Read the fairy tale Nelly loves
Rapunzel
A girl with hair long enough to climb, a tower with no door, and a boy who found his way back to her across many years: a tale the Brothers Grimm made famous, and older than they knew.
A husband and wife had wished for a child for many years, and at last one was on the way. From their window the wife could see into the garden of a sorceress next door, where a bed of rapunzel, a small green plant with sweet leaves, grew thick and fresh. She longed for it so badly that she could eat nothing else, and one evening her husband climbed the wall to gather her some.
The sorceress caught him on his second visit. She was not angry, or did not seem to be. She told him he could take all the rapunzel he wanted, on one condition: that when the child was born, she would come and raise it as her own. Frightened, and with his wife still unwell, the husband agreed, and when a daughter was born the sorceress came and took her, and named her Rapunzel.
The tower
Rapunzel grew into a girl with a voice like a bell and hair like fine gold, so long that when she braided it, it reached the ground. On her twelfth birthday the sorceress shut her away in a tower deep in the forest, a tower with no stairs and no door, only one small window at the very top. When the sorceress wished to come up, she would stand below and call, and Rapunzel would loop her long braid around a hook by the window and let it fall, and the sorceress would climb it.
A young prince, riding through the forest one day, heard Rapunzel singing to herself and could not find any way to reach her. He came back evening after evening to listen, until one night he saw the sorceress arrive and call up, and watched the golden braid come tumbling down. When she had gone, he stood in the same place and called the same words, and the braid fell for him too, and he climbed up. Rapunzel was startled, but he spoke gently, and soon she looked forward to his visits more than anything.
Found out
One day Rapunzel, without thinking, asked the sorceress why she was so much heavier to pull up than the young man who came in the evenings. The sorceress understood at once. In her anger she cut off Rapunzel’s braid and carried her far away, to a wild and empty country, and left her there alone. Then she went back to the tower and waited.
That evening the prince called up as always, and the sorceress let down the cut braid, which she had fastened to the hook. He climbed up expecting Rapunzel and found only the sorceress, who told him he would never see the girl again. In his grief he lost his footing and fell into the thorns below, and the thorns scratched his eyes so that he could no longer see.
Across the years
The prince wandered for a long time, blind, living on roots and berries, listening for a voice he half remembered. After some years his wandering brought him, without his knowing it, into the wild country where Rapunzel had been left. He heard her singing, the same song from the tower, and he walked toward it, and she saw him and ran to him and wept, and two of her tears fell onto his eyes.
Where the tears fell, his sight came back, clear as it had ever been, and he saw her face for the first time in years. He took her home to his father’s kingdom, and the sorceress was never heard of again. Rapunzel had grown up with only a window to the world, and it had not made her hard or afraid; and the prince had lost his way and his sight and had kept walking anyway; and in the end the two of them found each other by the sound of a song.
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Sorbian Lullaby
Play this softly while you read Rapunzel aloud: a traditional handplayed lullaby of the Sorbs, a small Slavic people of the forests and marshes of eastern Germany.
More stories, more lullabies
This is one tale in a growing collection of traditional stories from around the world, each one paired, where we can, with a real lullaby from the same culture.