Rapunzel, Rapunzel! Jogue as suas tranças.

The call “Rapunzel, Rapunzel! Jogue as suas tranças” is the story’s verbal key to the tower: it summons Rapunzel to lower the braids that serve as a ladder, allowing the caller to climb through her tiny window. Its repetition first sustains the witch’s control, then gives the prince a way to reach Rapunzel, and finally becomes the means by which the witch deceives him after cutting Rapunzel’s hair.

Form and Function

The expression combines Rapunzel’s name, spoken twice, with an instruction to let down her braids. It is not merely a greeting. In the tower’s otherwise inaccessible setting, the words initiate a physical procedure: Rapunzel hears the caller, uncoils her long hair, ties the braids to the window latch, and lets them fall to the ground. The witch then climbs up them and enters.

The call’s practical force depends on the unusual construction of the tower. Rapunzel is confined in a tower without stairs or a door, with only a tiny window high above the ground. The summons and the hair together provide its sole described entrance. Sound travels from the foot of the tower to the isolated girl; her response transforms a voice into a route upward. The expression therefore operates as both a command and a cue in a repeated ritual of access.

The Witch’s Repeated Entrance

After taking Rapunzel away at the age of twelve and locking her in the tower, the witch uses the call whenever she wants to enter. Rapunzel’s long, fine, gold-like hair makes the instruction possible, and the repeated routine gives the witch a reliable way to reach her captive without a door or staircase. The words establish a pattern in which the witch calls from below and Rapunzel supplies the means of ascent from above.

That pattern also marks the imbalance between them. Rapunzel is alone in the tower, while the witch controls when she comes and goes and can summon the girl to assist her entrance. The call makes that control audible: before the witch appears at the window, her voice identifies the familiar approach and triggers Rapunzel’s response. In this first use, the formula maintains the conditions of confinement rather than opening a path to freedom.

The Prince Learns the Formula

The prince discovers the call by watching the witch arrive at the tower. He has already heard Rapunzel singing while he rides through the forest; moved by her voice, he returns day after day to listen. From behind a tree, he sees the witch call and Rapunzel lower her braids, revealing how anyone who knows the words can make use of the tower’s only entrance.

The next day, as evening begins, the prince repeats the same summons. Rapunzel lets down her braids, and he climbs through the window. His entry changes the call’s function without changing its wording: what had served the witch’s regular access now permits Rapunzel to meet someone from outside. Rapunzel is initially frightened because she has never seen a man, but the prince speaks gently, tells her that her singing moved him, and asks her to marry him. She accepts and proposes making a ladder from silk brought on his future visits so that she can descend and leave with him.

The formula thus opens a route into the tower, but not yet an escape from it. The prince can climb the hair; Rapunzel’s proposed silk ladder would give her a way down. The distinction matters: the repeated call enables their meetings, while their plan for departure requires a different ladder and the prince’s continuing visits. They agree that he will come every night because the witch is present during the day.

Repetition and Deception

The prince’s imitation of the witch’s call makes the expression a transferable password rather than a phrase exclusive to its first speaker. Rapunzel responds to the words, and the braid-ladder carries whoever has summoned her. That vulnerability becomes decisive when the witch discovers the relationship. In a fury, she cuts off Rapunzel’s braids and sends her away to a desert, severing both the familiar physical route and the arrangement that had allowed the prince to visit.

On the same day, the witch ties the cut braids to the window latch. When the prince arrives and calls, she lets them fall. The familiar response appears to repeat the old procedure, and the prince climbs as before; but the hair no longer belongs to Rapunzel, and the person waiting at the window is the witch. The call has not changed, yet its apparent promise of reunion is false. Its repetition conceals the decisive difference between the earlier visits and this one.

The witch tells the prince that Rapunzel is gone and that he will never see her again. In despair, he leaps from the tower. He survives, but a bramble scratches his eyes, leaving him blind. The expression’s final tower use therefore turns access into betrayal: the same words and braids that once brought the prince to Rapunzel deliver him to the scene of their separation.

The Call’s Place in the Ending

The phrase’s sequence of uses follows the story’s changing possibilities for connection. The witch’s summons sustains her access to the captive girl; the prince’s repetition makes a secret meeting possible; the witch’s staged repetition uses familiarity to conceal Rapunzel’s absence. The words themselves remain constant, while the speaker, purpose, and consequence change around them.

The later reunion occurs away from the tower, in the desert where Rapunzel is struggling to survive with the twins she has borne, a boy and a girl. The blind prince hears a familiar voice and follows it; Rapunzel recognizes him, embraces him, and weeps. Two of her tears fall into his eyes, and his sight returns. They then go back to his kingdom and live happily for many years. The ending no longer depends on the tower’s call or the hair ladder: recognition comes through Rapunzel’s voice, while reunion and restored sight follow from finding one another in the wilderness.

The story’s source note identifies the tale as the Grimms’ “Rapunzel,” in the seventh edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Berlin, 1857), with the first edition dated 1812. Within this version, the recurring expression binds together a compact chain of motifs: an inaccessible tower, hair used as a ladder, the cutting and removal that break the visitors’ routine, and a deceptive replay that precipitates the prince’s blindness. Its significance lies not only in what it commands, but in how repetition can preserve a familiar procedure while reversing what that procedure leads to.