The Many Real Versions of Little Red Riding Hood
The version most people know is a specific 17th-century French retelling. Folklorists have catalogued hundreds of older and independent variants across Europe and Asia, several with a very different ending.
The version of Little Red Riding Hood most people grew up with — red cloak, a wolf that eats the grandmother and impersonates her, a woodsman who cuts the girl and grandmother out alive at the end — is not the original story. It is a specific blend of a 1697 French telling by Charles Perrault, where the wolf simply eats the girl and the story ends there as a warning, and a 19th-century German version collected by the Brothers Grimm, who added the huntsman and the rescue.
Folklorists classify the story as Aarne–Thompson–Uther tale type 333, and the classification exists precisely because Perrault and the Grimms were not working from nothing — versions of a girl encountering a wolf or wolf-like figure on the way through a forest appear across French, Italian, and Central European oral tradition well before either was written down, with real regional variation: in some tellings the girl escapes on her own by trickery, in some she does not survive at all, and in at least one well-documented French variant she is briefly and unknowingly made to eat parts of her own grandmother, prepared by the wolf, before realising what has happened.
This is not unusual for fairy tales generally — most of the stories now associated with a single "original" version were standardised comparatively recently, by 18th- and 19th-century collectors and publishers working from a wider, messier oral tradition, and then fixed in place by repeated retelling and, eventually, film.
Perrault's version had no rescue at all
Perrault's 1697 original is shorter and considerably bleaker than the story told today: the wolf reaches the grandmother's house first, eats her, takes her place in the bed, and when the girl climbs in beside him after the exchange about his eyes and his teeth, he eats her too. There is no huntsman and no second chance — the tale simply ends there. Perrault attached an explicit verse moral warning young women of the French court that the most dangerous wolves are not the obviously threatening ones but the charming, agreeable strangers who seem safe to trust, making the story less a warning about the forest than about predatory people. The rescue that most readers now assume was always part of the story is a German addition — the Brothers Grimm published their huntsman ending in 1812, more than a century later, and it only gradually displaced Perrault's ending as the version people told.
The same warning, told independently in China
A closely related tale exists in China, first written down in the late 1600s and often called "The Tiger Grandmother" — best known in English through Ed Young's picture-book retelling Lon Po Po. A mother leaves her three daughters home alone with a warning to bar the door; a wolf-like predator arrives disguised as their grandmother and talks its way inside. Where the European tale usually resolves with an outside rescuer, the Chinese version resolves through the children's own cleverness — the eldest sister sees through the disguise and lures the predator into a fatal trap up a tree, with no huntsman involved. Folklorists don't read this as one tale copying the other; independent oral traditions across Europe and Asia arrived at a strikingly similar shape — a predator impersonating a trusted relative to get past a child's guard — because it is, simply, a fear old enough and universal enough to surface in unconnected cultures on its own.
One retelling, illustrated
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Little Red Riding Hood based on a true story?
No — it is a folk tale, classified by scholars as Aarne–Thompson–Uther type 333, with independently attested variants across French, Italian, German and Central European oral tradition long before Perrault or the Grimms wrote any version down.
Why does the wolf disguise itself as the grandmother in most versions?
A predator impersonating a trusted family member to get past a child's guard is the core engine of the tale type across cultures, from Perrault's French version to the German Grimm telling to the independently-attested Chinese Tiger Grandmother story — it is what makes the warning land.
Did the story always have a happy ending?
No. Charles Perrault's original 1697 French version ends with the wolf eating both the grandmother and the girl, with no rescue. The huntsman who cuts them out alive was added by the Brothers Grimm in their 1812 German version, over a century later.