Rapunzel

Once upon a time, there lived a husband and wife who longed for a child. Their little cottage stood beside a magnificent garden, and behind its high stone wall grew a beautiful herb called rapunzel. The wall belonged to a powerful enchantress, and no one dared trespass there.

One day, the wife looked out her window at the rapunzel plants and felt she simply must taste them, or she could not go on. So her husband, loving her dearly, climbed the wall one evening to gather some. But as he climbed back down, the enchantress appeared before him, her eyes sharp as thorns.

"How dare you steal from my garden!" she said. Trembling, he begged for mercy and explained his wife's longing. The enchantress's face softened, just a little. "Take what you need," she said, "but when your child is born, she must be given to me. I will care for her like a mother — but she will be mine."

Frightened, the man agreed. And when a baby girl arrived, the enchantress came and carried her away, naming her Rapunzel, after the very plant that had brought her to them.

The Tower With No Door

Rapunzel grew into the loveliest child anyone had ever seen, with hair like spun gold that grew longer with every passing year. But when she turned twelve, the enchantress led her deep into the forest, to a tall stone tower with no stairs and no door — only a single small window at the very top.

There, the enchantress left her. Whenever she wished to visit, she would stand at the tower's foot and call up:

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!"

And Rapunzel would wind her long golden braid around a hook by the window and let it fall, fall, fall — all the way to the ground — so the enchantress could climb up like a sailor scaling a rope.

Think about what that tower must have felt like from the inside. No footsteps on a staircase. No knock at a door. Just stone walls, a patch of sky, and hair that had become the only bridge between Rapunzel's small round world and the great wide one beyond it. She sang to the birds. She watched the clouds change shape. She waited.

A Voice in the Forest

Years passed this way, until one day a prince came riding through the forest and heard the sweetest singing he had ever known drifting down from somewhere above the treetops. He searched and searched but could find no door — only smooth stone walls circling up into the sky.

He returned again and again, until one evening he saw the enchantress arrive and call out those strange, magical words. He watched, hidden among the trees, as golden hair spilled down like a river of light and the old woman climbed up into the tower.

When she had gone, the prince stepped out from the shadows. His heart was pounding. He took a breath and called up the very same words:

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!"

And down it came, gleaming in the last of the sunlight — the only key to a door that had never existed, offered freely to a stranger's voice.

Rapunzel had never seen anyone but the enchantress in all her life, and when the prince climbed through her window, she was startled — but he spoke gently, and told her how her singing had called to him across the whole forest. Slowly, they began to talk, and then to visit, again and again, as the seasons turned. For the first time, Rapunzel's lonely tower held two voices instead of one.

But the enchantress discovered their secret, and in her anger, she cut off Rapunzel's beautiful hair and sent her far away into a wild and lonely wilderness, so she could never be found. When the prince came calling for his golden ladder, it was the enchantress who lowered the shorn braid instead — and what he learned at the top of that tower filled him with such sorrow that he wandered blindly through the world for a long, long time, searching for the voice he had lost.

After many years of wandering, led by hope more than sight, the prince at last found Rapunzel again, living simply with the two little children who had been born to her in the wilderness. When their eyes met, her joyful tears of recognition fell upon him — and, as old tales tell, they had the power to heal what sorrow had broken. Together, they returned to his kingdom, where they lived out their days in happiness, never lonely again.

The tower once seemed like the whole world to Rapunzel — but even stone walls could not keep out a song, or a voice calling back to her from below. Sometimes the smallest thread of hope, offered and received, is enough to open a door that never had one.

Attribution: Adapted from The Brothers Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812) — public domain.