Sleeping Beauty Coloring Pages
Sleeping Beauty is one of the oldest fairy tales around, and every storyteller seems to tell it a little differently.
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One Prick of a Spindle
When the princess was born, the king and queen threw a grand party and invited the fairies of the kingdom to bless her. In the German version there were thirteen wise women but only twelve golden plates, so one of them was left off the guest list. She turned up anyway, and she wasn't in a gift-giving mood. She declared that the princess would prick her finger on a spindle and die.
Luckily one good fairy hadn't given her blessing yet. She couldn't undo the curse, but she could soften it, so instead the princess would fall asleep for a hundred years. The king had every spindle in the land burned. That worked beautifully right up until the princess's fifteenth birthday, when she wandered up an old tower and found a little old woman spinning.
A Whole Castle Fast Asleep
The moment the spindle pricked her finger, the princess dropped into the deepest sleep, and the rest of the castle went with her. The king and queen nodded off on their thrones, the horses dozed in the stable and even the flies stopped buzzing on the walls. The cook froze with his hand raised, halfway through scolding the kitchen boy.
Around the castle walls a hedge of briar roses began to grow, thicker and taller every year, until only the very tip of a tower showed above the thorns. That's why the German storytellers called her Little Briar Rose. Princes came from far away to try their luck, but the thorns held tight and none of them got through.
A Prince Right on Time
A hundred years later, almost to the day, another prince came riding by and heard the old story from a villager. Everyone warned him about the thorns, but he decided to try anyway. This time, as he walked up to the hedge, the thorns burst into great pink roses and drew back to let him through.
He found the princess asleep in the tower, looking so lovely that he couldn't help kissing her, and she opened her eyes and smiled as though she'd been waiting for him all along. All through the castle, everyone woke up and carried on from exactly where they'd left off. The cook finally finished scolding the kitchen boy, and before long there was a wedding to plan.
The Story of Sleeping Beauty
Long ago a king and queen welcomed a baby daughter, and the whole kingdom came to celebrate. There were trumpets at the gate and flowers on every windowsill.
The fairies came too, seven of them, and they lined up beside the cradle to give their blessings one at a time. The first gave her beauty. The second gave her a kind heart. The third promised she would sing, the fourth that she would dance, the fifth that she would be clever enough to talk her way out of trouble. The sixth gave her good luck on rainy days.
The seventh fairy was the youngest, and she was so nervous about saying her blessing in front of everybody that she had been practising it under her breath all morning. She was still waiting her turn when the doors blew open.
In swept a fairy nobody had invited, and she was furious about it.
"You left me off the list," she said.
"You were not forgotten," said the eldest fairy. "You were simply never asked."
That was the wrong thing to say. The two of them squared up over the cradle with their wands raised, pointing and frowning and talking over the top of each other, while the king and queen looked on in horror.
"Then hear this," the uninvited fairy said at last. "One day she will prick her finger on a spindle, and when she does she will fall fast asleep."
Away she swept, and the hall went very quiet.
Then a small voice said, "I haven't gone yet."
Everybody turned. The youngest fairy came forward, holding her wand with both hands because they were shaking. She could not undo what had been done, but she had her own blessing still to give, and she could change the shape of it.
"She will sleep," she agreed. "But not for ever. She will sleep until somebody comes to find her."
The years passed and the baby grew into a girl, and the girl grew into a princess who liked to explore. She knew every staircase in the castle except one, and that was the one she climbed on the morning of her birthday. At the top she found a little room, and in the little room an old spinning wheel with a point as sharp as a thorn.
She reached out to touch it. Down she went, fast asleep on the floorboards.
And the sleep spread. It poured down the stairs and out into the courtyard. The milkmaid dozed off on her stool with her head against the cow, and the cow dozed off too, and the cat curled up on the step as if it had meant to all along. The bucket tipped over and nobody came to pick it up. Thorny vines crept up the walls until the castle looked like a hedge with towers poking out.
A hundred years went by. Then a prince came riding past, saw the towers above the thorns and wondered what was underneath. He cut his way through, climbed the staircase nobody had climbed in a century and found the princess asleep with her hands folded.
He knelt down and said her name.
She opened her eyes. Down in the courtyard the cow lifted her head and mooed, the cat stretched, the milkmaid picked up her bucket, and the whole castle woke up as if it had only nodded off for a minute.
The king and queen came hurrying up the tower stairs, still rubbing their eyes, and stopped in the doorway when they saw the stranger kneeling beside their daughter. The princess took his hand and introduced him, and after that there was no getting rid of him. Her father wanted to hear all about the thorns. Her mother wanted to know whether he was eating properly.
They were married in the autumn, in a hall full of flowers, with the cook grumbling happily over the biggest cake anybody had ever seen. Six of the fairies came and sat in the front row. The seventh very nearly did not come at all, because she still hated being looked at, but the princess went out to the gate herself and walked her in.
And they all lived happily ever after, which in that castle meant nobody was ever allowed to nod off in the afternoon again without somebody shouting up the stairs to check that everything was ok.
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