Disney has, I hear, decided to rename its animated film Rapunzel (due at cinemas in time for Advent) Tangled. It is thought that little boys would not want to go to see a film named after a heroine. But since Rapunzel herself is named after a root vegetable, they might perhaps have called the film Rampion instead. It has a manly sound, as if it were the name of a television detective. In the story that we vaguely remember from the Brothers Grimm, a man steals some rampion from an enchantress’s garden because his wife says: ‘If I can’t eat some of the rampion which is in the garden behind our house I shall die.’ Why the woman should want rampion, goodness knows. Campanula rapunculus is the bellflower, which, they tell me, has ivory-coloured roots tasting like filberts. But the tendency of a single name to refer to quite different species makes me fear being poisoned by boiling up a dish of supposed rampions.
In the briar-patch of European plant names with which rampion is connected, the Spanish version acquired the form rapónchigo under the influence of rhaponticum, a kind of rhubarb. Rhaponticum was the sort of rhubarb that came from the Pontic region near the Black Sea; rhabarbarum was the foreign or barbarian sort of rhubarb. Rha itself was said to be the ancient Greek name for the river Volga.
The great contribution of English to the rapunculus story was to insert an m, on the model of campion or pompion. Campion is obscure in both its origin and applicability. The Oxford English Dictionary remains unconvinced that it derives from the same word as champion, and it calls such forms as meadow campion (for Ragged Robin), bladder campion and moss campion ‘mere book names’. As for pompion (from the ancient Greek for ‘cucumber’), after some popularity among Jacobean comic dramatists as an abusive name for a fat man, it gave way to a diminutive form, pumpkin.
Anyway, an important fact in the fairy-tale is that the enchantress takes away the woman’s baby and names her Rapunzel, the German for ‘rampion’. This is not transparent in the usual versions, but it seems to make the child an equivalent of the stolen rampions. Later in the story, when the Prince tries to steal away Rapunzel, his eyes are scratched out by thorns. The story was not intended for children in particular, and its mythical force seems at best arbitrary now. But that is how we prefer fairy-tales, rather than in Disneyfied versions, where American film values triumph.
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