Monday, December 19, 2016

Grimm Reviews – “Little Red Riding Hood”




“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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