Sleeping Beauty is one of those popular stories we all know... or maybe not.
First let's draw a summary of the story, and then go into details:
A Queen gives birth to a girl. The King announces a great party. Seven fairies are summoned to be godmothers of the girl. In gratitude for the honor (and for the gifts of the king) the fairies give the girl seven gifts.
- Be the most beautiful of all women.
- Have the kindness of an angel.
- The grace of the gazelles.
- Dance with perfection.
- Sing like birds.
- Play all the instruments with mastery.
- A great intelligence.
Suddenly, an evil fairy enters the room. Furious at not being invited to the party, she curses the girl saying:
-The day of your fifteenth birthday you will pierce yourself with a needle and you will die!
One of the good fairies says:
-The girl will not die, she will sleep a hundred years and a prince will wake her up.
Spend time. When the girl turns fifteen she finds an old woman sewing in a castle room; is the evil fairy who by this stratagem makes the young woman prick her finger with a needle, and sleeps. The King, despondent, sends to call the good fairy, who says:
- So that your pain is not immense; and so that the princess is not alone, they will all sleep, and they will not wake up until their long sleep ends.
Everyone sleeps a huge nap. A magical forest covers the castle. A hundred years pass and a prince goes through the place. Your horse refuses to move forward. As if by magic, see the castle and enter. Find the princess and, excited by her beauty, kisses her gently and the young girl awakens, as well as the rest of the sleepers. The next day the festivities begin with the marriage between the princess and her savior.
Now the true story of Sleeping Beauty:
Before being a fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty was a medieval folktale, heir to an even darker and grander past. In 1697, Charles Perrault published it as: The Sleeping Beauty of the Forest (Belle au Bois Dormant). Years later, after deep folklore investigations, the Grimm brothers republished the story, this time in Germany, under the title: Sleeping Beauty (Dornröschen).
These are the versions that circulate normally, and on which the imaginary of the story was built -including Disney and its inexhaustible capacity to annihilate traditional monuments-. They are similar in almost everything, except in the number of fairies. The Brothers Grimm smoothed the story to give it the charm of simplicity, Perrault, however, uses the story to rant against women and give free rein to their machismo. For example, he insists that the prince makes fun of the princess' old clothes, and includes intelligence as one of the gifts offered by the fairies, as if this could only exist supernaturally in the woman. Then he feeds on the prince's mother, a kind of insatiable ogre who tries to devour the children of the young couple. Grimm, much more subtle, eliminate the gift of intelligence, and clarify on several occasions that the princess already had it.
The truth is that, despite the efforts of the brothers Grimm not to be sexist, the medieval version of Sleeping Beauty tells us about a rather stupid princess. Read out of a mythological context, the curse of the fairy is only understandable in terms of profound misogyny. Let us suppose that someone sends us a similar curse, that is to say, that in a little while we will fall into a dream of a century after piercing us with a needle. The most reasonable thing is that we stay away from such textile tools, but this does not happen in the story. Even the king, wise and prudent man, is scandalized by the prophecy, which he considers perfectly achievable. It is worth noting that in the middle ages, and much more here, the woman was intimately related to the preparation and maintenance of the clothes, so there was always a needle at hand for them. In this sense, the fear of the king is doubly unusual, because he knows that his daughter, as a woman, is obliged to do the textile tasks, but it never occurs to her to abandon them, a fact that would leave her safe from the curse.
Soon we will see that all these anecdotes have survived for the simple fact that they have a strong mythological roots. They are not there in vain, nor is their usefulness merely narrative; They are there because they are the only link to the true story of Sleeping Beauty.
Let's travel from the bedrooms of romantic and Victorian girls, and, why not, the young girls of our time, and fly to the remote past of Western Europe. Let's go through the middle ages, which we imagine covered by a dark cloud (and equally bright), we pass over the Beowulf, English monument to the ancient mythology of that country, lost forever, let's leave behind the first Merovingian and all the kings of the continent ; let's go back, far in time, long before Galileo climbs to the tree; let us immerse ourselves in an archaic darkness, when the Lords of Valhalla were still feared and worshiped by the Indo-European tribes; Then yes, there we will find the reason that a seemingly imbecile tale survives in our era; illuminating the hidden essence of Sleeping Beauty.
Our link to that dark age is the Volsunga Saga (Völsungasaga), written in Iceland in the thirteenth century on stories that predate the Roman boom, and that go back, perhaps, to 800 BC, when the so-called Völkerwanderung occurred (migration of villages); a time of changes and exiles, where entire civilizations migrated throughout Europe. Among other notable stories, the Volsunga Saga tells the story of Sigurd (Sigurðr) and Brunilda (Brynhildr), whose foundations are even before migrations, in a time as old as 1000 a.C.
Brunhilda was a Valkyrie, that is, a demigoddess who gathered the dead heroes on the battlefield, escorting them to the wide halls of Valhalla. She is, by all accounts, the woman in the wild, honorable and terrible at the same time. Its ambiguous silhouette will star in Nordic epics like Nibelungenlied, and it would inspire Richard Wagner in his capital work: The Ring of the Nibelungs (Der Ring des Nibelungen). The Volsunga Saga tells that Odin, the great Norse god, orders Brunilda to decide on the fate of a battle between two kings, Agnar and Hjalmgunnar. She decides for Agnar, and Odin, enraged by not having bent down to her favorite, Hjalmgunnar, the condemnation to an eternal dream, that is, to let go of her goddess status and live in the thick world of the senses. In other words, Odin condemns Brunilda to live like a mortal woman, and imprisons her on Mount Hindarfjall, hidden in the Alps. To do this he nails it to the hard floor of a cave using fire needles.
Sigurd, a gentleman of noble lineage, discovers the entrance to a dark cavern in that mountain, and describes it as a castle of rock surrounded by a thick forest. There he finds Brunhilda, seized by a dream so deep that, at first, our hero considers her dead; although he knows that he is not. His king, Gunnar, has told him the tragedy of Brunhilda, and has sent him on a suicide mission, get the hand of this fallen Valkyrie. For this, Sigurd disguises himself with Gunnar's clothes, since Brunilda will only marry anyone who can defeat her in single combat. The young man wakes her with a kiss on the cheek, a detail that some point out as metaphorical, holding that this kiss was, in reality, a brush with the edge of his sword; and they intertwine in a fierce battle.
Sigurd wins. Brunhilda meekly surrenders to her destination, but before returning they must spend the night in the cave, as a strong storm hits the flanks of Hindarfjall. They lie together, but Sigurd places his sword between them, so their bodies do not touch. He remains faithful to his promise to the king; but Brunhilda, dazzled by the strength of the young man, tries to caress him and cuts a finger with the sword, whose manufacture was so perfect that its tip was as tiny and sharp as the tip of a pin.
Recognizing these mythological shreds is not simple, nor is it particularly necessary to enjoy a good story; but its weight is what decides the immortality of a popular story. Perhaps we do not know why, nor how or when, but all the stories that still entertain our children have an amazing past, something that enters through the ears but flourishes in the unconscious, which branches out in the vast psychological inheritance of the peoples, oblivious to the vicissitudes of the cinema and the changes, immobile, like the dream of some princesses, fixed, like the sharp gaze of the princes who wander through forests already forgotten.
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We await your comments and suggestions, until the next post, have a nice day!
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