Array The Brothers Grimm - Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm - A New English Version

So she stepped off the path, and ran into the trees to pick some flowers; but each time she picked one she saw an even prettier one a bit further away, so she ran to get that as well. And all the time she went further and further into the wood.

But while she was doing that, the wolf ran straight to the grandmother’s house and knocked on the door.

‘Who’s there?’

‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ said the wolf. ‘I’ve got some cake and wine for you. Open the door!’

‘Just lift the latch,’ said the grandmother. ‘I’m feeling too weak to get out of bed.’

The wolf lifted the latch and the door opened. He went inside, looked around to see where she was, and then leaped on the grandmother’s bed and ate her all up in one big gulp. Then he put on her clothes and put her nightcap on his head, and pulled the curtains tight shut, and got into bed.

All that time, Little Red Riding Hood had been wandering about picking flowers. Once she had gathered so many that she couldn’t hold any more, she remembered what she was supposed to be doing, and set off along the path to her grandmother’s house. She had a surprise when she got there, because the door was open and the room was dark.

‘My goodness,’ she thought, ‘I don’t like this. I feel afraid and I usually like it at Granny’s house.’

She called out, ‘Good morning, Granny!’ but there was no answer.

She went to the bed and pulled open the curtains. There was her grandmother, lying with her cap pulled down and looking very strange.

‘Oh, Granny, what big ears you’ve got!’

‘All the better to hear you with.’

‘Granny, what big eyes you’ve got!’

‘All the better to see you with.’

‘And Granny, what big hands you’ve got!’

‘All the better to hold you with.’

‘And oh, Granny, what a great grim ghastly mouth you’ve got—’

‘All the better to eat you with!’

And as soon as the wolf said that, he leaped out of bed and gobbled up Little Red Riding Hood. Once he’d swallowed her he felt full and satisfied, and since the bed was so nice and soft, he climbed back in, fell deeply asleep, and began to snore very loudly indeed.

Just then a huntsman was passing by.

‘The old woman’s making such a noise,’ he thought, ‘I’d better go and see if she’s all right.’

He went into the parlour, and when he came near the bed he stopped in astonishment.

‘You old sinner!’ he thought. ‘I’ve been looking for you for a long time. Found you at last!’

He raised his rifle to his shoulder, but then he put it down again, because it occurred to him that the wolf might have eaten the old lady, and he might be able to rescue her. So he put down the rifle and took a pair of scissors, and began to snip open the wolf’s bulging belly. After only a couple of snips he saw the red velvet cap, and a few snips later the girl jumped out.

‘Oh, that was horrible!’ she said. ‘I was so frightened! It was so dark in the wolf’s belly!’

And then the grandmother began to clamber out, a bit out of breath but not much the worse for her experience. While the hunter helped her to a chair, Little Red Riding Hood ran outside to fetch some heavy stones. They filled the wolf’s body with them, and then Little Red Riding Hood sewed him up very neatly, and then they woke him up.

Seeing the hunter there with his gun, the wolf panicked and ran outside, but he didn’t get very far. The stones were so heavy that soon he fell down dead.

All three of them were very happy. The hunter skinned the wolf and went home with the pelt, Granny ate the cake and drank the wine, and Little Red Riding Hood thought, ‘What a narrow escape! As long as I live, I’ll never do that again. If mother tells me to stay on the path, that’s exactly what I’ll do.’

Tale type:ATU 333, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’

Source:a story told to the Grimm brothers by Jeanette and Marie Hassenpflug

Similar stories:Italo Calvino: ‘The False Grandmother’, ‘The Wolf and the Three Girls’ ( Italian Folktales ); Charles Perrault: ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ ( Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales )

I suppose that this and ‘Cinderella’ are the two best-known fairy tales (in Britain, at any rate), and they both owe a great deal of their popularity to Charles Perrault (see the note to ‘Cinderella’). His version differs from Grimm mainly in that it ends with the wolf eating Little Red Riding Hood. There is no rescue by a brave huntsman; instead, a moralistic verse warns that not all wolves are wild — some of them are smooth-talking seducers.

The huntsman is an interesting detail. The German forests were not just wildernesses, belonging to no one: their owners were often of princely rank, and after the great demand for ship-building timber and the destruction of the forests to make way for crops and cattle to feed the armies of the Thirty Years War, what they wanted most from their woods was pleasure and recreation: hunting, in a word. As John Eliot Gardiner says in his forthcoming work on J. S. Bach: ‘In terms of influencing the way their [i.e. the princely owners’] woods were managed, the huntsman eclipsed the trained forester (just as the pheasant and the gamekeeper today so often has more sway than the woodman).’

Perhaps a forester, being less confident with wild animals than a huntsman, and less likely to carry a gun, too, would have tiptoed away carefully from the sleeping wolf and left Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother to be digested.

Whatever the likelihood of that, both Perrault and Grimm reinforce the moral of bourgeois respectability. Little Red Riding Hood, in the Grimms’ version, has no need of a moralistic reminder not to leave the path — she’s learned her lesson. (During the panic about paedophilia, it was common to hear this story used to remind children of ‘stranger danger’.) She’ll never leave the path again.

Gustave Doré’s famous engraving, published in 1863 to illustrate an edition of Perrault’s version, showing Little Red Riding Hood actually in bed with the wolf reminds us of part of this story’s power: wolves are sexy. And so are foxes, as Beatrix Potter knew when creating and drawing the suave ‘gentleman with the sandy-coloured whiskers’ in The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck (1908), her own variation on the Little Red Riding Hood story. Perrault would have recognized him at once.

Perhaps Charles Dickens’s comment sums up the attraction of the heroine most vividly. ‘Little Red Riding Hood was my first love,’ Bruno Bettelheim quotes him as saying. ‘I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss’ ( The Uses of Enchantment , p. 23).

Once there was a man who had a donkey, and for years this donkey had carried sacks of grain to the mill without a word of complaint; but now his strength was running out, so he couldn’t work as hard as he used to, and his master thought it was time to stop feeding him. The donkey noticed this, and didn’t like it a bit, so he ran away and looked for the road to Bremen. His plan was to become a town musician.

When he’d gone a little way he came across a hunting hound lying in the road. The dog was panting as if he’d just run for miles.

‘What are you panting for, Grabber?’ said the donkey.

‘Well, I’m getting old, you see,’ explained the hound, ‘and I can’t run as far as I used to. My master reckons I’m no good any more, and he wanted to kill me, so I ran away; but I don’t know how to earn my living in any other way, and I’m getting hungry.’