CLASSIC: Was there a real-life Rapunzel?

Ridiculous History

iHeartPodcasts

History, Society & Culture

4.3 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

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Summary

Most people in the West are familiar with the old Rapunzel fairy tale -- a beautiful princess is confined to a tower until a prince, captivated by her beauty, uses her hair as a ladder and comes to her rescue. But where did this story come from, exactly? Tune in to learn more in today's Classic episode from 2019.

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0:00.0	Fellow ridiculous historians, what is your favorite fairy tale?
0:04.9	Yeah, they're all so dark.
0:06.3	Yeah, the real ones, right?
0:07.8	The original ones, yeah.
0:08.9	The red shoes, you know about that one?
0:10.8	Cutting the feet off?
0:11.9	It's like, I've heard that reference in a movie recently.
0:14.9	Um, but Rapunzel, uh, the prince, I believe, falls into a briar patch and is blinded.
0:20.3	And it's, you know, all kinds of horrible things happen to that guy.
0:24.5	I think we've talked about this, Ben, but my exposure to a lot of the dark versions of these fairy tales came from an anime series that played on Nick Jr. back in the day that was, I believe, just called Grimm's fairy tales.
0:37.3	And it had a version of
0:39.3	Rapunzel where all of that horrific stuff happened.
0:43.5	Oh, yeah.
0:44.4	And like so many other kids growing up in the Anglosphere, we are familiar with all types of
0:51.1	fairy tales.
0:51.7	And we started to ask ourselves back in 2019,
0:54.7	whether there was some sort of grain of truth
0:59.3	to this great game of telephone.
1:01.2	So in today's classic episode,
1:03.8	we're going to ask whether or not a lady really used her hair as a ladder.
1:11.0	Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
1:11.9	Mm-hmm.
	...

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