Little Red Riding Hood

Lore & Background

The story revolves around a girl named Little Red Riding Hood, named after the red hooded cape that she wears. The girl walks through the woods to deliver food to her sickly grandmother (wine and cake, depending on the translation). A stalking wolf wants to eat the girl and the food in the basket. After he asks where she is going, he suggests that she pick some flowers as a present for her grandmother. While she goes in search of flowers, he goes to the grandmother's house and gains entry by pretending to be Riding Hood. He swallows the grandmother whole, climbs into her bed, and waits for the girl, disguised as the grandmother. When Riding Hood arrives, she notices the strange appearance of her "grandmother". After some back and forth, Riding Hood comments on the wolf's teeth, at which point the wolf leaps out of bed and eats her as well. In Charles Perrault's version of the story, the first to be published, the wolf falls asleep afterwards, whereupon the story ends. In later versions, the story continues: A woodcutter (German: Jäger, lit. 'hunter') in the Brothers Grimm and traditional German versions comes to the rescue with an axe, and cuts open the sleeping wolf. Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother emerge shaken, but unharmed. They then fill the wolf's body with heavy stones. The wolf awakens and attempts to flee, but the stones cause him to collapse and die. In the Grimms' version, the wolf leaves the house and tries to drink out of a well, but the stones in his stomach cause him to fall in and drown (similarly to the story of "The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids"). Sanitized versions of the story have the grandmother locked in the closet rather than being eaten (and also having the wolf eat the food Little Red Riding Hood brought rather than her) and some have Little Red Riding Hood saved by the lumberjack as the wolf advances on her rather than after she is eaten, where the woodcutter kills the wolf with his axe or simply chases away the wolf with his axe. The Brothers Grimm version had the woodcutter's rescue of Little Red Riding Hood replaced with a hunter who did the job.

In Their Own Story

The earliest known printed version was known as Le Petit Chaperon Rouge and may have had its origins in 17th-century French folklore. It was included in the collection Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals. Tales of Mother Goose (Histoires et contes du temps passé, avec des moralités. Contes de ma mère l'Oye), in 1697, by Charles Perrault. As the title implies, this version is both more sinister and more overtly moralized than the later ones. The redness of the hood, which has been given symbolic significance in many interpretations of the tale, was a detail introduced by Perrault. The story had as its subject an "attractive, well-bred young lady", a village girl of the country being deceived into giving a wolf she encountered the information he needed to find her grandmother's house successfully and eat the old woman while at the same time avoiding being noticed by woodcutters working in the nearby forest. Then he proceeded to lay a trap for Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood ends up being asked to climb into the bed before being eaten by the wolf.

Reader's Guide

The story displays similarities to stories from classical Greece and Rome. It resembles a legend recounted by Pausanias in which, each year, a virgin girl was offered to a malevolent spirit dressed in the skin of a wolf, who raped the girl. Then, one year, the Olympic boxer Euthymus of Locri came along, slew the spirit, and married the girl who had been offered as a sacrifice. The Roman poet Horace alludes to a tale in which a male child is rescued alive from the belly of Lamia, an ogress in classical mythology. The dialogue between the wolf and Little Red Riding Hood has analogies to the Norse Þrymskviða from the Elder Edda. A parallel to another Norse myth, the chase and eventual murder of the sun goddess by the wolf Sköll, has also been drawn. A similar story also belongs to the North African tradition, namely in Kabylia, where a number of versions are attested. The theme of the ravening wolf and of the creature released unharmed from its belly is also reflected in the Russian tale "Peter and the Wolf" and another Grimm tale "The Wolf and the Seven Young Goats", but its general theme of restoration is at least as old as the biblical story, "Jonah and the Whale". The Book of Jonah itself is dated to the Hellenistic period (332–167 BCE). The theme also appears in the story of the life of Saint Margaret, wherein the saint emerges unharmed from the belly of a dragon, and in the short story "The Red Path" by Jim C. Hines. A Taiwanese story from the 16th century, known as Aunt Tiger bears several striking similarities. According to Paul Delarue, a similar narrative is found in East Asian stories, namely, in China, Korea and Japan, with the title "The Tiger and the Children". The origins of the Little Red Riding Hood story can be traced to several likely pre-17th-century versions from various European countries. Some of these are significantly different from the currently known, Grimms-inspired version. It was told by French peasants in the 10th century and recorded by the cathedral schoolmaster Egbert of Liège. A 15th-century collection of folklore described an anecdote about a woman whose husband was a werewolf. However, it bears little resemblance to Perrault's text. In Italy, Little Red Riding Hood was told by peasants in the 14th century, where many versions exist, including La finta nonna (The False Grandmother), written among others by Italo Calvino in the Italian Folktales collection. It has also been called "The Story of Grandmother". It is also possible that this early tale has roots in very similar East Asian tales (e.g. "Grandaunt Tiger"). These early variations of the tale do differ from the currently known version in several ways. The antagonist is not always a wolf, but sometimes a 'bzou' (werewolf), making these tales relevant to the werewolf trials (similar to witch trials) of the time (e.g. the trial of Peter Stumpp). The wolf usually leaves the grandmother's blood and flesh for the girl to eat, who then unwittingly cannibalizes her grandmother. Furthermore, the wolf was also known to ask her to take off her clothing and throw it into the fire. In some versions, the wolf eats the girl after she gets into bed with him, and the story ends there. In others, she sees through his disguise and tries to escape, complaining to her "grandmother" that she needs to defecate and would not wish to do so in the bed. The wolf reluctantly lets her go, tied to a piece of string so she does not get away. The girl slips the string over something else and runs off. In these stories, she escapes with no help from any male or older female figure, instead using her own cunning, or in some versions, the help of a younger boy whom she happens to run into. Sometimes, though more rarely, the red hood is even non-existent. In other tellings of the story, the wolf chases after Little Red Riding Hood. She escapes with the help of some laundresses, who spread a sheet taut over a river so she may escape. When the wolf follows Red over the bridge of cloth, the sheet is released, and the wolf drowns in the river. And in another version, the wolf is pushed into the fire, while he is preparing the flesh of the grandmother to be eaten by the girl.

Did You Know?

• The story is number 333 in the Aarne–Thompson classification system for folktales.
• The earliest known printed version was Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, published by Charles Perrault in 1697 in Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals: Tales of Mother Goose.
• In some early versions, the antagonist is not a wolf but a 'bzou' (werewolf), linking the tale to werewolf t