Summary

“Sleeping Beauty” (French: La Belle au bois dormant, or The Beauty Sleeping in the Wood; German: Dornröschen, or Little Briar Rose), also titled in English as The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods, is a fairy tale about a princess cursed by an evil fairy to sleep for a hundred years before being awakened by a handsome prince. A good fairy, knowing the princess would be frightened if alone when she wakes, uses her wand to put every living person and animal in the palace and forest asleep, to awaken when the princess does.

The earliest known version of the tale is found in the narrative Perceforest, written between 1330 and 1344. Another was the Catalan poem Frayre de Joy e Sor de Paser. Giambattista Basile published another in his collection titled The Pentamerone, published posthumously in 1634 and adapted by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697. The version collected and printed by the Brothers Grimm was one orally transmitted from the Perrault.

The Aarne-Thompson classification system for fairy tales lists Sleeping Beauty as a Type 410: it includes a princess who is magically forced into sleep and later woken, reversing the magic. The fairy tale has been adapted countless times throughout history and retold by modern storytellers across a variety of media.

Grimm Stories

You can read the full text here: “Sleeping Beauty (Little Briar Rose)” [Full Text].

Giambattista Basile (1634)

You can read the full text here: “Sun, Moon and Talia” [Full Text].

Perrault (1697)

You can read the full text here: “Sleeping Beauty” [Full Text].

Bedtime Stories for Kids

You can read the full text here: “Sleeping Beauty Fairytale” [Full Text].

Fairy Tale and Bedtime Stories in English

You can view the full video here: “Sleeping Beauty” [Full Video].

Text Attributions

• Summary: Sleeping Beauty by Wikipedia. Adapted by Octaviano Gutierrez © Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Licence.
• “Sleeping Beauty” is free of known copyright restrictions in the United States.