Nearly everyone knows the fairytale of Rapunzel. A beautiful girl is kidnapped and trapped in a tall tower by a witch, and she never gets a haircut a day in her life. By the time she is a teenager, her hair is so long, it can be used as a rope for the witch to climb up and down the tower.
Eventually, a clever prince sees this and makes his way up the tower to meet Rapunzel. They fall in love, and he helps her escape. They live happily ever after.
The first written version of the Rapunzel story was written in the year by a writer named Giambattista Basile , from Italy. In this version, Rapunzel is sold to an ogre when she was a baby, all because her mother stole some parsley from a garden. She was forced to give away her first-born child, and she was locked in a tower her entire life.
Rapunzel has never seen a man before, so she is seduced by the prince, and she becomes pregnant. The prince goes blind and wanders aimlessly through the forest, while Rapunzel gives birth to twins all alone. After going through hell and back, they eventually find each other again. The original true story that inspired all of these versions of the fairy tale is the darkest one of all. In the year CE, a man named Jacobus de Voragine recorded a story of a young woman named Barbara who lived in Italy.
She was a beautiful girl, and her father, Dioscorus, was a rich and powerful merchant. He also knew that his daughter was very beautiful. Men were already lining up to meet her, and many of them were even princes. Dioscorus made a rule that men were not allowed to meet her unless they went through an interview process with him, first.
