.

For Little Briar-Rose on the other, hand the curse came completely by surprise. It was pure luck the eleventh fairy didn't give her gift yet and had a chance to transform death into one hundred year sleep. It was foretold this would happen in her fifteenth year (no specific day, only later versions put that on her birthday).

In Little-Briar-Rose parents fall asleep together with the rest of the court. After a century, the princess can return in her environment, enriched with Prince Charming.

We can imagine it was not very safe to sleep in an unprotected castle for a full century. While in both cases the castle was immediately surrounded by the wood, Perrault used it just to hide it from the curious eyes.

Brothers Grimm, who loved to include some blood into their tales, added thorns and numerous princes who died trying to get through the obstacles. Yet in both cases, the prince, who came after one hundred years, didn't have any trouble getting through, though. He was just at the right time in the right place.

The kiss by which the princess is awakened is one of the most famous elements in literature. But there is no kiss at Perrault, she woke up simply because one hundred years passed.

The kiss is an invention of Brothers Grimm. Otherwise they were not fond of erotic parts in fairy tales, but they probably used the kiss as the symbol of love, not necessarily physical, with strong Christian roots.

Brothers Grimm just threw the wedding and it's over. The mission of the princess is simple: to get married. She is grown-up now and nobody really cares what happens next.

Charles Perrault stayed more faithful to older versions (especially Basile's). While he didn't want to follow the plot of the jealous wife in Giambattista Basile's Sun, Moon, and Talia (the prince, who found the sleeping princess was already married), he still tried to include some unsolved issues of the prince. At Perrault, they are presented through the prince's mother who is a cannibal and orders her daughter in law and her two kids (yes, Sleeping Beauty becomes a mother in this version) for lunch. This means somebody must die before the happy ending!

We don't know how much time Perrault spent on his Sleeping Beauty. He wrote it where he was already way over sixty years old while Brother Grimm first published it in their twenties. They were hesitating to include it in their collection at first because it had Italian and French roots.

But when they managed to connect it with the myth about Brunhild, they decided to use it. In seven editions of their fairy tales, published during their lives, The Little Briar-Rose went through four significant corrections.

All used images are in Public Domain. Resources:

https://charles-perraults-fairy-tales.weebly.com/books/

http://vintagebooks.joomla.com/8-fairy-tales/2-sleeping-beauty-van-caspel/

https://childrensandhouseholdtales.wordpress.com/2018/07/23/the-sleeping-beauty-picture-book-by-george-w-brenneman/

https://yesterdaysdream.hatenablog.com/entry/2019/09/13/065700/