“Little Red Riding Hood”
There was a little girl whose grandmother
once gave her a red riding hood. The girl loved it so much, she always wore it
and people called her Little Red Riding Hood. One day her grandmother was
feeling ill, so Red’s mother sent Red to take her some cakes and wine. Her
mother told her to be careful.
As Red journeyed through the woods, she
met a wolf who asked her what she had and where she was going. Red told him she
had cakes and wine and even gave him directions to her grandmother’s house.
The wolf tried to think of some way to eat
both of them, so he pointed out some flowers to Red and she decided to pick
some for her grandmother.
Meanwhile the wolf went to grandmother’s
house and after pretending to be Red, just walked in because the door was
apparently unlocked. He went in and ate the grandmother and then put on her
clothes and hid in the bed.
When Red finished picking the flowers, she
continued on to her grandmother’s house. There’s the “what big eyes you have”
scene, and the wolf eats her. Since he’s full and already in bed, the wolf
falls asleep.
A huntsman was passing and heard such
awful snores coming from the house he went in to investigate to make sure
nothing was wrong. He found the wolf, but figured he must have swallowed the
old woman whole and might be saved. So instead of shooting the wolf, he took a
pair of scissors and cut him open. Both Red and the grandmother came out
unharmed.
They filled the wolf’s stomach with rocks
and sewed him back shut. When the wolf woke up, the stones were so heavy he
died, for some reason.
The huntsman took the wolf skin,
grandmother got her cakes and wine, and Red decided to play it safer while
traveling through the woods.
A few days later, Red was again taking
cakes and wine to her grandmother when another wolf stopped her. But Red kept
going to her grandmother’s and when she got there they locked the door.
Well, the wolf had followed her and
pretended to be Red but they didn’t open the door. So he jumped up on the roof to wait for Red
to leave. But grandmother had been boiling sausages and still had the water, so
she had Red filled a trough outside with it. The wolf was so intrigued by the
smell that he leaned out from the roof and fell in the trough where he drowned.
And then Red went home.
#
Give me that old time medicine of cakes
and wine.
I don’t think I had previously read the
version where Red GAVE the wolf directions to her grandmother’s house.
The wolf didn’t know how he could manage
to eat Red when she was away from the road picking flowers? And why pretend to
be Red when the door was unlocked?
How many outfits did the grandmother have
that the wolf had one, or did he strip her before … consuming her?
I don’t know much about wolves, but is it
common for them to swallow their meals whole, like seals swallowing a fish?
Did the wolf take some of grandmother’s
painkillers to sleep through having his stomach cut open and stitched back
shut? And what is it with wolves getting
stones put in their stomachs? The same
happened to the wolf in “The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids.”
I’m not sure what I find most upsetting
about the second wolf. Is it that grandmother’s plan was to tempt the wolf with
boiled sausage water so that he’d slip off the roof and drown in a trough of
water, or that it worked?
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