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.
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 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. 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, 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?
To grandmother's?
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.
Good for her and give her strength. Little Red Cap, just where does.
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 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.
Why don't you go and take a look.
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 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 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.
I'm too weak to get up.
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. 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.
I so afraid?
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. 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, Oh grandmother, What a horribly.
Big mouth you have, all the better to eat you with.
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 passing by. He thought, the old woman is snoring so loudly. You had better see if something's wrong with her.
Stepped into the.
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, 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.
I was so frightened. It was so dark inside the wolf's body.
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 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.
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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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
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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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
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 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. 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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
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 the end.
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 grim ending. That's like high lighting the metaphor that's going on here. Vulnerable young women, predatory men. That's the real risk.
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 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 it a step further.
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 time we get to the Grim Brothers version.
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.
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 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.
Although these variations present different morals, doctor McNeil says the overall symbolism of the character of Little Red stays the same.
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.
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 the wolf is the dark, devouring night coming after her.
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
what makes her stray from the path these days? In almost all the Little Red riding Hood stories, a little 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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, 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. 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.
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 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 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 ideas today.
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 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 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,
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. 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, 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.
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
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.
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 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 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