The story
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1785–1863 · 1786–1859)
From Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), first published in 1812. Retold here in our own words.
A husband and wife longed for a child, and at last the wife was expecting one. From their little window they could see into a splendid garden belonging to a sorceress, full of flowers and herbs, and no one dared to enter it. The wife began to crave the rapunzel plants growing there, a kind of leafy green, and she grew pale and thin with wanting.
"What is wrong?" asked her husband. "If I cannot taste the rapunzel from that garden," she said, "I shall die." So at dusk he climbed the wall, gathered a handful of the leaves, and brought them to her. She ate them greedily, but the next day she craved three times as much. Again he climbed over at dusk, but this time the sorceress stood waiting. "How dare you steal from my garden?" she cried. The trembling man begged forgiveness and explained. "I will let you take all you want," said the sorceress, "on one condition: when your child is born, you will give it to me." In his fear he agreed.
When the baby girl was born, the sorceress appeared, named her Rapunzel, and carried her away. At twelve years old Rapunzel was the most beautiful child in the world, and the sorceress locked her in a tall tower deep in the forest. The tower had no door and no stairs, only one small window at the very top. When the sorceress wanted to visit, she called: "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair." For Rapunzel had wonderful long hair, fine as spun gold, twenty ells long, and she let it fall from the window, and the sorceress climbed up by it.
Years passed. One day a prince rode through the forest and heard a voice singing so sweetly that he stopped to listen. It was Rapunzel, passing the lonely hours with song. The prince watched and saw the sorceress come and heard the words: "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair." The next evening, when all was dark, he called out the same words, the hair fell, and he climbed up.
Rapunzel was frightened at first, for she had never seen a man, but the prince spoke kindly, and when he asked if she would marry him, she thought: he will take me away from this tower, which is better than staying. She said yes. Then she had an idea: "I will gather silk thread, and you will bring a skein each time you visit, and I will weave a ladder." So the prince came every evening, for the sorceress came by day.
But one day Rapunzel, thinking aloud, said: "Tell me, Dame Gothel, why are you so much heavier to pull up than the young prince?" The sorceress understood everything in an instant. In a rage she seized Rapunzel's beautiful hair, wrapped it round her hand, cut it off with scissors, and carried the weeping girl away to a desert where she left her alone.
That evening the sorceress tied the cut hair to the window hook. When the prince called, she let it down, and he climbed up, only to find the sorceress glaring at him. "You will never see Rapunzel again," she shrieked, and in his horror the prince leapt from the tower into the thorns below. The thorns scratched out his eyes, and he wandered blind through the forest for years, eating only roots and berries, weeping for his lost bride.
At last he came to the desert where Rapunzel lived with the twin boy and girl she had borne him. She heard his voice and ran to him, and two of her tears fell upon his eyes, and he could see again. She led him to her cottage, and they lived there in joy, and the sorceress was never heard of again.
Moral and themes
The tale is about imprisonment and escape, and about the price of both. Rapunzel's hair is her only connection to the world, and it becomes the tool of her rescue and then of her betrayal. The story does not pretend that escape is free: the prince loses his eyes, Rapunzel loses her home, and both must wander before they find each other. What restores them is not magic but love and grief: her tears heal his blindness.
Reading note
Rapunzel is one of the Grimms' most borrowed-from tales, and the tower with no door has become an image for every kind of isolation. Notice the story's economy: the whole tragedy turns on one careless sentence, Rapunzel's innocent question to Dame Gothel. The Grimms' sorceress is not simply evil; she raised the child for twelve years, and her rage reads as much like a betrayed guardian's as a villain's. That ambiguity is why the tale keeps being retold: everyone in it has a reason.