"Rapunzel" German pronunciatio is a German fairy tale in the collection assembled by the Brothers Grimm, and first published in 1812 as part of Children's and Household Tales.

The Grimm Brothers' story is an adaptation of the fairy tale Persinette by Charlotte-Rose de Caumont de La Force originally published in 1698. Its plot has been used and parodied in various media and its best known line ("Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair") is an idiom of popular culture.

In the Aarne–Thompson classification system for folktales it is type 310, "The Maiden in The Tower".

Andrew Lang included it in The Red Fairy Book. Other versions of the tale also appear in A Book of Witches by Ruth Manning-Sanders and in Paul O. Zelinsky's 1998 Caldecott Medal-winning picture book, Rapunzel and the Disney movie Tangled.

Rapunzel's story has striking similarities to the 10th century AD Persian tale of Rudāba, included in the epic poem Shahnameh by Ferdowsi. Rudāba offers to let down her hair from her tower so that her lover Zāl can climb up to her.

Some elements of the fairy tale might also have originally been based upon the tale of Saint Barbara, who was said to have been locked in a tower by her father.

Plot

A lonely couple, who want a child, live next to a walled garden belonging to an enchantress. The wife, experiencing the cravings associated with the arrival of her long-awaited pregnancy, notices a rapunzel plant (or, in some versions of the story,rampion), growing in the garden and longs for it, desperate to the point of death.

On each of two nights, the husband breaks into the garden to gather some for her; on a third night, as he scales the wall to return home, the enchantress, Dame Gothel, catches him and accuses him of theft. He begs for mercy, and the old woman agrees to be lenient, on condition that the then-unborn child be surrendered to her at birth. Desperate, the man agrees. When the baby girl is born, the enchantress takes the child to raise as her own, and names the baby Rapunzel.

Rapunzel grows up to be the most beautiful child in the world with long golden hair. When Rapunzel reaches her twelfth year, the enchantress shuts her away in a tower in the middle of the woods, with neither stairs nor a door, and only one room and one window. When the witch visits Rapunzel, she stands beneath the tower and calls out:

......

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair, so that I may climb the golden stair".

Upon hearing these words, Rapunzel would wrap her long, fair hair around a hook beside the window, dropping it down to the enchantress, who would then climb up the hair to Rapunzel's tower room. (A variation on the story also has the enchantress imbued with the power of flight and/or levitation and the young girl unaware of her hair's length.)

One day, a prince rides through the forest and hears Rapunzel singing from the tower. Entranced by her etheeal voice, he searches for the girl and discovers the tower, but is naturally unable to enter. He returns often, listening to her beautiful singing, and one day sees Dame Gothel visit, and thus learns how to gain access to Rapunzel. When Dame Gothel is gone, he bids Rapunzel let her hair down. When she does so, he climbs up, makes her acquaintance, and eventually asks her to marry him. Rapunzel agrees.

Together they plan a means of escape, wherein he will come each night (thus avoiding the enchantress who visited her by day), and bring her silk, which Rapunzel will gradually weave into a ladder. Before the plan can come to fruition, however, Rapunzel foolishly gives the prince away. In the first edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Rapunzel innocently says that her dress is getting tight around her belly (indicating pregnancy); in the second edition, she asks the witch (in a moment of forgetfulness) why it is easier for her to draw up the prince than her.

In anger, Dame Gothel cuts off Rapunzel's hair and casts her out into the wilderness to fend for herself. When the prince calls that night, the enchantress lets the severed braids down to haul him up. To his horror, he finds himself staring at the witch instead of Rapunzel, who is nowhere to be found. When she tells him in anger that he will never see Rapunzel again, he leaps from the tower in despair and is blinded by the thorns below. In another version, the witch pushes him and he falls on the thorns, thus becoming blind.

For months, he wanders through the wastelands of the country and eventually comes to the wilderness where Rapunzel now lives with the twins she has given birth to, a boy and a girl. One day, as Rapunzel sings while she fetches water, the prince hears Rapunzel's voice again, and they are reunited. When they fall into each other's arms, her tears immediately restore his sight. The prince leads her and their children to his kingdom, where they live happily ever after.

In some versions of the story, Rapunzel's hair magically grows long and beautiful again, once the prince touched it.

In another version of the story, the story ends with the revelation that the witch had untied Rapunzel's braid after the prince leapt from the tower, and the braid slipped from her hands and landed far below, leaving her trapped in the tower.

Film adaptations

· Don Bluth originally planned an animated film adaptation entitled Rapunzel, but due to the failure of The Pebble and the Penguin, the film was shelved.

· There was also an earlier animated film adaptation with Olivia Newton-John narrating the story. The major difference between the film and the Grimm tale is that instead of making the prince blind, the witch transforms him into a bird, possibly a reference to The Blue Bird, a French variant of the story.

· The story is retold in a second season episode of Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics.

· A live action version was filmed for television as part of Shelley Duvall's series Faerie Tale Theatre, airing on Showtime. It aired on 5 February 1983. In it, the main character (played by Shelley Duvall) is taken from her parents by a witch (Gena Rowlands), and is brought up in an isolated tower that can only be accessed by climbing her unnaturally long hair. Jeff Bridges played the prince, and Roddy McDowall narrated.

· A 1988 German film adaption, Rapunzel oder der Zauber der Tränen (meaning "Rapunzel or the Magic of Tears"), combines the story with the lesser known Grimm fairy tale Maid Maleen. After escaping the witch's tower, Rapunzel finds work as a kitchen maid in the prince's court, where she must contend with an evil princess who aims to marry her prince.

· Rapunzel has made appearances in Sesame Street where she was performed by Jerry Nelson in Episode 692, Louise Gold in Episode 3460, and Stephanie D'Abruzzo in Episode 3890.

· Into the Woods is a film being made in which Rapunzel is one of the many fairytales being told.

· In Shrek the Third, Rapunzel (voiced by Maya Rudolph) is a character who is later revealed as the secondary antagonist and was friends with Princess Fiona. She is shown to be the true love of the evil Prince Charming and helps to fool Princess Fiona and her group when they try to escape from Charming's wrath.

· An adaptation featuring Barbie, entitled Barbie as Rapunzel, was released in 2002. In this version, Rapunzel is not trapped inside her tower until she explores the outside world. Gothel also keeps Rapunzel in a tower not because of a vegetable but because she wants revenge on an old boyfriend. The main concept of hair in this version is also not extremely important. Rather, it focuses more on a magic paintbrush.

· Disney released a 2010 version of the tale, Tangled, originally titled Rapunzel.^[14] In this version, Rapunzel (voiced by Mandy Moore), while still innocent, is far more assertive in character and has magical hair, 70 feet (21 m) in length, that can be used to heal or restore youth in others (notably Mother Gothel, which is why she locked Rapunzel in the tower in the first place). To activate her golden hair's healing properties, Rapunzel must sing an incantation. As with many variations of the fairy tale, Rapunzel's tears are also shown to possess healing powers. One difference in this film is that Gothel is depicted as an old lady using Rapunzel's hair to restore her youth instead of her being an enchantress.