Briar Rose
Briar Rose is today more known as The Sleeping Beauty, a classic fairy tale by the Grimm Brothers. Carl Offterdinger illustrated a slightly different version by Ludwig Bechstein for this project but you won't notice any difference by judging just the pictures.
We'll expose some of the differences between Bechstein's and Grimm's versions later. For now, let's focus on the summary.
The king and the queen long for a child and finally, when a queen takes a bath, a frog appears and foretells her that her wish will come true. Indeed, soon the queen becomes a mother to a lovely daughter.
The royal couple is delighted and throws a huge party. They invite a lot of people from the country, including wise women who live there. But there is a problem. They have just twelve golden plates and there are thirteen wise women in the kingdom.
So they invite just twelve of them.
When the thirteenth wise woman finds out she is furious and comes to the castle without an invitation. She waits until other wise women present their magical presents (all kinds of virtues) to the baby and then gives one present too. When the girl fulfills fifteen years, she will prick herself with a spindle and die.
Fortunately, the twelfth wise woman didn't give her present yet and she used the opportunity to soften the nasty spell. She couldn't completely deny it, though. So the girl will still prick her finger but instead of dying, she will fall into a long, one hundred-year-long sleep.
The king is not happy with this and bannes all the spindles in the kingdom. He feels much better after that but nobody can't escape destiny and one day, exactly fifteen years after the spell, the girl wanders around the castle and enters an old tower.
There is a locked room with a rusty key in it.
She opens the doors and enters the room where an old lady spins flax. The girl sees a spindle for the first time in her life and wants to touch it.
She pricks her finger and falls asleep. Everybody in the castle falls asleep as well.
All the servants, all the guards, everybody in the kitchen, including the cook who was just about to punish a clumsy assistant, everybody immediately starts sleeping.
Even the animals fall asleep. The horses, the dogs, the flies on the wall, ...
Many years pass and the castle is surrounded with thorns. There are rumors about a castle with a sleeping beauty in it but nobody is able to go through the thorns.
Then a young man, a prince decides to go through. This was exactly one hundred years after the princess pricked her finger.
The thorns move away from the prince and the roses appear everywhere around. When he enters, the path closes behind him. He is alone.
He reaches the castle.
He enters and finds everybody sleeping. Including the cook and the boy who is still about to get punished.
Including the nobility, the servants, the court fool, and, of course, the king and the queen.
Then he finally finds the sleeping princess.
She is even more beautiful than the rumors claim. He gets to her bed and kisses her.
She wakes up and everybody else in the castle wakes up too.
Including the kitchen boy who receives a deserved punishment.
Including the animals, from the horses in the stable to the flies on the walls.
The prince and the princess marry and everybody is happy.
***
Here are some promised differences between Bechstein's and Grimm's stories about the sleeping beauty. Bechstein puts more emphasis on details. For instance, he lists all the virtues given to the baby by the wise women:
- cheerfulness,
- grace,
- gentleness,
- humbleness,
- kindness,
- modesty,
- piety,
- virtue,
- sincerity,
- understanding,
- wealth.
Yes, there are eleven of them. Then the angry wise woman comes and breaks the idyll. Another tiny detail is her prophecy. She foretells that the girl will prick her finger exactly fifteen years after her prophecy. Brothers Grimm wrote that this would happen in her fifteenth year (actually before her fifteenth birthday. Bechsteins's version is more dramatic and Grimm's has more logic (her parents could easily protect her if they were informed about the exact date). Somehow most of us know best the third version - she pricks her finger on her fifteenth birthday. It's dramatic and symbolic - many countries consider this age as the end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood.
Another detail is the description of times after she falls asleep. Bechstein tells more about the sleeping of everybody (including animals) and Grimms more about the legend that started around the castle. This seems logical considering they were very fond of legends and tried to use every opportunity of connecting fairy tales with them.
We won't go too deep in this comparison but if you are interested in the background of this popular classic story, visit: https://discover.hubpages.com/education/the-sleeping-beauty