Once upon a time there lived a sweet little girl who was beloved by every one who saw her; but her grandmother was so excessively fond of her that she never knew when to give the child enough.

One day the grandmother presented the little girl with a red velvet riding hood; and as it fitted her very well, she would never wear any thing else; and so she was called Little Red Riding Hood.

Little Red Riding Hood by jerrycai.deviantart.com

Into the woods...

"when you go out in the woods, look straight ahead like a good little girl."

Little Red Riding Hood left the path and ran off into the woods looking for flowers. As soon as she picked one, she spotted an even more beautiful one somewhere else and went after it. And so she went even deeper into the woods.

Happy Halloween

from the Fairy Tale Land

of Red, Snow, and Sleep

Some cakes and a bottle of wine...So this is what our fair Red brought for grandmother's under-the-weather spell...no wonder the wolf wanted to join in. What about chicken soup? What about Sudefed?

It is written that the cakes and wine represent the Christian Communion, countering the flesh and blood the wolf leaves on grandmother's table in some versions of the tale. In Perrault's version cakes and a pot of butter make the grade. It is thought that some illustration portray the grandmum as an alcoholic, which would explain without question why Red brought such a treat. Trina Schart Hyman's illustrations for the story depict grandmother this way, which triggered a banning of the book in two California school districts in 1990.

Why I am so fascinated with Red, I can't explain. I don't see her as the naive girl, seduced into preoccupation so a wicked wolf can steal the prize and get a full meal. I don't see her as the stupid girl, unable to recognize treachery, and falling for an old transvestite wolf, only to be rescued, as in most tales, by some man or, in her case, a number of woods-men.

I see Red perhaps as a teen, bewildered and seduced as a young hormonal girl could be, who makes a choice. I see Red also as a smart, tough young woman, who outwits the evilness on her own terms, smiling and playing dumb, but getting her way in the end. Perhaps this is why Dickens once said that if he could Red Riding Hood he felt that he would be happy forever. He must have had a vision of her more as woman, than naive girl.

The wolf gets a bad rap always. Whenever I re-write fairy tales, I always sympathize with the wolf. What if he doesn't eat everyone in site? What if he's the one being betrayed?

Source: The Annotated Brothers Grimm

"Oh, what big ears you have!"
In the classic dialogue between girl and wolf, Little Red Riding Hood invokes the senses of hearing, sight, feeling, and taste, leaving out the sense of smell. The invocation of different body parts was no doubt expanded by folk raconteurs, who took advantage of opportunities for ribald humor. A parallel dialogue in oral versions of the tale provides an inventory of Red Riding Hood's clothes, which she removes and discards one by one.

Djuna Barnes understood the power of the scene for children when she wrote that "Children know something they can't tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!"

from: The Annotated Brothers Grimm by Maria Tatar

"Little Red Riding Hood" taps into many childhood anxieties, but especially into one that psychoanalysts call the dread of being devoured. Although the tale may take too violent a turn for some children, for others those same stories willend with a squeal of delight and a cry for more. And for those who are irritated by Red's failure to perceive that the creature lying in her grandmother's bed is a wolf, James Thurber's Little Girl and the Wolf and Roald Dahl's Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf are healthy antidotes to Perrault and the Grimms.

In Thurber's version, we learn that a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge, and we watch the girl take an automatic out of her basket and shoot the wolf dead. "It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be," Thurber concludes in the moral appended to the tale.

In Roald Dahl's Little Red Riding Hood "whips a pistol from her knickers," and in a matter of weeks, she sports a "lovely furry wolf skin coat."

From: The Annotated Brothers Grimm by Maria Tatar