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About this episode
In the Grimms’ version, a huntsman saves Little Red Riding Hood. In Perrault’s, she’s eaten. But in a peasant tale from Burgundy, recorded in the 1880s, the girl eats her own grandmother’s flesh, undresses in front of a werewolf, and in the end saves herself. In episode 3 of our Grimm series, we dig for the dark roots of Little Red Riding Hood: from a Latin schoolbook written around 1023, through the Paris salons of Charles Perrault, to a study that analyzes fairy tales with the tools of evolutionary biology. And we ask whether that ancient oral tradition ever really existed, or whether it’s a fairy tale itself.
📚 Sources and Further Reading
Jamshid J. Tehrani: “The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood.” PLOS ONE 8/11 (2013), e78871. → The family-tree study of Little Red Riding Hood and related tales. Open access.
Jan M. Ziolkowski: “A Fairy Tale from before Fairy Tales: Egbert of Liège’s ‘De puella a lupellis seruata’ and the Medieval Background of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’.” Speculum 67/3 (1992). → The key study of Egbert’s girl among the wolves.
Ruth B. Bottigheimer: Fairy Tales: A New History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. → The counter-thesis of a book-based history of fairy tales.
Journal of American Folklore 123, no. 490 (2010). → Responses to Bottigheimer by Dan Ben-Amos, Francisco Vaz da Silva and Jan M. Ziolkowski.
Alan Dundes (ed.): Little Red Riding Hood: A Casebook. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. → A collection of key texts and interpretations, including an English translation of the Story of Grandmother.
Paul Delarue / Marie-Louise Tenèze: Le Conte populaire français. Vol. 1, Paris 1957, further volumes to 1985. → The great catalogue of French folk tales in which Delarue published the Story of Grandmother. (French)
Yvonne Verdier: “Grands-mères, si vous saviez… Le Petit Chaperon rouge dans la tradition orale.” Cahiers de Littérature orale 4 (1978). → The ethnological reading of the needles and pins. (French; full text available via the BnF)
Yvonne Verdier: Façons de dire, façons de faire. La laveuse, la couturière, la cuisinière. Paris: Gallimard, 1979. → The village study from Minot on which her reading is based. (French)
Charles Perrault: Histoires ou contes du temps passé. Paris, 1697. → Perrault’s original, with its verse moral. Public domain, widely available online and in translation.