painted The Sleeping Beauty.]]Sleeping Beauty ("La Belle au Bois dormant" (The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood)) is a fairy tale classic, the first in the set published in 1697 by Charles Perrault, Contes de ma Mère l'Oye ("Mother Goose Tales").Heidi Anne Heiner, "The Annotated Sleeping Beauty"While Perrault's version is better known, an older variant, the tale Sun, Moon and Talia, was contained in Giambattista Basile's Pentamerone (published 1634).Giambattista Basile, Pentamerone, "Sun, Moon and Talia" Professor J. R. R. Tolkien noted that Perrault's cultural presence is so pervasive that, when asked to name a fairy tale, most people will cite one of the eight stories in Perrault's collection.J. R. R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories" , The Tolkien Reader, p 11-12 Since Tolkien's generation, however, the most familiar Sleeping Beauty in the English speaking world has become the Walt Disney animated film (1959), which draws as much from the Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ballet (Saint Petersburg,
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal Sleep