the wondrous happens. Animal tales feature animals that act, think, and talk like humans. The animals are placed in human situations where they interact with each other and sometimes with humans. These tales ascribe particular human behaviors to various animal species. With the repetition of these tales over time, the animals become a kind of shorthand for those behaviors. For instance, foxes represent cunning and slippery behavior while wolves represent physical strength and brutality. These stories often impart specific and clear lessons, morals, or warnings.
Common features of folktales include brevity, conventional opening and closing phrases, and archetypal characterizations that embody certain traits or situations, such as the third son or the wicked stepmother. The dark forest, a giant’s lair, or the beautiful princess evoke powerful images. According to Max Lüthi (1982), a lack of details in folktales helps keep the tales alive by making them flexible and more easily adaptable from one culture to another. Illustrations, which accompany folktales in children’s books, give shape and substance to the characters and setting, seemingly undermining their adaptability. And yet it is the endless range of visual interpretations and possibilities that illustrated print editions offer that helps keep these traditional tales vital.
Although folktales are often relegated to the nursery, as Tolkien complained (1964, p. 58), children were not necessarily the intended audience for folktales. Many tales were bawdy and violent. Tellers shared these tales with whomever was present. Even early print collections were not published with children in mind. For instance, Charles Perrault’s collection of tales, a source text for many children’s books, was originally published as part of a larger cultural debate in late seventeenth-century France. Today, even when children are the intended audience, they are certainly not the sole audience. Adults select, adapt, and illustrate tales that are published as children’s books and shared with children, but critiqued by and studied by adults.
Folktales are often thought of as being an innocent and safe way to impart lessons for young people. The struggle between good and evil or between those in power and the powerless are often at the heart of these tales. Maria Tatar (1987, p. 51) wrote that in the tale of Little Red Riding Hood “strength confronts weakness, and any predatory power can be substituted for the wolf.” This applies to many tales. Petulant fairies, evil stepmothers, witches, giants, and monstrous wolves often plague the protagonists’ journey with violence and cruelty. Folktales are the stuff of nightmares. And yet the situations they depict, including child abandonment, child abuse, domestic violence, and murder, belong to real life.
Often the appeal of traditional tales lies in their subversive nature. They offer alternative possibilities, the “what might be” as opposed to what is. They are the stuff of dreams. Characters who in real life are powerless – the youngest, weakest, and most vulnerable – take center stage. Through goodness, guile, courage, or hard work (and sometimes the help of magical beings), an orphan, the youngest child, or an unloved stepchild overcomes challenges and gains a modicum of power. And yet, these stories do not advocate widespread social change. Instead, they recount the stories of individual underdogs whose courage and suffering are rewarded with power or wealth (Bottigheimer 1987; Zipes 2002).
This chapter focuses on Western European folktales in children’s literature. Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Pigs offer examples to explore the history and research of folktales in children’s books. They are popular tales, representing two of the more popular subgenres of folktales in children’s books: the fairy tale and the animal tale. (For expediency, the term folktale will be used in lieu of finer designations such as fairy tale, animal tale, etc.) Both Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Pigs continue to be told and retold, making them mainstays of the canon of Western European and North American children’s literature.
Putting Tales in Print
During the 1690s, Charles Perrault rewrote popular oral folktales by combining French folk motifs with the more refined language and style of the salons. In 1697, Perrault published Histoires ou contes du temps passé avec des moralités: Contes de ma mère l’Oye (Stories or Tales of Past Times with Morals: Mother Goose Tales), a collection of eight tales, several of which have become mainstays in children’s literature. The tales included “La belle au bois dormant” (“Sleeping Beauty”), “Le petit chaperon rouge” (“Little Red Riding Hood”), “Barbe bleue” (“Bluebeard”), “Cendrillon” (“Cinderella”), “Le petit poucet” (“Tom Thumb”), “Riquet à la houppe” (Riquet with the Tuft), “Le chat botté” (“Puss in Boots”), and “Les Fées” (“The Fairies”). In this collection of tales, Perrault helped to create the style associated with folktales: brief, entertaining prose stories marked by simple plots, eloquent language, and explicit morals (Jones and Schacker 2013, p. 497).
In 1729, Robert Samber translated and published Perrault’s collection of tales into English: Histories or Tales of Past Times: Told by Mother Goose. The first five editions were bilingual and displayed the English translation alongside the French text. The sixth edition, published in 1772, was in English only. By the mid-eighteenth century, inexpensive and ephemeral chapbook editions of Perrault’s tales were common in England, France, and Central Europe.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s efforts to collect German folktales helped foster a general interest in the genre. While studying law at the University of Marburg, the Grimms became interested in ancient German literature. They believed that traditional folktales formed the basis of that literature. From 1806 to 1813, during the time of the Napoleonic invasions and French occupation of German states, the Brothers Grimm, with the aim of saving the oral folktales of the German volk, began collecting tales. In 1812 and 1815, they published Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Nursery and Household Tales), a scholarly work in two volumes containing 156 tales.
Beginning with the 1819 second edition, Wilhelm Grimm continued to edit, revise, and incorporate new tales. Wilhelm’s revisions, which included the removal of coarse language and scenes and the insertion of more pedantic language, middle-class morals, gendered role models, and Christian values, helped transform this scholarly undertaking into a major source of tales appropriate for the general public, including children (Bottigheimer 1987; Tatar 1987; Zipes 2002).
In 1823, Edgar P. Taylor’s English translation of the Grimms’ tales was published. It featured illustrations by George Cruikshank. The popularity and financial success of this English illustrated edition, known as German Popular Stories, inspired the Grimms to produce a smaller, illustrated edition of their work. Comprised of 50 tales with illustrations by their brother Ludwig Emil Grimm, this Kleine Ausgabe, or Small Edition, was aimed at a more general audience, including children. From 1825 to 1858, the Grimms published 10 editions of this smaller work.
The Grimms’ collection of tales included “Little Red Cap,” a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. The Grimms’ version differs from Perrault’s version in its tone, characterization, and plot. Perrault’s tale ends with the wolf devouring the little girl. In the Grimms’ version, a hunter rescues both the girl and the grandmother from the sleeping wolf’s belly. The girl and the grandmother then kill the wolf by filling his belly with stones. This resolution recalls the ending to another tale in the Grimms’ collection, “The Wolf and the Seven Kid Goats.” By changing the ending, the Grimms also changed the tone of the tale, making it less cruel (the girl and the grandmother survive) but more didactic than Perrault’s tale. Before sending her daughter on her way, the mother tells her what she should and should not do, making it clear that if Little Red Cap fails to heed her mother’s instructions, she will be punished. In the 1857 edition, the Grimms lengthened the tale to include a second meeting with a second wolf. This time, however, both the little girl and her grandmother knew how to deal with the wolf.
Subsequent adaptors and illustrators of this tale base their text, plot, and ending on either Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” or the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap.” English-language retellings are varied and
