Reading Sleeping Beauty for the 10,000th time the realization emerged from the background static. What an unchanging environment! An entire kingdom falls asleep for one hundred years and then wakes up simultaneously and goes on as if nothing had happened in the 100-year interim. This speaks of a time when each community was an independent self-sufficient economic entity, making everything that was consumed. This was a time when each of these little walled city-states had its own castle to protect their communities from invading Norsemen, marauding Vikings, or warring kingdoms. Further outlaws or unemployed knights preyed upon innocent travelers. Because travel was so dangerous each kingdom became relatively self sufficient, leading to the unchanging worldview of Sleeping Beauty.
Throw Sleeping Beauty into Medieval Europe, with its fixed social structure based upon feudalism. Barbara Tuchman in her book, A Distant Mirror, points out that from the middle of the first millennium CE until about the middle of the second millennium Europe had one dominant social form based upon mutual protection. This system was called feudalism.
The Feudal System with its kings, queens, knights, peasants, priests, & popes dominated the European landscape for over a thousand years. Despite the diversity of cultures, languages & vast boundaries in Europe they were united by this feudal system for over a millennium. We call this time the Middle Ages and still look back it fondly. Its idealized form is perpetuated with fairy tales like this.
How did it come about? Agricultural communities surrounding small villages dominated the British Isles & Europe of prehistoric times. Gradually tribes became communities, villages, cities and even small kingdoms. Then came the invasion of agricultural Europe from all directions. The Goths, Ostrogoths, Franks, and other Germanic tribes from the Northeast – the Romans from the Southeast – the Moors from the South & the Scandinavian Vikings (the Danes and Normans) from the North. It was obvious that a new social order was needed to protect the cultural integrity of these communities from external attack.
The process of social transformation that led to the feudal system actually began relatively suddenly. In 732 CE the Moors - who had already conquered the Iberian Peninsula - where the countries of Spain and Portugal were to form many centuries later - decided to move north across the Pyrenees to conquer more of Europe. In what was to become France, they collided with the Frankish kingdom which had been freshly consolidated by Charles ‘the Hammer’ Martel. He had gotten his nickname as he had risen to the top of his local politics by militarily dominating some of the other Frankish princes as well as subduing the competing Germanic cultures of the Frisians and the Saxons. (These two cultures went on to dominate the island of Britain.)
The Franks on foot met the attack of the Moors on horseback. After six days of fierce fighting the Franks under the tight discipline of Charles Martel turned back the Moors. Presumably the heavily armed Franks held their shields together to prevent the lightly armed Moorish horsemen from getting through their lines. Winning this crucial battle prevented the Moors from conquering Europe.
However Charles Martel experienced the superiority of armed trained horsemen over foot soldiers. After this crucial battle he planted the seeds of feudalism by setting up a system of mutual protection from external invasion. The king promised protection for the estates and villages around him if they would train and supply him with an army and a knight who was trained on horseback in time of attack.[1] The king became the liege lord of the local knights of the surrounding castles. He would come to their defense if they supplied him with an army led by a knight or knights. This was the beginning of the knightly tradition in Europe – an integral part of the feudal system.
European feudalism was also Christian – specifically Roman Catholic. Charles Martel was considered a devout Christian. Hence even from the initiation of the feudal system Knights were considered ‘Defenders of the Faith’. The Muslims of Mohammed and the Koran had attacked the Frankish army under Charles Martel. He and his army had defended the Christian Faith of Jesus and the Bible from destruction. Martel set up the ‘knight’ system of feudalism to defend the Christian culture of Europe against another Muslim attack.
Although these knights were more frequently employed to attack fellow Christian nations than to defend against the Muslims, the Knight has retained the positive aspect of his original nature in modern mythology. Indeed King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table would be said to epitomize the ‘noble’ knight. The prince who discovered the sleeping princess would be considered one of those honorable knights – saving damsels from distress and presumably dedicated to the preservation of the Christian nation from attack. The feudal knight was a uniquely Christian warrior.
This new political/military technology, based upon the knight and mutual protection[2], proved so effective that Charles Martel’s son Pepin was able to enlarge the Frankish kingdom. Continuing the strategy Pepin’s son Charles was able to continue the territorial expansion and consolidation of Western Europe. He eventually allied himself with the Pope in Rome, who ordained him as the Holy Roman Emperor. The Pope provided Charles with the title ‘The Great’, or simply Charlemagne – as the French call him. The loose alliance of kingdoms that pledged temporary allegiance to Charlemagne along with the Catholic Pope under the feudal system was called the Holy Roman Empire.
Anyway the land of Sleeping Beauty belonged to the Middle Ages, whose social structure was based upon feudalism, which was grounded in the training of Christian knights as armed horsemen, to defend the culture or country from attack. This unchanging time could imagine a country falling asleep for 100 years and then waking up as if nothing had happened.
Besides providing protection to the Western European Christian culture based in Catholicism the feudal system of the Middle Ages was also classist and sexist. This is also reflected in the fairy tales of the time. Sleeping Beauty comes from royal blood, as does her royal suitor. The Disney version has her falling in love with a presumed commoner - the prince falling in love with a peasant maiden. Luckily by coincidence they are instead both royalty - showing, of course, that royalty has an innate attraction for royalty. Birds of a feather flock together. This is the conceit that noble breeding creates a noble person. Lies!
The older fairy tales don’t even touch the idea of mixed marriages – commoners with royalty. The prince, presumably of royal blood, always comes from a faraway kingdom to save the sleeping princess. It is never a peasant boy on the way up, not even a soldier.
In Puss in Boots, The Tinder Box and The Little Tailor (Seven in One Blow) the commoner surpasses tremendous odds to become prince of the kingdom. The 18th century fairy tale compilers, notably Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, gave these stories their egalitarian endings. In the earlier versions there is no promise of marrying the princess to become a prince with half the kingdom thrown in. Instead the reward only consisted of a good sized meal. The implication is that they were very hungry, perhaps nearly starving to death. This is reflected in Hansel & Gretel, where the father tried to lose his children in the forest because he couldn’t afford to feed them. In the cultures that spawned the original stories the peasantry had no hope of joining the royalty.
Although these particular fairy tales suggest the possibility of upward mobility in Puss in Boots it takes a magical cat for the peasant boy to transcend his bloodline, while in The Tinder Box, magic dogs are necessary to pass the hidden boundary between common soldier and aristocracy. Magic animals, especially dogs, are seen as guides between worlds in many cultures. Even Sirius the Dog Star is one of the major navigational stars. The subtext behind the assistance of these magic animals is that only with divine intervention can the peasant class rise to the favored nobility.
Nobility. Bah! Even the word itself, nobility, noble ones, betrays the blood prejudice.
Only in The Little Tailor does our peasant hero pass the line on his own merits. But he must make a superhuman effort. Not accepting the fact that this peasant has accomplished the first trial, the king gives him ever more difficult tasks. When at last he overcomes every trial the king finally accepts this common tailor into his royal class.
In the Disney version of Sleeping Beauty the subject of upward mobility is broached. However it is danced around in a superficial way. A happy coincidence saves the day! Disguised as peasants the prince and princess fall in love, ignorant that they both have royal blood. The respective kings are pacified & confrontation is avoided. No need to worry about the problems of mixed class marriages.
Another fairy tale playing to the myth of the superior blood of the ruling class is The Princess & the Pea. A self-proclaimed princess arrives at a castle in a terrible storm. Because she is drenched and disheveled the mother & father go to extreme lengths to prove or disprove her claim. The criterion: is she truly picky enough to be a princess? Girls love the story of the real princess having a miserable night on mattresses stacked 20 high. The implication is that a commoner with coarse skin & rough demeanor wouldn’t even feel the pea and would sleep through the night. Presumably a girl from the working class, someone who produced goods and services, wouldn’t be sensitive enough to pass the princess test and the rulers of the castle would have thrown her out into the cold or perhaps they would make her their servant. The fact that she actually did something useful would be held against her. These rigid class lines reflect the culture of the Middle Ages, which has continued into modern times and had such destructive consequences.
Besides reflecting and reinforcing the inherent classism of the Middle Ages fairy tales are also sexist. In each of the fairy tales, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Cinderella, and Rapunzel, the heroine requires a prince for her salvation.
“No. They are saved by true love,” chimes 28-year-old Serena.
“I like the Princess stories!” pipes in Denise, 45-year-old Montessori teacher of 3 to 6 year olds. “The ritual, the drama, the costumes, the handsome Prince, the romance! I love it all.”
Obviously these fairy tales have a timeless appeal, which has nothing to do with their socio-political implications.
[1] This system was still used in Scotland 1000 years later in the 1700s when they were warring against England. Bonnie Prince Charlie called upon the clans to provide him with soldiers and knights to restore him to his ‘rightful’ throne against the German ‘usurpers’.
[2] Ironically the armed Horseman had replaced the Chariot as the dominant military technology in China over a 1000 years before it reached Western Europe – and continued as such for another 1000 years - 2000 years in all. The nomads of the Central Asian steppes easily dominated the Chinese Emperor’s troops with their fast moving horsemen, who attacked and retreated rapidly. This military technology inevitably spread to Persia, Rome and the nomadic Arabs. United behind Islam, the religion of the Prophet Mohammed, their armed horsemen allowed them to quickly dominate the countries around them. In response to the Muslim Moors the Europeans began training armed horsemen – which eventually allowed them to easily dominate the Indians of the Americas – a testament to the power of this military technology.
Indeed it was Napoleon in the early 1800s - 1000 years after the feudal system was set up - who finally ended the reign of the armed horsemen. When fighting in Egypt against an elite army of armed horsemen - never been defeated before – French mathematicians provided Napoleon’s army with equations that accurately plotted the trajectories of his cannons. There was no contest. Science reigned supreme against the Warrior. From that point on Science applied to weapons of destruction replaced the armed horseman as the dominant military technology in the world. The last time that armed horsemen were used in a war was by Poland in World War II with sad results. The entry of the scientist into battle was the demise of the warrior everywhere. The European knight, as well as the Japanese Samurai, the Chinese Boxers and the Indian Brave were unable to stand up against the weapons of destruction designed by Scientists. There is no place for the Warrior in modern warfare.
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