page_title: Sleeping Beauty
section_title: Variations
hierarchical_section_title: Sleeping Beauty / Plot / Variations
caption_attribution_description: From The Sleeping Beauty (1876), later republished in The Sleeping Beauty Picture Book (1911).
context_page_description: "Sleeping Beauty", or "Little Briar Rose", also titled in English as "The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods", is a classic fairy tale about a princess who is cursed to sleep for a hundred years by an evil fairy, to be awakened by a handsome prince at the end of them. The good fairy, realizing that the princess would be frightened if alone when she awakens, uses her wand to put every living person and animal in the palace asleep, to awaken when the princess does.
  The earliest known version of the story is found in the narrative Perceforest, composed between 1330 and 1344. The tale was first published by Giambattista Basile in his collection of tales titled The Pentamerone. Basile's version was later adapted and published by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697. The version that was later collected and printed by the Brothers Grimm was an orally transmitted version of the literary tale published by Perrault.
  The Aarne-Thompson classification system for folktales classifies "Sleeping Beauty" as being a 410 tale type, meaning it includes a princess who is forced into an enchanted sleep and is later awakened reversing the magic placed upon her.
context_section_description: The princess's name has varied from one adaptation to the other. In Sun, Moon, and Talia, she is named Talia (Sun and Moon being her twin children). She has no name in Perrault's story but her daughter is called  "Aurore". The Brothers Grimm named her "Briar Rose" in their 1812 collection. However, some translations of the Grimms' tale give the princess the name "Rosamond". Tchaikovsky's ballet and Disney's version named her Princess Aurora; however, in the Disney version, she is also called "Briar Rose" in her childhood, when she is being raised incognito by the good fairies. John Stejean named her "Rosebud" in TeleStory Presents.
  Besides Sun, Moon, and Talia, Basile included another variant of this Aarne-Thompson type, The Young Slave, in his book, The Pentamerone. The Grimms also included a second, more distantly related one titled The Glass Coffin.
  Italo Calvino included a variant in Italian Folktales. In his version, the cause of the princess's sleep is a wish by her mother. As in Pentamerone, the prince rapes her in her sleep and her children are born. Calvino retains the element that the woman who tries to kill the children is the king's mother, not his wife, but adds that she does not want to eat them herself, and instead serves them to the king. His version came from Calabria, but he noted that all Italian versions closely followed Basile's.
  In his More English Fairy Tales, Joseph Jacobs noted that the figure of the Sleeping Beauty was in common between this tale and the Gypsy tale The King of England and his Three Sons.
  The hostility of the king's mother to his new bride is repeated in the fairy tale The Six Swans, and also features in The Twelve Wild Ducks, where the mother is modified to be the king's stepmother. However, these tales omit the attempted cannibalism.
caption: He stands—he stoops to gaze—he kneels—he wakes her with a kiss, woodcut by Walter Crane
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