WIBCI we really understood Fairy Tales?
Wouldn’t It Be Cool If we considered Folk Tales not only in the time they were written, but as well as in comparison to today?
Little Red Riding Hood, is a tale that has thousand year old roots in oral traditions, Greek and Roman literature, and the Kabbalah, but the version closest to today’s can be traced back to pre-17th century western Europe. The tale has had many titles, been passed down in multiple languages, and has softened the ending with each generation. You probably only know the sanitized Disney version of such tales and not why the lessons they taught were necessary for children’s survival.
Little Red Riding Hood was about peasants’ struggle to live in their harsh, scraped out existence. How children need to be leery of strangers and crafty just to exist. In the earliest versions the wolf found out how and where the girl was headed, taking a different route he beat her to her grandmother’s house, killed the grandmother and served her for dinner. The little girl at her grandmother was coaxed into bed with the wolf and he ate her. End of story.
Charles Perrault explained the ‘moral’ at the end of the tale so that no doubt is left to his intended meaning:
From this story one learns that children, especially young lasses, pretty, courteous and well-bred, do very wrong to listen to strangers, And it is not an unheard thing if the Wolf is thereby provided with his dinner. I say Wolf, for all wolves are not of the same sort; there is one kind with an amenable disposition – neither noisy, nor hateful, nor angry, but tame, obliging and gentle, following the young maids in the streets, even into their homes. Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves are of all such creatures the most dangerous!
Through the years the ending was cleaned up for the aristocrats to whom this was jarring. There was the introduction of a woodsmen who saved the two eaten but still alive women within the wolf’s belly, or scarred off the wolf before he ate the girl while grandma was hiding in the closet.
I think it crazy to think that life was so brutal that stories needed to scare the bejeezus out of children. Most of the Brothers Grimm stories are just that, grim… Hansel and Gretel is rough, and you know that Old Woman in the Shoe? Here are the original lines:
There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth without any bread;
Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.
Eeeesh, I thought Poltergeist left scars….
Last Updated on 04/24/2026 by Death of Hypatia Inc.
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