Little Red Riding Hood

7-9 min read
16 pages

Little Red Riding Hood, the Brothers Grimm tale to read aloud. She is told to keep to the path, and the wolf asks where she is going.

There was a girl who had a red hood, and she wore it so often that in the end nobody in the village called her anything else.

One morning her mother packed a basket with bread and a jar of butter. «Your grandmother is ill,» she said. «Take this to her. Go straight there, keep to the path, and don't stop to talk to anybody.»

The path went through the wood, and it was a good path, wide enough for a cart. Red Riding Hood had walked it before and she knew the turning by the fallen birch.

Halfway along, a wolf came out of the trees and walked beside her as though they had arranged to meet. «Good morning,» he said. «That's a heavy basket for a small person.»

«It's for my grandmother,» she said. «She's ill.» «Ah,» said the wolf. «And where does she live?» «In the cottage past the three oaks, at the end of the wood.»

«Have you noticed the flowers?» said the wolf, as if it had only just occurred to him. «Just there, under the birches. Your grandmother would like flowers. Nobody brings her flowers, I expect.»

Red Riding Hood looked. There were flowers, and there were more flowers a little further in, and a whole blue bank of them beyond that. She stepped off the path to pick some. The wolf watched her go, and then he ran.

He ran the short way, which he knew and she did not, and he reached the cottage while she was still among the birches with her arms full.

He knocked. «It's me,» he said, in a voice that was not his. The grandmother, who could not see well and could not get up quickly, said, «Lift the latch, dear, it isn't locked.»

What happened next was quick. Then the wolf put on the grandmother's nightcap and got into her bed and pulled the blanket up to his chin, and lay in the dark waiting.

Red Riding Hood came at last. The door stood open, which was strange, and the room was very dark for the middle of the day, which was stranger.

«Grandmother,» she said, «what a deep voice you have.» «So that I can call you nearer, my dear.» «Grandmother, what big eyes you have.» «So that I can see you better.»

«Grandmother,» said Red Riding Hood, and she did not move any closer, «what enormous teeth you have.»

«So that I can eat you up,» said the wolf, and he came out of the bed all at once, and the nightcap fell off.

There was a huntsman in the wood that morning, close enough to hear the noise a girl makes when she is truly frightened, and he was at the door before the wolf reached it. What he did with the wolf he did outside, and quickly.

The grandmother was found, and she was shaken but she was whole, and the three of them ate the bread and the butter together while the fire was got going. On the way home Red Riding Hood did not stop once, and she did not look at the flowers, and afterwards, for the rest of her life, she kept to paths.

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Text source: Folk tale, public domain (Perrault 1697, Brothers Grimm 1812). The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

Little Red Riding Hood characters

Little Red Riding Hood: Named after a cap her grandmother made her, which she never takes off. The cap arrives with Perrault in 1697; in the older oral tellings there is none.
The wolf: Asks where she is going and is told. Nothing in the story is stolen from her — it is given away in conversation.
The grandmother: Lives a quarter of an hour into the wood, alone and ill. Swallowed whole, which is why she can come out again.
The huntsman: Arrives only in the Grimm version of 1812. In Perrault's there is no rescue at all and the story stops with the wolf.
The second wolf: Most retellings cut him. In the full Grimm text Red Riding Hood meets another wolf later, does not stop, and walks straight past — which is the whole point of the first half.

Where «Little Red Riding Hood» comes from and who wrote it down

What is a folk tale?

Little Red Riding Hood

Little Red Riding Hood characters

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