In all the oral stories, Dundes said, the girl triumphs over the villain and gets away.
In various Asian versions, she is tricked by the villain, usually a female tiger or ogress, into eating her sister’s finger or bone. In European oral folk stories, the girl unwittingly eats the flesh and blood of her grandmother, who had been killed by the wolf, Dundes said. In fact, said Dundes, the wolf was orginally female and the little girl didn’t even have a red hood. Once upon a time, though, Little Red Riding Hood was a craftier character who escaped the wolf’s big teeth. This time the girl was saved by a hunter, who cut open the wolf’s stomach to allow Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother to spring out alive. The Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm, based their popular 1812 story on a second-hand account of Perrault’s version and changed the ending. At the end, Little Red Riding Hood got gobbled up by the wolf. The original folktales may have been considered too crude by Charles Perrault, the French writer who first put the story into written form in 1697 and made it into a moral fable warning girls against listening to strangers, Dundes said.
″There are enough oral versions around in different languages so that we know what the original must have been like,″ Dundes said in an interview.
Dundes’ book includes analyses of Little Red Riding Hood by psychologists, historians, anthropologists and sociologists, plus versions of the oral folktale collected in Europe and Asia.
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