Little Red Cap

Seems like a trustworthy wolf to me.

Happy Halloween, readers! Hopefully today has more treats than tricks for you. If you don't observe Halloween, then happy Thursday!

Today's story comes from the Grimm brothers in Germany. Little Red Cap, better known as Little Red Riding Hood, is a story about a naive girl and a devious wolf. There are many versions of this story, even on the webpage linked to above. I chose this version to write about, but if you want a more violent and frankly gross option, you could also read Little Red Hat from Italy or Austria. It might be more appropriate for Halloween, but I didn't want to go into detail with that one.

So, continuing on below, we'll talk about Little Red Cap, which is the Grimm brothers version of this famous story.



Somehow I never realized that our protagonist tells the wolf exactly where her grandmother's house is. In the stories I remember, she just tells him she's off to see her grandmother, and he happens to know who that is and where she lives. This version makes a lot more sense. Of course, it also makes Little Red Cap a lot more naive and foolish. If I'm walking somewhere, I'm not going to tell a stranger exactly where I'm going, particularly if I'm walking alone through the woods. But maybe part of the reason why is because I heard this story as a child.

I have to spend a moment on Little Red Cap's intuition. She saw the door was open to her grandmother's house and as soon as she walked inside, she knew something was wrong. Now, when the wolf came into the house, he ate her grandmother up while she was still in bed. Everything should have been the same in the parlor as it was before the wolf got there. So, either Little Red Cap's intuition is really good (there have been scientific studies about thin slicing, which is how you know things without really knowing them, so this could be possible), or Little Red Cap has some magic and that let her know the wolf was there. Since her potential magic is never mentioned again, it's probably the first option. But really, I could fall down a rabbit hole learning about the things our brains do that we don't realize.

We also need to spend a moment on the huntsman. Apparently he'd been hunting this particular wolf for quite awhile. When the huntsman finds his prey, instead of shooting him, he decides to take some scissors and open the wolf's belly just in case the grandmother is inside. Wow. Whether Little Red Cap has magic or not, the huntsman clearly does. Not only is he able to use a pair of scissors to cut open the wolf's belly and not harm either of the ladies inside, he doesn't wake up the wolf while doing this. So, clearly, he's magic. Or the scissors are, I suppose.

I also love the epilogue of this story where Little Red Cap finds herself in a similar situation with a wolf in the forest, but she learned her lesson, so she and her grandmother figure out a way to kill the wolf before he kills them. So Little Red Cap definitely learned her lesson and hopefully her grandmother felt a bit safer living in her house in the woods after that.

The moral of this story is, if you're going to be eaten by a talking wolf, make sure a helpful huntsman with magic scissors isn't far away. Alternatively, if someone creepy is trying to talk to you while you're out walking alone, don't tell him where you're going.

Have a different moral? Wondering where Little Red Cap's father was in all of this? Wondering why they had to kill the wolf with the stones before the huntsman could take his pelt? Comment below! And if you enjoy this blog, don't forget to subscribe.