The Sleeping Beauty Story

Many fairytales stem from oral storytelling traditions. Before stories were put into print they would be passed through the generations through word of mouth, singing, dancing and theatre. Oral storytelling is known to be a lot more fluid and dynamic than written stories as stories changed and developed as they were passed on and told by different people.

In the early 1800’s two German brothers named Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began to collect all of the stories they heard into a written format so they could be published, sold and shared. Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) was their first published work containing 86 stories. The book became hugely popular with children and parents and the Grimm brothers took this opportunity to edit the tales making the scary and gruesome tales into softer more child-friendly stories. They also added a moral to the stories making the stories educational. The Brothers Grimm published two other books of fairytales in their lifetime before their deaths and are now widely known as the people who bought oral stories to the masses.

Through the years the titles of the stories began to change as the story of Little Briar Rose became Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Cap became Little Red Riding Hood and Aschenputtel became Cinderella. In the early 1900’s Walt Disney began to take on these fairytales creating short cartoons. As the Disney studio’s cartoons became more popular they created their first feature film in 1937 called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs based on the Grimm tale Snow White. Later Walt used the story line of Cinderella (the original Aschenputtel) and Sleeping Beauty (Little Briar Rose) to base his feature films around. Walt Disney opened up these fairytales to interpretation and adaptation and many are used around the world today to influence modern stories in films, books and theatre.