The death sentence becomes a hundred-year sleep
death also may perhaps be softened to a sleep.
The softening is an actual event in the tale, before Chesterton makes it an allegory of human mortality. In Lang's ‘The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood’ (Blue Fairy Book, 1889; Gutenberg transcription), gifts at the christening are followed by a fatal spindle curse; a younger fairy commutes death to a hundred-year sleep. Opening scene. Chesterton's ‘birthday gifts’ is thus a loose compression of the christening scene. The application to humanity is his interpretive step. Christian language supplies a suggestive parallel: in the Douay-Rheims John 11:11–14, Jesus calls Lazarus's death sleep and then explicitly explains that Lazarus is dead. John 11. That parallel illuminates the hope of awakening, but Chesterton does not identify a particular biblical verse here.
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