S urely among the most original and

gifted of illustrators, Paul O. Zelinsky

once again has crafted a unique vision

of an age-old tale. Drawing on elements
from early French and Italian sources

as well as from the Grimms, the artist

brings forth the humanity of Rapiiiizel,

taking us beyond the events of the

story to discover its powerful, endur-

ing truths. His stunning oil paintings

evoke not a barren, forbidding tower,

but one of esoteric beauty and phys-
ical luxury; not an ugly witch who
cruelly imprisons a young girl, but a

mother figure who powerfully resists

her child's inevitable growth; and two

young people who must struggle in

the wilderness for the self-reliance that

marks the true beginning of adulthood.

Resonant with the complex flow of
human relationships, this book is a work
of rare endeavor.
z ^te
 i^

k.

i 1 1 1 n 1 1 1 i ¥yn nnrnn

RAPUNZEL
Retold and Illustrated by

PAULO. ZELINSI<y
Dutton Children's Books • Nevv^York

<^«>
v
 Copyright © lyyy by Paul O. Zelinsky

All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Ctitaloging-iii-PubliCiitioii Data

Zelinsky. Paul O.

Rapunzel/by Paul O. Zelinsky. — ist ed.

p. cm.
Summary: A retelling of the German folktale in which
a beautiful girl with long golden hair is kept imprisoned
in a lonely tower by a sorceress.

ISBN 0-525-45607-4 (hardcover)

[i. Fairy tales. 2. — Germany]

Folklore I. Title.

PZ8.Z38Rap 1997 398.2'o943'o2 — dc2i 96-50260 CIP AC

PubHshed in the United States 1997 by Dutton Children's Books,

a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

375 Hudson Street, New York, Nev/York 10014

Designed by Amy Berniker and Paul O. Zelinsky

Hand lettering on jacket and title page by John Stevens

Printed in Hong Kong

First Edition

3579 10 864
i lovingly dedicate this book to my taniily-

Anna, Rachel, and Deborah

 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2009

http://www.archive.org/details/rapunzelOOzeli
L ''ong ago, there lived a

As year followed year, this

man and
was
a woman who
their only sorrow.
had no children.
Then one spring,

the wife felt her dress growing tight around her waist. Joyfully she
said to her husband, "We are going to have a child at last."
W! f0
 The wife liked to sit by a small window at

the back of their house and look down into

a beautiful garden. Flowers grew there, and

rare fruits and herbs of every kind. The

garden belonged to a sorceress, who had
enclosed it on all sides with a high wall. No
one ever dared to enter it.

One day, as the wife sat by the window;

her eyes fixed on a bed of rapunzel. The
herb looked so luxuriant, so green and thick
and fresh, that she felt a terrible longing to

taste it. Day after day her cra\ing gre\y until

she began to suffer from it. She became pale

and wretched, and said to her husband, "It I

cannot eat some of the rapunzel from the

garden behind our house, I am scorns; to die."
 Her husband was alarmed to hear such desperate words. He loved
his wife dearly, and saw no choice but to bring her some of the

rapunzel.

Ten times, twenty times he curled the garden wall, but found

neither door nor gate. So, lowering himself through the window at

the back of the house, he cHmbed down into the sorceress' garden.

Quickly he pulled up as much rapunzel as he could hold and

scrambled back up through the window.

His wife made a salad of the roots and greens, and devoured it

with a wild hunger. So intensely delicious was the taste that she

nearly fainted as she ate. Yet the next day her craving for rapunzel

was even fiercer than betore.

 Once again the husband made his way down the wall and into

the garden. But this time as he reached for the rapunzel, the
sorceress rose up before him. "How dare you come here to steal my
rapunzel!" she cried. "Oh, it will serve you ill!"

"Have mercy on me," the man begged. "My wife is carrying our

child. She has seen your rapunzel from our window and conceived
such a longing for it that she will die unless she can eat some. What
am I to do?"

The sorceress considered his w^ords. "If what you say is true, you
may take the rapunzel that you need. But in return, you must give
me the child your wife will bear."

The frightened husband did not know what to say. Rather than
see his wife die, he agreed to the demand. And when the child was
born, the sorceress appeared in the room. She named the baby girl

Rapunzel and carried her away.

'-3
 The sorceress cared for the baby, seeing to her every need.

Rapunzel grew to be a child of rare beauty, with pale skin and an

abundance of flowing red-gold hair. When she reached the age of
twelve, the sorceress led her into the forest to live in a high tower.
 The tower was a great column rising in

the middle of the woods. Although it looked

narrow on the outside, on the inside it was
large, with many elegant rooms. Yet no door
led into this tower, and its only window was
at the very top.

When the sorceress wished to enter,

she stood below the window and called,

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair."

Then Rapunzel would unpin her silky

braids, wind them around a hook on the

window frame, and let them tumble all

the way to the ground. The sorceress would

grab hold of them and hoist herself up.
 For years, Rapunzel lived alone in her rooms above the treetops,
visited only by the sorceress. Then one day a king's son came riding

through the woods. As he neared the tower, he heard a voice

sweeter than any he had ever known. It was Rapunzel, singing to

the forest birds. Charmed by her voice, the prince fell deeply ni

love. He circled the tower ten times, twenty times, but found no
entrance. "How strange this tower is," he said to himself, and felt he

would die of sadness.

He inquired at the nearest houses, where he was told that the

tower belonged to a sorceress, who was keeping a young girl shut

away inside. Day after day the prince returned, hoping to glimpse

the sirl whose sweet singing haci moved him so.

 One morning he saw the sorceress appear
below the window and call up, "Rapunzel,
Rapunzel, let down your hair!"
At once the prince knew how he, too,
might enter the tower.
The next evening he stood under the

window and called, "Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

let down your hair!" Rapunzel's hair came
billowing down. The king's son took hold of
it and puDed himself up.
"Heaven preserve me!" cried Rapunzel
when the prince stepped through her
window, for she had never set eyes on a man
before. But he began to speak to her in such

a friendly way that her fear was soon gone.

 "Your singing was so beautiful," the prince told her, "that I knew
I must see your face, or my heart could have no peace." Rapunzel
saw that he -was young and handsome; in her own heart she felt a

happiness she had never known. And when the prince, grown bold,

proposed to marry her then and there, she consented. They held a

ceremony in the tower, and every evening after that, he returned.

The sorceress, who came only by day, knew nothing of his visits.
m
 One day when the sorceress entered the tower, Rapunzel said, "It

you please, Stepmother, help me with my dress. It is growing so

tight around my waist, it doesn't want to fit me anymore."

Instantly the sorceress understood what Rapunzel did not. "Oh,

you wicked child!" she shrieked. "What do I hear you say? I

thought I had kept you safe, away from the whole world, but you
have betrayed me!"
 In a rage, she seized the braids and coils of Rapunzel's silky hair

and sheared them off. Then she sent the miserable girl to a wild

country, to live alone with no one to care for her. After some
months m this wilderness, Rapunzel gave birth to twins, a boy and
a gn-1.
^»AjaKr:^ ^ ti:_LJi !k-^:i x
 Once the sorceress had cast Rapunzel
out ot the tower, she gathered the cutoff
hair and fastened it to the window-hook.
That evening, when the prince called up,

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!"

she let the hair cascade down. The poor

prince pulled himself up to the window,

only to be confronted by the sorceress, her

eyes wild with fury. "So you have come to

fetch your dearest darling?" she cried. "Well,

you shall not see her again — Rapunzel is

lost to you forever!"

Struck through with grief, the prince let

go of the braids, and he plummeted to the

ground.
 Although the fall should have killed him, the prince lived. But his

eyes were hurt; he could no longer see. Wretched and blind, he

stumbled from place to place, eating nothing but roots and
berries, thinking of nothing but the loss of his beloved wife. After a

year of wandering in such misery, he came into the same wilderness

where Rapunzel was living with her children. There one day he
heard a voice so dear to him that he rushed towarci it. Rapunzel saw
him and opened her arms to him, weeping.
I ,
^
 iN
I i y /

#
.y''

SX

.f-%-r-^:^ mmPf
 As Rapunzel embraced the prince, two
of her tears fell into his eyes. Suddenly his

vision grew clear; once again the prince

could see.

He gazed at Rapunzel and at their two

beautiful children. He looked up at the hills

beyond the rocky landscape and knew that

he was not lost. The prince led his family

out of the wilderness toward his kingdom,

where they were received with great joy.
There they Hved a long Hfe, happy and content.
 ^^ ^9P( C
A Note About "Rapunzel"
"Rapunzel" has a rich and surprising history. Although Wilhelm and
Jacob Grimm included it in their famous collection of German folktales,

Children's and Household Tales, their "Rapunzel" was hardly the rustic

story of "folk" origin that they impHed it to be. It was actually their own
adaptation of a rather elegant story of the same name, published in

Leipzig some twenty years earUer. That "Rapunzel" was a loose German
translation of a much older French literary fairy tale, which itself drew
heavily on a story published in Naples, a story that did have a local

folktale as its source.

// Pentamerone, or The Tale of Tales, written in the Neapolitan dialect by

Giambattista Basile and published in 1634, was a colorful and sometimes

ribald collection of stories-within-a-framing-story, in the manner of The

Thousand and One Nights. One of its tales was "Petrosinella."

In this story a pregnant mother, craving her witch-neighbor's parsley

(called petrosine in NeapoHtan), is caught in the act of stealing it. Seven

years later the witch collects on her debt, taking the young, long-haired

Petrosinella to live with her in a tower. After some time, a prince

happens on the tower, climbs the braids hanging from its window, and
falls in love with Petrosinella. A neighbor sees his nighttime visits and
warns the witch that Petrosinella may soon run away. The witch brags

that the girl is held by a charm and cannot flee. But Petrosinella and her
prince elope, using a rope and the witch's own amulets: magic acorns

that allow them to evade her fierce pursuit.

When a vogue for fairy tales swept Europe in the late seventeenth

century, // Pentamerone inspired a French noblewoman, Charlotte-Rose

de Caumont La Force, to write her own Tale of Tales. Published in 1697,

these stories were written in a nunnery —La Force had been banished
from Louis XIV's court for her scandalous satirical novels. Lm Conte des

Contes included "Persinette," an elaborate tale based in part on

"Petrosinella."

Here a newly wed and pregnant young wife urges her husband to

steal parsley (persil) from the neighboring garden of a fairy. The husband
is caught, and the fairy claims the child, Persinette, at birth. Twelve years
later the fairy moves the long-haired girl into a magical silver tower deep

in the woods. There, in its many glowing rooms, Persinette lives amidst
in ® IPI
great luxury; there she

some
is discovered by, and soon married

prince. In time, her pregnancy scandaUzes the fairy,

to,

who
the hand-
^
cuts the

girl's hair, banishes her (to a lovely seaside cottage), and tricks the prince,

resulting in his blindness. After a year, when Persmette's tears heal the

prince's eyes, the reunited family must still undergo some terrible

ordeals —food turning into stone, birds into dragons and harpies —before
the fairy takes pity and saves them.

Among the translations of "Persinette," one by Joachim Chnstoph

Friedrich Schulz, in his 1790 Kleincn Romaiie, found favor with the
German public. Schulz dealt freely with La Force's text (to which he
gave no attribution), altering phrases and adding details, such as the tight

dress that betrays the girl's pregnancy to the old woman. And for parsley

he substituted the altogether unrelated herb called Rapiinzcl in German

and, in English, rampion.

(Rampion is both an ornamental flower and a salad green, edible in

its leaf and tuberous root, with a flavor somewhere between watercress
and arugula. It is not related to the wild onion known as rampion or

ramp, a traditional dish in some parts of the United States. In this book
I have chosen to refer to the herb only as "rapunzel.")

The Grimms wrote m the appendix to the first edition of their col-

lection (1812) that Schulz's "Rapunzel" was "undoubtedly derived from

an oral tale." Apparently they were unaware of its French provenance,

though they did mention its similarity to "Petrosinella." For their own
version of the tale, they shortened and recast Schulz's story in the harsh-

er style of their other tales. So La Force/Schulz's newlyweds became a

couple burdened with infertiHty; the magical tower turned into a prison
tower, in which no marriage ceremony occurred; and Rapunzel's place
of exile became an inhospitable wilderness. In the Grimms' first edition.

Rapunzel's tight dress gave away her secret trysts, but by the second

edition it was her now familiar shp of the tongue: "Why are you so hea\7

to pull up, while the prince is here in the bhnk ot an eye?"

Although the Grimm brothers purportedly created their collection to

preserve ancient stories in a pure state, untouched by literary influence,

the history of "Rapunzel" shows how far from this goal the reality actu-

ally fell. In recent years, scholars of folklore have traced the confluence

of oral traditions and literary invention; indeed, "Rapunzel" is a prime

example of this intermingling.

p flB ^P il^K %
My retelling of "Rapunzel" takes its shape from both the Grimms'

and earlier versions of the tale. I have tried to combine the most mov-
ing aspects of the story with the most satisfying structure, and to bring

out its mysterious internal echoes. In selecting a setting, too, I considered

the story's three countries of origin. The formal beauty of Italian

Renaissance art seemed to fit well with a tale centered on the beauty of

a young girl and a mother figure whose own youth is gone. Also, for me,

the very image of a tower evokes the Italian landscape, where the cam-
panile, or bell tower, plays a prominent role in architectural tradition.

(The closeness of this word to Caiiipatiula, the name of the bellflower

genus to which rapunzel belongs, helped me to believe I was setting out

on the right track.)

As an interloper in the august tradition of Italian Renaissance paint-

ing, I have been humbled by my own attempts to achieve effects that any

Renaissance painter's apprentice could have tossed off as though it were

nothing: billowing drapery or the glint from a fingernail or light falling

on tree leaves.

It would please me if my pictures served in some measure to spur an

interest in the magnificent art from which I have drawn. My great hope,
of course, is that this book may give pleasure to readers in and of itself.

Paul O. Zelinsky
 PAUL Q ZELINSICY
has brought his rare and treasured gifts to

tiie illustration of many highly acclaimed

children's books. Noted for his power-
ful sense of narrative, his wit, and his re-

markable ability to create a unique and

seamless visual world for each story he

undertakes, Mr. Zelinsky has been a Cal-

decott Honor medalist three times — for

Hansel and Grclcl. retold by Rika Lesser;

Rtiiiipclstiltsliin; and Simiiip Ain;cl. by Anne

Isaacs, which was also a Boston Glohc^Honi

Book Honor Award recipient and a .Vcic

York Times Ten Best Illustrated Books of

the Year, among many other honors. As
well, Mr. Zelinsky has illustrated the
work of Beverly Cleary, Carl Sandburg,

and is the creator of the beloved JMieels

on the Bus. He lives in New York Cif\'

with his wife and t\vo daughters.

nUTTON CHILDREN'S 1300KS

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.K.^ Hudson Sneci

Sew Yorh. .\en' York 10014

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