are rescued) bear the title Little Red Riding Hood. There are also variations on the Grimms’ ending. In 1843, Sir Henry Cole, writing under the pseudonym Felix Summerly, adapted “Little Red Riding Hood” with color printed illustrations. His introduction to the tale praises Little Red Riding Hood’s moral and religious qualities while his ending introduces the girl’s father, who rescues her from the wolf. Walter Crane’s 1875 toy book makes several key changes to the tale. His visual rendering of the wolf transforms Perrault’s aristocratic wolf into a lower class, rustic wolf. Crane’s Little Red Riding Hood is also rescued – this time by a clearly well-heeled hunter – before the wolf can devour her.
Neither Perrault’s nor the Grimms’ collections contain the story of The Three Pigs. The history of this tale points to English, Italian, and North American origins. Most sources, including the nineteenth-century English folklorist Joseph Jacobs, cite James Orchard Halliwell’s fifth edition of The Nursery Rhymes of England (1853) as containing the first print version of the tale. However, the afterword of a reproduction of Pigweenie the Wise or, The History of a Wolf and Three Pigs (1830) points to this story in verse as the first known print version of The Three Pigs (Graham and Shefrin 1988). It also cites the unpublished manuscript Adventures of the Little Pigs from Nursery Traditions of Boulton & Raymond Families (1850) by C. Sadleir-Bruère as predating Halliwell’s story.
The two main print versions of this tale differ on the fates of the pigs. In one version, the wolf blows down the houses of straw and sticks and devours the resident cowering pigs. The third pig, who built his house with bricks, withstands the wolf’s assault. With the death of the first two pigs, the story shifts to a duel between the surviving pig and the increasingly frustrated wolf. The pig outwits the wolf, and the tale ends with the wolf plunging down the pig’s chimney, where he is either boiled in oil (or water) or consumed by the flames. In another version of this tale, the first two pigs survive the wolf’s onslaughts by seeking refuge in their sibling’s house. When the wolf arrives at the house of brick, the third pig invites the wolf to climb down the chimney. He does and is burned alive.
During the nineteenth century, illustrated folktales and folktale anthologies intended for children became increasingly common. As Avery and Kinnell (1995, p. 71) wrote, “The fairy tale had become the province of children, and furthermore was being separately presented from the clearly educational tales for children.” While many of these works featured tales found in the collections of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, folktales from a wider range of countries were also adapted and published for children. Works include Benjamin Tabart’s Cinderella: or the Little Glass Slipper (1804) and his 1809 edition of Perrault’s tales for Collection of Popular Stories for the Nursery; John Harris’s illustrated Cinderella (1808) and Bluebeard (1808); Lucy Crane’s translation of Household Stories, illustrated by Walter Crane (1882); and Andrew Lang’s 12-volume Fairy Book series (1889–1910).
During the latter half of the nineteenth century, a new format, the toy book (precursor of picturebooks) emerged. With text and full-page color illustrations on each page, toy books retold some of the most popular tales with images by some of the best illustrators. The best examples include Walter Crane’s The Sleeping Beauty (1874), The Frog Prince (1874), The Beauty and the Beast (1875), and The Blue Beard Picture Book: Containing Blue Beard, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk (1875); and Kate Greenaway’s Diamonds and Toads (1867) and The Pied Piper of Hamlin retold by Robert Browning (1888).
During the twentieth century, the picturebook became the main folktale format in children’s books. These works not only recount the tales, but also feature artwork reflecting a range of styles and media. The images in these works create visual narratives that are as essential to the retellings as the texts. Illustrators of several of these works have been recipients of the Caldecott Medal, which is awarded to the most prestigious American picturebook for young people. Examples include Marcia Brown’s Cinderella or the Little Glass Slipper (1955), Trina Schart Hyman’s Little Red Riding Hood (1983), Paul O. Zelinsky’s Rapunzel (1983), Ed Young’s Lon Po Po: A Chinese Red Riding Hood (1989), and David Wiesner’s The Three Pigs (2001).
In the post-World War II years, the founding of the United Nations helped spur a growing interest in folktales from Africa and Asia (Bader 2010). In 1947, anthropologists Harold Courlander and George Herzog published a collection of the folktales from West Africa for children: The Cow-Tail Switch and Other West African Stories. In the introduction to their collection, they identified the regions where they had heard the tales and connected some of these tales to several of the Brer Rabbit tales brought to the New World by enslaved people (Bader 2010). Since the 1970s there has been an increase in the publication of folklore for children that is not derived from white European sources. Important works include Verna Aardema’s 1975 adaption of African and African American stories for children in Why Mosquitoes Buzz in People’s Ears with illustrations by Leo and Diane Dillon and Julius Lester’s 1987–1990 retelling of the Uncle Remus stories with illustrations by Jerry Pinkney.
Parodies of fairy tales (i.e. William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring [1855], Lewis Carroll’s Alice Adventures in Wonderland [1865], Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince and Other Tales [1888], and Kenneth Grahame’s The Reluctant Dragon [1898]) became an established genre in children’s books during the nineteenth century. Since the 1980s, the picturebook has become an important platform for parodies of European folktales. Drawing on a range of textual and visual narrative techniques, including role reversal and changes in point of view, characterization, and setting, authors and illustrators have created new takes on traditional tales. The Three Pigs lends itself well to parody. Good examples are Eugene Trivizas and Helen Oxenbury’s (1993) The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig, Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s (1989) The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by A. Wolf, and Barry Moser’s (1988) The Three Little Pigs. Even revisions that parody, undermine, or invert the traditional stories keep them vibrant and alive. By their very nature, parodies are rooted in the presumption that the reader knows the folktales on which they are based, in a sense validating the stories as they subvert them.
Other stories, such as Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s The Jolly Postman (1986), Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith’s The Stinky Cheese Man (1992), and David Wiesner’s The Three Pigs (2001), are populated with characters, plots, and settings from several Western European fables and tales, each of which evokes the stories from which they are taken while giving voice to multiple texts. Gianni Rodari (1996, p. 38) described such jumbles of fairy-tale characters as a “Fairy Tale Salad Mix.” He suggested that in subjecting stories and characters “to this treatment, even the images that are most constantly used appear to take on a new life, to blossom again, and to bear fruit and flowers in unexpected ways” (p. 38). Yet, as Anthony Browne’s Piggybook (1986) and Into the Forest (2004) demonstrate, the mixing of folktale characters can create not only humorous results but also ominous moods.
Retellings, parodies, and “fairy tale salad mixes” are also found in books and series for older children, from beginning readers such as Lisa Wheeler and Frank Ansley’s Fitch & Chip (2003) to stand-alone novels such as Liesl Shurtliff’s Red: The True Story of Red Riding Hood (2016) or Sara Lewis Holmes’s The Wolf Hour (2017) and series such as those by Michael Buckley, beginning with The Sisters Grimm (2005), or Adam Gidwitz, beginning with A Tale Dark and Grimm (2010). These works are more than new versions of old tales. Many of them fill in the “back stories” of traditional characters while imagining their lives and new adventures during the “happily ever after.”
Controversial Tales
Folktales are not neutral territory in children’s books. Controversy surrounding folktales as fare for children is almost as old as the first tales published explicitly with young people in mind. Sarah Fielding, the author of one of the first novels written for children in English,
