Little Red Riding Hood.
Perrault has not concealed the moral which he thought obvious in this brief narrative. There are wolves—
'Qui suivent les jeunes Demoiselles Jusques dans les maisons, jusques dans les Ruelles!'
Racine, in an early letter, admits that he himself has been one of these wolves.
'Il faut être régulier avec les Réguliers, comme j'ai été loup avec vous, et avec les autres loups, vos compères.[43]'
But the nurses from whom Perrault or his little boy heard Le petit Chaperon Rouge had probably no such moral ideas as these. They may have hinted at the undesirable practice of loitering when one is sent on an errand, but the punishment is out of all proportion to the offence. As it stands, the tale is merely meant to waken a child's terror and pity, and probably the narrator ends it by making a pounce, in the character of Wolf, c'est pour te manger, at the little listener. This was the correct 'business' in our old Scotch nurseries, when we were told The Cattie sits in the Kiln-Ring Spinning.
'By cam' a cattie and ate it a' up my loesome, Loesome Lady! And sae will I you—worrie, worrie, gnash, gnash, Said she, said she!'
'The old nurse's imitation of the gnash, gnash, which she played off upon the youngest urchin lying in her lap, was electric' (Chambers, Popular Rhymes of Scotland, 1842, p. 54).
If Little Red Riding Hood ended, in all variants, where it ends in Perrault, we might dismiss it, with the remark that the machinery of the story is derived from 'the times when beasts spoke,' or were believed to be capable of speaking. But it is well known that in the German form, Little Red Cap (Grimm 26), the tale by no means ends with the triumph of the wolf. Little Red Cap and her grandmother are resuscitated, 'the wolf it was that died.' This may either have been the original end, omitted by Perrault because it was too wildly impossible for the nurseries of the time of Louis XIV, or children may have insisted on having the story 'turn out well.' In either case the German Märchen preserves one of the most widely spread mythical incidents in the world,—the reappearance of living people out of the monster that has devoured them.
In literature, this incident first meets us in the myth of Cronus (Hesiod, Theog. 497; Pausanias, x. 24), where Cronus disgorges his swallowed children alive, after gulping up the stone in swaddling bands which he had taken for Zeus, his youngest infant. He had previously dined on a young foal that he was assured his wife had just borne, when, in reality, the child was Poseidon. In this adventure Cronus united the mistake of the ogress mother-in-law, in La Belle au Bois Dormant, who ate the kid in place of the Sleeping Beauty's boy, the adventure of the king who hears his wife has borne a beast-child, and the adventure of the Wolf who disgorges his prey alive. The local fancy of Arne in Arcadia had combined all these ideas of Märchen into one divine myth (Pausan. viii. 8, 2). It would be superfluous to enumerate here all the savage and civilised stories of beings first swallowed and then disgorged alive. A fabulous monster Kwai Hemm is the swallower in Bushman story. The Iqong qongqo takes the rôle among the Kaffirs. There are some five examples in Callaway's Zulu Nursery Tales. Night is the swallower in Melanesia (Codrington, Journal Anthrop. Inst. Feb. 1881), while the Sun swallows the stars in a Piute myth. It is quite possible that a savage theory of Night swallowing and restoring Light, or of the Sun swallowing the stars, is the origin of the conception[44]. The Australians tell it in a shape not unlike Grimm's. The Eagle met the Moon and offered him some Kangaroo meat. The Moon ate up the Kangaroo, and then swallowed the Eagle. The wives of the Eagle met the Moon, who asked them the way to a spring. As he stooped to drink, they cut him open with a stone tomahawk, and extracted the Eagle, who came alive again[45]. In Germany it was with a pair of scissors that the Wolf was cut up, and he was then stuffed with stones (as in Grimm 5, The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids). The stones kill him in Little Red Cap; in the German tale, their weight drags him into the well, where he, like the Australian Moon, wants to drink after his banquet. In Pomerania a ghost takes the Wolf's rôle, the stones are felt to be rather 'heavy' by the ghost, and the child escapes[46].