[39] Poésies de Marie de France, vol. ii. p. 53.
La Belle au Bois Dormant.
The Sleeping Beauty.
The idea of a life which passes ages in a secular sleep is as old as the myth of Endymion. But it would be difficult to name any classical legend which closely corresponds with the story of the Sleeping Beauty. The first incident of importance is connected with the very widely spread belief in the Fates, or Moirai, or Hathors (in Ancient Egypt), or fairies, who come to the bedside of Althæa, or of the Egyptian Queen, or to the christening of the child in La Belle au Bois Dormant, and predict the fortunes of the newly born. In an Egyptian papyrus of the Twentieth Dynasty there is a tale, beginning, just like Perrault's, with the grief of a king and queen, who have no child, or at least no son. Instead of going à toutes les Eaux du monde, they appeal to the gods, who hear their prayers, and the queen gives birth to a little boy. Beside his cradle the Hathors announce that he shall perish by a crocodile, a serpent, or a dog. The story, in Egyptian, now turns into one of the common myths as to the impossibility of evading Destiny[40]. In Perrault's Conte, of course, fairies take the place of the Fates from whom perhaps Fée is derived. When the fairies have met comes in another old incident—one of them, like Discord at the wedding of Peleus, has not been invited, and she prophesies the death of the Princess. This is commuted, by a friendly fay, into a sleep of a hundred years: the sleep to be caused, as the death was to have been, by a prick from a spindle. The efforts of the royal family to evade the doom by proscribing spindles are as futile as usual in these cases. The Princess and all her people fall asleep, and the story enters the cycle of which Brynhild's wooing, in the Volsung's Saga, is the heroic type. Brynhild is thus described by the singing wood-peckers,—
'Soft on the fell A shield-may sleepeth, The lime-trees' red plague Playing about her. The sleep-thorn set Odin Into that maiden For her choosing in war The one he willed not.'
Sigurd is bidden to awaken her, and this he does, rending her mail with his magic sword. But the rest of the tragic story does not correspond with La Belle au Bois Dormant. Perrault's tale has its closest companion in Grimm's Little Briar Rose (90), which lacks the conclusion about the wicked mother-in-law. Her conduct, again, recurs in various tales quite unlike La Belle in general plot. The incident of the sleep-thorn, or something analogous, occurs in Surya Bai (Old Deccan Days), where a prick from the poisoned nail of a demon acts as the soporific. To carry poison under the nail is one of the devices of the Voudou or Obi man in Hayti. Surya Bai, when wakened and married by a Rajah, is the victim of the jealousy, not of an ogress mother-in-law, but of another wife, and that story glides into a form of the Egyptian tale The Two Brothers (Maspero, i.). The sleep-thorn, or poisoned nail, takes again in Germany the shape of the poisoned comb. Snow-white is wounded therewith by the jealousy of a beautiful step-mother, with a yet fairer step-daughter (Grimm, 53). In mediæval romances, as in Perceforest, an incident is introduced whereby the sleeping maid becomes a mother. Lucina, Themis, and Venus take the part of the Fairies, Fates, or Hathors. In the Neapolitan Pentamerone the incident of the girl becoming a mother in her sleep is repeated. The father (as in Surya Bai) is a married man, and the girl, Thalia, suffers from the jealousy of the first wife, as Surya Bai does. The first wife wants to eat Thalia's children, à diverses sauces, which greatly resembles Perrault's sauce Robert. The children of Thalia are named Sun and Moon, while those of the Sleeping Beauty are L'Aurore et Le Jour. The jealous wife is punished, like the Ogre mother-in-law[41].
While the idea of a long sleep may possibly have been derived from the repose of Nature in winter, it seems useless to try to interpret La Belle au Bois Dormant as a Nature myth throughout. The story, like all contes, is a patchwork of incidents, which recur elsewhere in different combinations. Even the names Le Jour and L'Aurore only appear in such late and literary forms as the Pentamerone, where they are mixed up with Thalia, clearly a fanciful name for the mother, as fanciful as that of the sleeping Zellandine, who marries the god Mars in Perceforest. As an example of the length to which some mythologists will go, may be mentioned M. André Lefèvre's discovery that Poufle, the dog of the Sleeping Beauty, is the Vedic Sarama in search of the Dawn.
[40] Maspero, Contes Egyptiens, p. 33.
[41] Contes de Ma Mère L'Oye, p. 157.
Le Petit Chaperon Rouge.[[42]]