LITTLER RED RIDING HOOD

Little Red Riding Hood is a classic European fairy tale about a young girl who wears a red hooded cape and is tasked with bringing food to her sick grandmother through a forest. She is tricked by a wolf who learns her destination, takes a shortcut, eats the grandmother, and disguises himself to eat her too, often ending with a hunter saving them or the girl falling victim to the wolf. The story revolves around a girl named Little Red Riding Hood, named after the red hooded cape that she wears. The girl walks through the woods to deliver food to her sickly grandmother (wine and cake depending on the translation). A stalking wolf wants to eat the girl and the food in the basket. After he inquires as to where she is going, he suggests that she pick some flowers as a present for her grandmother. While she goes in search of flowers, he goes to the grandmother's house and gains entry by pretending to be Riding Hood. He swallows the grandmother whole, climbs into her bed, and waits for the girl, disguised as the grandmother. Gustave Doré's engraving of the scene "She was astonished to see how her grandmother looked." When Riding Hood arrives, she notices the strange appearance of her "grandmother". After some back and forth, Riding Hood comments on the wolf's teeth, at which point the wolf leaps out of bed and eats her as well. In Charles Perrault's version of the story, the first to be published, the wolf falls asleep afterwards, whereupon the story ends. In later versions, the story continues: A woodcutter (German: Jäger, lit. 'hunter') in the Brothers Grimm and traditional German versions comes to the rescue with an axe, and cuts open the sleeping wolf. Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother emerge shaken, but unharmed. They then fill the wolf's body with heavy stones. The wolf awakens and attempts to flee, but the stones cause him to collapse and die. In the Grimms' version, the wolf leaves the house and tries to drink out of a well, but the stones in his stomach cause him to fall in and drown (similarly to the story of "The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids").

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