[8] Giambattista Basile wrote another, "Sun, Moon, and Talia" for his collection Pentamerone, published posthumously in 1634–36[9] and adapted by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697.

[15][16] The second part of the Sleeping Beauty tale, in which the princess and her children are almost put to death but instead are hidden, may have been influenced by Genevieve of Brabant.

[17] Even earlier influences come from the story of the sleeping Brynhild in the Volsunga saga and the tribulations of saintly female martyrs in early Christian hagiography conventions.

The folktale begins with a princess whose parents are told by a wicked fairy that their daughter will die when she pricks her finger on a particular item.

By asking wise men and astrologers to predict her future after her birth, her father, who is a great Lord, learns that Talia will be in danger from a splinter of flax.

Intrigued by the sight of the twirling spindle, Talia invites the woman over and takes the distaff from her hand to stretch the flax.

After Talia falls asleep, she is seated on a velvet throne and her father, to forget his misery of what he thinks is her death, closes the doors and abandons the house forever.

[20] According to folklore editors Martin Hallett and Barbara Karasek, Perrault's tale is a much more subtle and pared down version than Basile's story in terms of the more immoral details.

An example of this is depicted in Perrault's tale by the prince's choice to instigate no physical interaction with the sleeping princess when he discovers her.

[9] At the christening of a king and queen's long-wished-for child, seven good fairies are invited to be the infant Princess's godmothers and give her gifts.

Soon after, an old fairy enters the palace, overlooked because she has not left her tower in fifty years and everyone believed her to be cursed or dead.

When she hears the eighth fairy muttering some threats, the seventh, fearing that the uninvited guest will harm the Princess, hides herself behind some curtains, so she can be the last to give a gift.

Six of the invited fairies offer their gifts of pure beauty, wit, grace, dance, song, and musical talent to the infant Princess.

The eighth fairy, who is very angry about not being invited, curses the infant Princess so that she will one day prick her finger on a spindle of a spinning wheel and die.

Instead of dying, the Princess will fall into a deep sleep for 100 years and be awakened by a king's son ("elle tombera seulement dans un profond sommeil qui durera cent ans, au bout desquels le fils d’un Roi viendra la réveiller").

The King then orders all spinning wheels in the kingdom banned and destroyed in an attempt to avert the eighth fairy's curse on his daughter.

Fifteen or sixteen years pass and one day, when the king and queen are away, the Princess wanders through the palace rooms and comes upon an old woman (implied to be the evil fairy in disguise), spinning with her spindle.

The king attributes this to fate and has the Princess carried to the finest room in the palace and placed upon a bed of gold and silver embroidered fabric.

The King and Queen kiss their daughter goodbye and leave the castle to ban others from disturbing her, but the good fairy summons a forest of trees, brambles and thorns to spring up around the place, shielding it from the outside world.

After marrying the Sleeping Beauty in secret, the Prince visits her for four years and she bears him two children, unbeknownst to his mother, who is an ogre.

After her son leaves, the Ogress Queen Mother sends her daughter-in-law to a house secluded in the woods and orders her cook to prepare Morning with Sauce Robert for dinner.

The King returns home unexpectedly and the Ogress, her true nature having been exposed, throws herself into the tub and is fully consumed by the creatures.

The Brothers Grimm included a variant of Sleeping Beauty, Little Briar Rose, in the first volume of Children's and Household Tales (published 1812).

Their decision was notable because in none of the Teutonic myths, meaning the Poetic and Prose Eddas or Volsunga Saga, are their sleepers awakened with a kiss, a fact Jacob Grimm would have known since he wrote an encyclopedic volume on German mythology.

[28] Besides Sun, Moon, and Talia, Basile included another variant of this Aarne-Thompson type, The Young Slave, in his book, The Pentamerone.

"[41] Despite being featured prominently in Disney merchandise, "Aurora has become an oft-forgotten princess", and her popularity pales in comparison to those of Cinderella and Snow White.

[42] An example of the cosmic interpretation of the tale given by the nineteenth century solar mythologist school[43] appears in John Fiske's Myths and Myth-Makers: “It is perhaps less obvious that winter should be so frequently symbolized as a thorn or sharp instrument ... Sigurd is slain by a thorn, and Balder by a sharp sprig of mistletoe; and in the myth of the Sleeping Beauty, the earth-goddess sinks into her long winter sleep when pricked by the point of the spindle.

In her cosmic palace, all is locked in icy repose, naught thriving save the ivy which defies the cold, until the kiss of the golden-haired sun-god reawakens life and activity.”[44] "Sleeping Beauty" has been popular for many fairytale fantasy retellings.