Little Red Riding Hood

The Brothers Grimm toned this story down to have less flesh eating and more clothes.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
School of Humans. My name is Miranda Hawkins. Welcome to
the Deep dark Woods. Today's story is Atu three point
thirty three, or Little Red riding Hood.

Speaker 2 (00:37):
Once upon a time there was a sweet little girl.
Everyone who saw her liked her, but most of all
her grandmother, who did not know what to give the
child next. Once she gave her a little cap made
of red velvet, because it suited her so well, and
she wanted to wear it all the time. She came
to be known as a little Red Cap. One day

(01:00):
her mother said to her, come, little Red Cap, here's
a piece of cake and a bottle of wine. Take
them to your grandmother. She's sick and weak, and they
will do her well. Mind your manners and give her
my greetings. Behave yourself on the way, and do not
leave the path, or you might fall down and break
the glass, and then there will be nothing for your grandmother.

(01:21):
And when you enter her parlor, don't forget to say
good morning, and don't peer into all the corners first.
I'll do everything just right, said Little Red Cap, shaking
her mother's hand. The grandmother lived out in the woods,

(01:41):
half an hour from the village. When Little Red Cap
entered the woods. A wolf came up to her. She
did not know what a wicked animal he was, and
was not afraid of him. Good day to you, little
Red Cap, Thank you wolf. Where are you going so early,
little Red Cap?

Speaker 1 (02:01):
To grandmother's?

Speaker 2 (02:03):
And what are you carrying under your apron grandmother is
sick and weak, and I'm taking her some cake and
wine we baked yesterday, and they should be.

Speaker 1 (02:12):
Good for her and give her strength. Little Red Cap,
just where does.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Your grandmother live? Her house is a good quarter hour
from here, in the woods, under three large oak trees.
There's a hedge of hazel bushes there. You must know
the place, said Little Red Cap. The wolf thought to himself,
Now that sweet young thing is a tasty bite for me.
She will be even better than the old woman. You

(02:39):
must be sly and you can catch them both. He
walked along a little while with Little Red Cap. Then
he said, little Red Cap, just look at all the
beautiful flowers that are all around us.

Speaker 1 (02:53):
Why don't you go and take a look.

Speaker 2 (02:55):
And I don't believe you can hear how beautifully the
birds are singing. You're walking along as though you were
on your way to school. It's very beautiful in the woods.
The red Cap opened her eyes, and when she saw
the sunbeams dancing to and fro through the trees, and
how the ground was covered with beautiful flowers, she thought,
if I take a fresh bouquet a grandmother, she will

(03:16):
be very pleased. Anyway, it's still early and I'll be
home on time. And she ran off the path into
the woods, looking for flowers. Each time she picked one,
she thought she could see an even more beautiful one
a little way off, and she ran after it, going
further and further into the woods. But the wolf ran

(03:40):
straight to the grandmother's house and knocked on the door.
Who's there, little Red Cap, I'm bringing you some cake
and wine. Open the door. Just press the latch, called
out the grandmother.

Speaker 1 (03:53):
I'm too weak to get up.

Speaker 2 (03:56):
The wolf pressed the latch and the door open. He
stepped inside and went straight to the grandmother's bed and
ate her up. Then he put on her clothes, put
her cap on his head, got into her bed, and
pulled the curtains shut. Little Redcap had run after the flowers.

(04:16):
After she had gathered so many that she could not
carry any more. She remembered her grandmother and then continued
on her way to her house, she found, to her
surprise that the door was open. She walked into the parlor,
and everything looked so strange that she thought, oh my god,
why am.

Speaker 1 (04:34):
I so afraid?

Speaker 2 (04:35):
I usually like it at grandmother's. She called out good morning,
but received no answer. Then she went to the bed
and pulled back the curtains. Grandmother was lying there with
her cap pulled down over her face and looking very strange.

(04:55):
Oh grandmother, What big ears you have, All the better
to hear you with, Oh grandmother. What big eyes you have,
all the better to see you with, Oh grandmother. What
big hands you have, all the better to grab you with,

(05:21):
Oh grandmother, What a horribly.

Speaker 1 (05:23):
Big mouth you have, all the better to eat you with.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
The wolf could scarcely finished speaking when he jumped up
from the bed with a single leap and ate up
poor little red cat. As soon as the wolf had
satisfied his desires, he climbed back into bed, fell asleep,
and began to snore very loudly. A huntsman was just

(05:56):
passing by. He thought, the old woman is snoring so loudly.
You had better see if something's wrong with her.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
Stepped into the.

Speaker 2 (06:06):
Parlor and When he approached the bed, he saw the
wolf lying there. So here I find you, you old sinner,
he said, I've been hunting you for a long time.
He was about to aim his rifle when it occurred
to him that the wolf might have eaten the grandmother
and that she might still be rescued. So instead of shooting,

(06:27):
he took a pair of scissors and began to cut
open the wolf's belly. After a few cuts, he saw
the Red Cap shining through, and after a few more cuts,
the girl jumped out, crying, oh.

Speaker 1 (06:44):
I was so frightened. It was so dark inside the
wolf's body.

Speaker 2 (06:48):
And then the grandmother came out as well, alive but
hardly able to breathe. Then Little Redcap fetched some large stones.
She filled the wolf's body with them, and when he
woke up and tried to run away, the stones were
so heavy that he immediately fell down dead. The three
of them were happy. The huntsmen skinned the wolf and

(07:10):
went home with the pelt. The grandmother ate the cake
and drank the wine the Little Red Cap had brought.
And Little Red Cap thought, as long as I live,
I will never leave the path and run off into
the woods by myself. If my mother tells me not to.

Speaker 1 (07:37):
Little Red riding Hood is one of my favorite tails
from The Brother's Groom. It's also the easiest last minute
costume during Halloween. If you're wearing a red cape and
a picnic basket, pretty much everyone knows who you're trying
to be, But the roots of the tail are complicated.
People have been trying to pinpoint where Little Red riding

(08:00):
Hood originated for the past two hundred years. That's according
to doctor Jamie Tarrani's research. Doctor Trani is an anthropology
professor at Durham University in England. In November of twenty thirteen,
he released his findings on the origins of Little Red
riding Hood. He used a process many biologists use called philogenetics.

(08:26):
Phylogenetics graphically represents the relationships between organisms and a diagram
known as a tree of life, and the trees can
look like a variety of things. One variation is bracketing,
like you would do with a sports event. In doctor
Trani's case, he built a tree diagram using fifty eight

(08:46):
variants of the folk tale and then focused on seventy
two plot variables like who was a protagonist or a villain?
From there, he compared similarities to show which route the
story most likely took. For the longest time, scholars thought
the story originated in China six hundred to eight hundred

(09:07):
years ago and then traveled to Europe along the Silk Road.
But doctor Tarani's research showed something else. There is another
tale worldwide called The Wolf and the Kids. It's about
a wolf who pretends to be a nantygot to eat

(09:27):
the kids. Sound familiar, well, Doctor Tarani thinks that the
Wolf and the Kids and Little Red Riding Hood traveled
from Europe to China, not the other way around, and
that China blended these two tales to create its own version.
He also found elements of the story dating back about

(09:49):
two thousand years from somewhere between Europe and the Middle East.
But that's just one theory, because some people think that
stories like these don't have a single point of origin,
but rather similar stories pop up all over the world
because of how universal they are, or because of chance.

(10:12):
It would seem for now Little Red's true origins or
lost to history. But there's an even bigger question at
the center of the debate. What even counts as a
Little Red writing Hood story? For example, there's a Latin
manuscript of a poem written in ten twenty two. The

(10:34):
poem is about a young girl in a red cloak
who was taken by wolves. They tried to eat her,
but the cloak protected her from their bite. But even
with the red cloak and the wolves, some folklorists don't
think this counts. Like all the stories we've heard about
so far, pinpointing exactly where Little Red writing Hood was

(10:58):
born is unanswerable. But with this tale, the brothers Grim
did something new, something out of the ordinary for them.
They made the story less gruesome than its predecessors. So
what exactly would be so gruesome that the brother's Grim
chose to cut it out? The Brother's Grim wrote two

(11:31):
versions of the tale they call Little Red Cap. The
first one ended up being the final version you heard
at the beginning of this episode. The second one goes
like this. On a separate occasion, Little Red Cap is
taking bait goods to her grandmother when she happens upon
a wolf. The wolf tries to convince her to leave

(11:55):
the path, but Little Red Cap refuses and goes straight
to her grandmother's house. When she arrives, she tells her
grandmother about meeting the wolf. The two of them immediately
lock the door. Not long after, the wolf comes knocking,
calling out to Red's grandmother, claiming to be the young
girl bringing sweets. The two remains silent while the wolf

(12:18):
walks around the house several times before jumping on the roof.
His plan is to wait until Little Red leaves to
go home, and then he will devour her. But the
grandmother knows what the wolf is up to and makes
a plan herself. The grandmother has a large stone trough
in the front of her house, and she tells a

(12:39):
little Red to fill the trough with water. The young
girl does as she is told until the trough is full,
but it is no ordinary water. The grandmother had cooked
sausage in it the day before. When the smell of
sausage reaches a wolf, he stretches his neck so far
trying to look into the trough that he slides off

(12:59):
the roof and falls into the water, where he drowns.
And so Little Red goes home safe and sound. The
two variants of Grimm's Little Red come from two sisters,
Jeannette and Marie Hassenflug. Jeannette told the brothers the final

(13:22):
version you heard while Marie told the one with the
wolf drowning. Jeannette, Marie, and their other sister, Amilie were
French Huguenots whose family fled France and settled and hanowed Germany.
The story goes that Jeanette and Marie were known to
share French tales with the brothers grim and the story
they were telling the Grims came one hundred years prior,

(13:45):
which would explain why the story had different versions. But
the main tale is called Le Petit chaperone rouge. Translated,
it means Little Red riding hood, and it was written
by the same man who gave us the Little Glass slipper,
Charles Perrault. In his version, Little Red gives her some

(14:06):
food to take to her grandmother because her grandmother is sick.
As she walks through the forest, a wolf spots a
young girl. He wants to eat her, but he doesn't
dare do so because there are woodcutters nearby. Instead, he
approaches Little Red and asks her where she's headed. Because
the young girl doesn't know talking to a wolf is dangerous,

(14:29):
she tells him she is going to visit her sick grandmother.
The wolf challenges her to a raise to see who
can get there first. The wolf races down the shortest path,
while Little Red takes a long path, gathering flowers and
nuts along the way. When the wolf gets to the
grandmother's house, he tricks the old woman into thinking he
is a little Red. Then he eats her and hops

(14:52):
into bed disguised in her clothes. When the young girl arrives,
the wolf invites her inside, tells her to take off
all her clothes and hop into bed with him. After
the back and forth of my grandmother, what big teeth
you have, the wolf devours her. Pierrot's story is a

(15:18):
combination of two other tales that were circulating across Europe,
the Grandmother's Tail from France and Little Red Hat from
Italy or Austria, and these tails are even more brutal.
In the Grandmother's Tail, the little girl's mom gives her
a loaf of bread and milk to take to the grandmother.

(15:41):
In the woods, the path splits into two. This is
where the little girl meets the bazoo or werewolf. He
asks her which path she is taking, the one of
needles or of pins. She says needles, and he says
that's good because he's taking the one of pins along
the way. The little girl entertains herself by gathering needles,

(16:04):
but the werewolf straight to the grandmother's house, kills her,
puts some of her flesh in the pantry and a
bottle of her blood on the shelf. Then he disguises
himself and climbs into bed. When the little girl arrives,
the werewolf tells her to put the milk and bread
in the pantry and help herself to the meat and
wine that's in there. The little girl begins to eat,

(16:29):
and she does so, not knowing she's eating her grandmother's
flesh and drinking her grandmother's blood. There's a cat who
shames the girl for doing so, though the story doesn't
say whether or not the little girl heard the cat.
Then the werewolf tells a little girl to get undressed
and come to bed. Every time she asks what should

(16:51):
she do with a piece of her clothing, the werewolf replies,
throw it into the fire. It's after the little girl
climbs into bed that they go through the whole. My,
what big ears you have, grandmother rigamarole. When the little
girl mentions, what a big mouth you have, the werewolf responds,

(17:14):
the better to eat you with my child. But before
the wolf gets a chance to eat her, Little Red
says she has to use the bathroom. Oh, grandmother, I
have to do it outside, and the were wolf responds,
do it in the bed. Child. There's a little back
and forth before the were wolf concedes, but he still
ties a woolf thread around the young girl's ankles. As

(17:37):
soon as the girl is outside, she ties the string
to a plum tree. After some time, the werewolf calls out, and,
not hearing a response, runs outside to see what's going on.
He sees the young girl has escaped and follows her,
but just as he catches up, she's closing the door

(17:59):
to her home, safe and sound. The version from Italy
or Austria is similar, except the grandmother asks Little Red
to bring her some soup. Along the way, the young
girl runs into an ogre, who asks if she's taking
the path of thorns or the path of stones. Little

(18:22):
Red says stones and Dilly Dally's picking flowers, while the
ogre takes a rout of thorns and beats Little Red
to her grandmother's The ogre then tricks the grandmother into
letting him in and if you thought the French tale
was violent, I actually got a little nauseous reading this one.
Once in the house, the ogre eats the grandmother, ties

(18:43):
her intestines to the door, replacing the latch string, and
places her blood, teeth and jaws in the kitchen cupboard.
Then he disguises himself and jumps into bed. When Little
Red gets there, she first mentions how the latch string
is soft. The ogre says it is her grandmother's intestine,
but when Little Red doesn't hear clearly, just tells her

(19:06):
to come in. And like the grandmother's tail, the yogre
has a little Red eat and drink the parts of
her grandmother that he put in the pantry. And then
afterward the ogre has a young girl getting into bed
naked with him before he eats her up. Unlike the
grim's Little Red, these three tails have strong sexual overtones.

(19:30):
They all include a naked girl climbing into bed with
the wolf or ogre. Also, there is no woodcutter to
save little Red. Different from the Grandmother's tail and Little
Red hat, Pierrot went a step further. He added a
moral to the end of his tail that said children

(19:52):
especially attractive well bred young ladies should never talk to strangers,
for if they should do so, they may well provide
dinner for a wolf. I say wolf. But there are
the various kinds of wolves. There are also those who
are charming, quiet, polite, unassuming, complacent and sweet who pursue

(20:15):
young women at home and in the streets. And unfortunately,
it is these gentle wolves who are the most dangerous
ones of all. I talked to professor and folklorist doctor
Lynn McNeil about this story, and she told me that
this was pretty odd that Pero included this moral at

(20:37):
the end.

Speaker 3 (20:39):
It's very clearly a warning story. Perau even includes at
the end like a little rhyme that functions as a moral,
where he says to his readers, I hope you all
realize that I'm not talking about wolves here. I'm talking
about the kind of wolves who walk around in men's clothing.
And it's just sort of like this, like somber, very

(21:02):
grim ending. That's like high lighting the metaphor that's going
on here. Vulnerable young women, predatory men. That's the real risk.

Speaker 1 (21:13):
Those themes of predatory men and vulnerable young women are
also in little Red hat and the grandmother's tail and
an interesting thing about the werewolf and the grandmother's tail.
Some historians believe the story comes from the sixteenth or
seventeenth century. They think the tale was initially a cautionary

(21:34):
tale about children being careful when playing in the woods
because at that time men were going to trial for
being werewolves and molesting, killing, or eating young kids. These
stories are already terrible as is, with sexual predators and
children being eaten, but doctor McNeil says these stories take

(21:55):
it a step further.

Speaker 3 (21:57):
She's also made to engage in cannibalism. She's told to
eat and drink a bottle of grandma's blood that the
wolf is put on the shelf. So it's this strange
sort of complicit act of cannibalism that she's joining in
with him on. So it's it's a real interesting level
of degradation that's being depicted that is erased by the

(22:18):
time we get to the Grim Brothers version.

Speaker 1 (22:21):
We know by now the brothers Grim did a fair
amount of editing with all their stories, and for Little
Red specifically, they're removed any references to sex and cannibalism,
making it less grotesque, and by adding the woodcutter. They
also change the story's moral.

Speaker 3 (22:39):
We have this wild, animalistic, predatory male character, and then
we have this, you know, stout hearted, strong, true, brave,
capable male character as well. And it's an interesting reframing
because the grimms are sending a very clear, distinct message.
It's no longer framed as a warning story. It's more

(23:00):
framed as a here's how the world works story. We
still get that message of don't stray from the path,
don't get led astray, but we're also told you're gonna
get saved if that does happen. There are mechanisms of
society by which you might be rescued.

Speaker 1 (23:15):
Although these variations present different morals, doctor McNeil says the
overall symbolism of the character of Little Red stays the same.

Speaker 3 (23:26):
Scholars have suggested that the red hat or the cloak
is a symbol of puberty of maturity, that it represents
maturation or even specifically menstruation, the beginning the onset of
a young girl menstruating, becoming sexually viable as an adult biologically,
and that, of course when she sets out in the
world with this new adult status, that's when the wolves come.

(23:50):
There's other schools of thought, though, and an old line
of academic thinking, the school of solar mythology, had that
all stories in the end boiled down to some element
of the sun struggling against the devouring night, in which
case Red riding Hood cloak becomes a solar symbol, and
she's representing the warmth and the safety of daylight, and

(24:11):
the wolf is the dark, devouring night coming after her.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
As if Little Red Riding Hood wasn't complicated enough, Throughout
the years, each retelling changes why the young girl strays
from the path, and the tales we heard about it's
because she's picking flowers or gathering pine needles. But then
during the nineteenth century Victorian era, Little Red veers off
the trail because she wants to disobey her mom. But

(24:38):
what makes her stray from the path these days? In
almost all the Little Red riding Hood stories, a little

(24:58):
girl takes a detour in the woods, and today's versions
Red is still taking a detour, but it's not as literal.
Doctor McNeil explains.

Speaker 3 (25:10):
The initial setup that we get really was pigeonholing these characters.
You know, a young girl is going to be vulnerable
and in danger, and a scary wolf is going to
be a predator and evil, and those binaries are really
inherent in fairy tales, but the door is open now
for us to comment on them. And this is something

(25:32):
that as we as a society move forward, we want
to nuance. We want to understand these things. We don't
want to see evil as an absolute. We try and
put things like crime and punishment in a human context. Now,
what causes this, what leads people to make choices? That
the choices might be bad, but that doesn't mean people

(25:52):
are inherently bad, And that nuanced understanding of humanity is
something we see reflected in how we handle fairy tales now,
the fact that we want to say, well, what does
this look like from the wolf perspective? The wolf has
a past, the wolf has a context, The wolf has
instinctive drives.

Speaker 1 (26:13):
Like with Rumpelstilskin today, we want to know the motivations
of all the characters, even the villains. And doctor McNeil says,
the wolf is a perfect anti hero.

Speaker 3 (26:25):
We love that. The idea of the anti hero now
is something that we want to run with and we've
got this perfect character with which to do it, The
big bad Wolf, right, and so we get to play
with these ideas because they're still relevant to us, but
in these totally different, totally nuanced ways, and we get

(26:46):
things like Hoodwinked, things like Into the Woods that turn
these ideas on their heads on purpose that wouldn't work
if we didn't all know the original story.

Speaker 1 (27:01):
Hoodwinked is a two thousand and five feature length cartoon
movie and crime procedural that tells a story through the
perspective of four different characters, Little Red, Granny, the Wolf,
and the Huntsman, and revolves around trying to discover who
the goodie bandit is. The twist it isn't the Wolf,

(27:22):
but a cute little bunny named Bongo who's a mastermind criminal.
The moral is simple, don't judge a book by its cover.
But these retellings aren't just about the wolf. They also
turn the tables on Little Red herself. Like with Into
the Woods, which doctor McNeil talked about above. It's a
musical that was turned into a film in twenty fourteen.

(27:46):
The story follows several characters set in a fairytale world
where things don't go quite right and Little Red isn't
as sweet. She steals pies, from the Baker. But Into
the Woods isn't the only time that Little Red is
portrayed as more than an innocent young girl.

Speaker 3 (28:03):
Angela Carter's poem in the Company of Wolves plays into this,
where it's not a directory telling of Little Red riding Hood,
but it's the themes of womanhood and sexuality and predatoriness
where the woman in the end chooses to welcome in
that predatory male. And we see it in even more

(28:24):
contemporary instances, like the film Hard Candy, a young girl
is groomed online by an older man. We encounter it
through their online discussions and when they meet up in person,
and it's very ominous, very chilling, And through the entire
opening half of the film, the young woman is wearing

(28:45):
a red hoodie and that's it. That's the entire reference
to Little Red riding Hood. But just in that one act,
even maybe unconsciously, for a lot of viewers, we have
those themes predatory masculinity and vulnerable femininity, and youth and
age and all of those binary oppositions that fairy tales
include in ways that make them a shorthand for those

(29:08):
ideas today.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
The part doctor McNeil doesn't mention about hard Candy is
that in the end, the twist is at the girl
as a true predator. The guy had photographed her friend
being murdered. She forces him to confess before blackmailing him
into killing himself. Another take comes from an essay by

(29:30):
Neha Patel. In it, she points out that many book
adaptations have one basis in common. A woman is put
into a perilous situation and must face something bad, whether
it be a demon, a monster, or a wolf. The
books she lists to back her point are Scarlett by
Marissa Meyer, Crimson Bound by Rosamund Hodge, for the Wolf

(29:54):
by Hannah Whitten, and Sister Read by Jackson Pierce. Her
essay connects back to the original moral of Pirot, and
she says that although the modern world might seem see
for women, it isn't. She uses crime statistics to illustrate
her take, but she says that unlike the Grimms version,

(30:14):
there are no societal mechanisms that might rescue you. But
then again, you have modern variations like the twenty eleven
Little Red Riding Hood movie with Amanda Seifred, where she
saves herself. In the film, a town is descended upon
by a werewolf. Valerie, who is a little Red, gets
caught up trying to figure out who the wolf is.

(30:38):
The werewolf turns out to be her father, and she
ends up killing him, but her love gets scratched. Since
Valerie can communicate with werewolves since she was born into it.
Although in the movie you still have to be turned,
she is able to stay in touch with her love
while he ventures off to learn to control his impulses. Here,

(30:58):
unlike the variations of the past, Red is more than
capable of defending herself. Yes, she does have help from
her love, but it is ultimately Little Red who kills
her father. You could say these stories present a shift
in power dynamics, or possibly women taking their power back.

Speaker 3 (31:18):
I think that the vulnerability of young women has been
and kind of always will be a hot topic in society,
but in wildly different ways. For a long time, the
instinct was shelter and protect, and now the instinct is
educate and empower. Let's do something different with that. So
we're going to keep our vulnerable young woman character, but
she's gonna start kicking ass, you know, like she's gonna

(31:41):
take on this incredibly different mode of being. Will still
need a way to talk about that, but we're going
to talk about it in wholly different ways.

Speaker 1 (31:53):
Little Red riding Hood has been around for centuries with
endless different ways to tell it, and it looks as
if it will stay with us for centuries more, just
maybe without Little Red eating her grandmother's teeth. Next time,
a beautiful Princess sleeps for one hundred years. The Deep

(32:18):
Dark Woods is a production of School of Humans and
iHeart Podcasts. It was created, written, and hosted by me
Miranda Hawkins. This episode was produced by Mike hal June
with senior producer Gabby Watts. Executive producers are Virginia Prescott,
Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley, and Maya Howard. Stories were voiced

(32:39):
by Julia Christgau. Theme song was composed by Jesse Niswanger.
This episode was sound designed and mixed by Chris Childs.
If you enjoyed the show, please leave a review and
you can follow along with the show on Instagram at
School of Humans