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bookc. 1697 (Perrault) / 1812 (Grimm)

Little Red Riding Hood

Disciplines:
literature/oral tradition
mythology/folklore
mythology/fairy tale
european

Summary

Classic European fairy tale — codified by Charles Perrault (1697) and later the Brothers Grimm (1812) — depicting a young girl's encounter with a wolf in the forest while traveling to her grandmother's house — one of the most analyzed and symbolically rich fairy tales in the Western canon.

Core Contribution

Creates the archetypal warning tale of innocence, predation, and female vulnerability — Little Red Riding Hood encodes one of the oldest oral warnings (the predator disguised as the familiar) in a narrative form so stark and symbolically dense (the red hood, the wolf, the grandmother's house, the forest as liminal danger zone) that it has generated more psychoanalytic, feminist, and anthropological interpretation than almost any other tale.

Historical Influences

European oral folklore tradition Pre-Christian forest mythology

Intellectual Lineage

Charles Perrault Brothers Grimm Pre-literary oral tradition

Allied Works

Hansel and Gretel Company of WolvesInto the Woods

Contemporaries & Peers

Cinderella Sleeping Beauty Hansel and Gretel

Minds Influenced

Psychoanalytic fairy tale interpretation Feminist folklore studiesHorror genre

Intellectual Posterity

Little Red Riding Hood Wolf as predator archetypeFeminist fairy tale critiqueInto the Woods

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Little Red Riding Hood

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