Rapunzel - Wikipedia

After years of wishing for a child, a couple is expecting their first baby. The husband and wife live next to a large high-walled flower and herb garden belonging to a sorceress.[a] The wife craves the rapunzel (which is either cornsalad or rampion[5]) that she sees growing in the garden. She refuses to eat anything else and begins to waste away. Her husband fears for her life and one night, he scales the garden wall to steal some rapunzel for her. When the man returns home, his wife makes a salad out of the rapunzel and eats it. But the next day, the wife craves more rapunzel, so her husband returns to the garden that night to steal some more. As he climbs down the garden wall, the sorceress catches him and accuses him of theft. The man begs for mercy and explains his wife's condition. The sorceress agrees to be lenient, allowing the man to take all the rapunzel he wants on the condition that the baby be given to her when it is born.[b] Desperate, he agrees.[c]

When the wife gives birth to a baby girl, the sorceress takes her to raise as her own and names her "Rapunzel" after the plant her mother had craved. Rapunzel grows up to be a beautiful child with long golden hair.[d] When she turns 12, the sorceress locks her up in a tower in the middle of the woods, with neither stairs nor a door, and only one room and one window at the top.[e] In order to visit Rapunzel, the sorceress stands at the bottom of the tower and calls out:

Rapunzel!Rapunzel!Let down your hairThat I may climb thy golden stair![f]

Whenever Rapunzel hears that rhyme,[g] she fastens her long braided hair to a hook in the window before letting it fall 20 yards to the ground, and the sorceress climbs it.

A few years later, a prince rides through the forest and hears Rapunzel singing from the tower. Entranced by her ethereal voice, he searches for her and discovers the tower, but is unable to get in. The prince returns to the tower often, listening to Rapunzel's beautiful singing, and one day sees the sorceress visit her as usual and learns how to gain access. When the sorceress leaves, the prince bids Rapunzel to let her hair down. Thinking it is the sorceress calling her again, Rapunzel lets down her hair and the prince climbs up. The two then fall in love and secretly marry. As the sorceress visits Rapunzel by day, the couple plans a means of escape: the prince will bring his wife a strand of silk every night until she has enough to make a ladder for her to climb down the tower and ride away with him on horseback.

Before the couple's escape plan can come to fruition, however, the sorceress visits one day and Rapunzel innocently asks her why all her clothes are tight around the waist (this part comes from the 1812 original edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen or Children's and Household Tales, most commonly known in English as Grimms' Fairy Tales;[12] in later editions, Rapunzel instead asks "Dame Gothel",[h] in a moment of forgetfulness, why it is easier for her to draw up the prince than her[14]). In anger, the sorceress cuts off Rapunzel's hair and banishes her into the wilderness to fend for herself.

When the prince calls that night, the sorceress hooks Rapunzel's severed hair and lets it down to haul him up. To the prince's horror and shock, he finds himself meeting the sorceress instead of Rapunzel. After the sorceress tells the prince in a rage that he will never see Rapunzel again, he throws himself from the tower, landing in a patch of thorns. Although the prince survives, the thorns blind him. A month later, Rapunzel gives birth in the wilderness to her twin children with the prince – a boy and a girl.

For some years, the blind prince wanders through the wastelands of the country and eventually comes to the wilderness where Rapunzel has been living with their children. One day, as Rapunzel sings, the prince hears her voice again, and they are reunited. When they fall into each other's arms, Rapunzel sheds tears, two of which fall into the prince's eyes, immediately restoring his sight. The prince leads Rapunzel and their children to his kingdom where they live happily ever after.[i]

Another version of the story ends with the revelation that the sorceress had untied Rapunzel's hair after the prince leapt from the tower, and it slipped from her hands and landed far below, leaving her trapped in the tower.[16]