MarytaleLittle Red Riding Hood is one of the few famous tales where the ending changed inside recorded history, and you can see it happen between two printed books a hundred years apart.
Perrault, 1697: it ends badly
In the first written version, by Charles Perrault, the wolf eats the grandmother and then eats the girl, and that is where the story stops. There is no huntsman, no woodcutter, nobody cutting anybody out of anything. Perrault then adds a verse spelling out the lesson for young ladies about listening to strangers.
It is a warning, and warnings do not have rescues in them. That was the point.
Grimm, 1812: the huntsman arrives
When the Brothers Grimm published the tale a century later, a huntsman appears at the end, hears what is happening, and gets both the grandmother and the girl out alive. The Grimm version also adds a short second ending in which Red Riding Hood meets another wolf, does not stop, and walks straight past it — the point being that she has learned.
The rescue was not sentimentality. The Grimms were collecting stories to be read to children in the household, and a story you read at bedtime has to be survivable. The lesson stayed; the death went.
The red hood is younger than the story
Versions of this tale without any red hood at all were told in France and northern Italy long before Perrault, and in some of them the girl escapes by her own wits rather than being rescued. The colour arrives with Perrault, and it is the detail every later teller kept, which is why the character is named after a piece of clothing.
Our version follows Grimm: the huntsman comes, and both of them live. We have kept the wolf frightening, because a warning with nothing frightening in it is not a warning — and we have kept the ending, because bedtime is bedtime.
The version before both of them
Folklorists recorded an oral French tale, usually called The Story of Grandmother, that is older than anything printed. In it there is no hood and no rescue, and the girl gets out on her own: she tells the wolf she needs to go outside, he ties a string to her so she cannot run, and she ties the string to a tree and walks home.
It is a completely different story with the same bones. The girl is not a warning to young ladies and not a child waiting for a huntsman; she is somebody who talks her way out. Some tellings also have her eating food the wolf has prepared from her grandmother, which nobody prints for children and which is why you may not have met this version.
Knowing it changes how the famous ones read. Perrault did not write down a story about obedience — he chose obedience out of a story that had other options in it.
What actually happens in each version
**Oral French, before 1697.** No red hood. The girl escapes by a trick, alone. The wolf loses.
**Perrault, 1697.** Red hood arrives. The wolf eats the grandmother and the girl. The story ends there, with a verse about not talking to strangers.
**Grimm, 1812.** A huntsman cuts them both out alive. A second ending is added in which the girl meets another wolf and walks straight past.
**Most retellings since.** Grimm's plot with Perrault's colour, usually with the eating made vaguer — swallowed whole, hidden in a cupboard — depending on how much the teller trusts the listener.
Which one should you read to a child?
For a child under about five, the Grimm ending. Not because the story needs softening, but because the point of the warning is that it can be acted on, and a version where doing everything wrong is final gives a small child nothing to do with the fear.
For an older child, the oral version is worth telling from memory — the string tied to the tree is the sort of detail that gets remembered for thirty years, and it is the only version in which the girl rescues herself.
Either way, the wolf should stay frightening. Children are very good at noticing when a story has been declawed, and they stop listening to the ones that have been.