Little Red Riding Hood

"Little Red Riding Hood" (French: Le Petit Chaperon rouge) is a fairy tale by Charles Perrault about a young girl and a Big Bad Wolf. Some later versions include a woodsman. Its origins can be traced back to several pre-17th-century European folk tales. It was later retold in the 19th-century by the Brothers Grimm.

The story has varied considerably in different versions over the centuries, translations, and as the subject of numerous modern adaptations. Other names for the story are "Little Red Cap" or simply "Red Riding Hood". It is number 333 in the Aarne–Thompson classification system for folktales.

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.

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 woodsman (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").

Sanitized versions of the story have the grandmother locked in the closet rather than being eaten (and also having the wolf eat the food Little Red Riding Hood brought rather than her) and some have Little Red Riding Hood saved by the lumberjack as the wolf advances on her rather than after she is eaten, where the woodcutter kills or simply chases away the wolf with his axe.

The story displays similarities to stories from classical Greece and Rome. Scholar Graham Anderson has compared the story to a local legend recounted by Pausanias in which, each year, a virgin girl was offered to a malevolent spirit dressed in the skin of a wolf, who raped the girl. Then, one year, the boxer Euthymos came along, slew the spirit, and married the girl who had been offered as a sacrifice. There are also a number of different stories recounted by Greek authors involving a woman named Pyrrha (literally "fire") and a man with some name meaning "wolf". The Roman poet Horace alludes to a tale in which a male child is rescued alive from the belly of Lamia, an ogress in classical mythology.