Read the fairy tale Lu loves
Sleeping Beauty
A christening with one guest too few, a curse turned gentle by a fairy’s grace, and a kingdom that falls asleep for a hundred years: one of the most enduring fairy tales in the world, first written down in France.
A king and queen who had long wished for a child finally had a daughter, and they held a great christening to celebrate her, inviting every fairy in the kingdom to be her godmother so that each might give the baby a gift. One by one the fairies stepped forward and blessed the princess with beauty, and grace, and a lovely singing voice, and a gift for dancing, until an old fairy nobody had remembered to invite swept into the hall, angry at being left out.
The old fairy leaned over the cradle and declared that when the princess grew to be a young woman, she would prick her finger on a spindle and die of it. The whole court gasped, but one young fairy had not yet given her own gift, and she had hidden herself nearby, guessing that the old fairy might do something unkind. She could not undo the curse entirely, but she could soften it: the princess would indeed prick her finger, but instead of dying, she would fall into a deep sleep for a hundred years, until a prince came to wake her.
The spindle
The king, hoping to outrun the curse, ordered every spinning wheel in the kingdom burned and forbade anyone from ever spinning again. Years passed, and the princess grew as beautiful and graceful as the fairies had promised, until on her sixteenth birthday, wandering through the castle while her parents were away, she came upon a small room at the top of a forgotten tower, where an old woman, who had never heard the king’s order, sat quietly spinning.
The princess had never seen a spindle before, and she asked if she might try it herself. The moment she took it in her hand, she pricked her finger, exactly as the old fairy had promised, and fell at once into a deep sleep. The young fairy, watching over the kingdom still, heard what had happened and hurried to finish her own kindness: she touched everyone in the castle with her wand, and one by one the king, the queen, the guards, the cooks, even the fire in the kitchen hearth and the dog asleep by the door, all fell softly asleep along with the princess, so that no one would wake alone in a hundred years and no one would wake to find her gone.
A hundred years
Around the castle, brambles and briar roses grew up thick and tall, higher every year, until the whole building disappeared behind a wall of thorns and no one from outside could see so much as a chimney. Princes from other kingdoms heard the story and tried to cut their way through to see if it was true, but the thorns had grown too close and too sharp, and none of them ever reached the tower.
A hundred years passed exactly as the fairy had promised, almost to the day, and a young prince from a neighbouring kingdom rode through the forest and heard an old story about a castle asleep behind a wall of roses. When he reached the brambles, they parted for him on their own, as though they had simply been waiting for the right moment, and closed again softly behind him once he had passed.
The waking
The prince walked through silent courtyards past sleeping guards and sleeping dogs, up the stairs of the forgotten tower, until he found the princess exactly as the fairy had left her a hundred years before, asleep and utterly still. He knelt beside her, and the moment he took her hand, she opened her eyes, as though the hundred years had been no longer than a single night’s rest.
All through the castle, the sleep lifted at the very same moment: the king and queen woke mid sentence, the cooks went on with the meal they had left unfinished, the dog by the door got up and barked, and the fire in the kitchen crackled back to life. The princess and the prince were married within the week, and the kingdom, which had slept so gently and so completely for so long, woke to find that the hundred years had cost it nothing at all.
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Occitan Lullaby
Play this softly while you read Sleeping Beauty aloud: a traditional lullaby from Occitania, the same broad stretch of southern France whose old tales and songs shaped so much of this collection.
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.