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The Three Little Pigs (Folk Tale Classics) Book Review

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Book review by Barbara Schultz, Common Sense Media

Common Sense says

age 4+

Charming, sweetly illustrated version of classic story.

Paul Galdone, Joanna C. Galdone Folklore 2011

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What Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that this edition of The Three Little Pigs is one of many folk tales retold and illustrated by Paul and Joanna C. Galdone. The story of the pigs in their different houses, and the wolf at their doors, is available in many updated versions, including The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs, which is told from the wolf's point of view. But this is a fine book for telling young children this old-fashioned story. Though the charming, cheerful pictures don't illustrate the violent events, it is, of course, part of the story that three characters are eaten.

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What's the Story?

A mother pig sends her THREE LITTLE PIGS out into the world to seek their fortunes, and each builds a house. The first little pig builds a house of straw, but a wolf blows down that house and eats the pig. The second little pig builds a house of sticks, but the same wolf blows it down and eats the pig. The third pig builds a strong house of bricks, so when the wolf comes to the door, he can't blow the house down. The wolf devises several schemes to trick the third pig into leaving his house so the wolf can eat him, but the pig outsmarts the wolf every time. Finally, the wolf tries to sneak down the pig's chimney, but the pig places a pot of water to boil over the fire, and when the wolf falls in, the pig cooks the wolf and eats him for supper.

Is It Any Good?

This sweetly illustrated edition of the classic story is a faithful retelling, for good and bad. Parents looking for an updated, softer version of the folk tale in which the pigs are all spared will want to look elsewhere, but those interested in an untempered version -- complete with "chinny chin chins" -- will appreciate this authentic approach.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about different versions of the Three Little Pigs story. Have you heard this story before? Was it different from or the same as what happens in this book?

  • How does the illustrator make the wolf look scary?

  • If you were going to build a house, what would you use to build it?

Book Details

  • Authors: Paul Galdone, Joanna C. Galdone
  • Illustrators: Paul Galdone, Joanna C. Galdone
  • Genre: Folklore
  • Topics: Horses and Farm Animals
  • Book type: Fiction
  • Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
  • Publication date: March 21, 2011
  • Publisher's recommended age(s): 4 - 8
  • Number of pages: 48
  • Available on: Nook, Audiobook (unabridged), Hardback, Kindle
  • Last updated: July 12, 2017

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A Summary and Analysis of the ‘Three Little Pigs’ Fairy Tale – Interesting Literature

Literature

By Dr Oliver Tearle

The anonymous fable or fairy tale of the Three Little Pigs is one of those classic anonymous tales which we hear, and have read to us, when we are very young. The fable contains many common features associated with the fairy tale, but there are some surprises when we delve into the history of this well-known story. Let us begin with a summary of the Three Little Pigs tale before proceeding to an analysis of its meaning and origins.

The Three Little Pigs: plot summary

First, a brief summary of the tale as it’s usually told. An old sow has three pigs, her beloved children, but she cannot support them, so she sends them out into the world to make their fortune. The first (and oldest) pig meets a man carrying a bundle of straw, and politely asks if he might have it to build a house from. The man agrees, and the pig builds his house of straw. But a passing wolf smells the pig inside the house.

He knocks at the door (how you can ‘knock’ at a door made of straw is a detail we’ll gloss over for now), and says: ‘Little pig! Little pig! Let me in! Let me in!’

The pig can see the wolf’s paws through the keyhole (yes, there’s a keyhole in this straw door), so he responds: ‘No! No! No! By the hair on my chinny chin chin!’

The wolf bares his teeth and says: ‘Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down. ’

He does as he’s threatened to do, blows the house down, and gobbles up the pig before strolling on.

The second of the three little pigs, meanwhile, has met a man with a bundle of sticks, and has had the same idea as his (erstwhile) brother. The man gives him the sticks and he makes a house out of them. The wolf is walking by, smells the pig inside his house made of sticks, and he knocks at the door (can you ‘knock’ at a door made of sticks?), and says: ‘Little pig! Little pig! Let me in! Let me in!’

The pig can see the wolf’s ears through the keyhole (how can there – oh, forget it), so he responds: ‘No! No! No! By the hair on my chinny chin chin!’

The wolf bares his teeth and says: ‘Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.’

He does as he’s threatened to do, blows the house down, and gobbles up the pig before strolling on.

Now, the final of the three little pigs – and the last surviving one – had met a man with a pile of bricks, and had had the same idea as his former siblings, and the man had kindly given him the bricks to fashion a house from. Now, you can guess where this is going.

The wolf is passing, and sees the brick house, and smells the pig inside it. He knocks at the door (no problem here), and says: ‘Little pig! Little pig! Let me in! Let me in!’

The pig can see the wolf’s great big eyes through the keyhole, so he responds: ‘No! No! No! By the hair on my chinny chin chin!’

The wolf bares his teeth and says: ‘Then I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down.’

So the wolf huffs and puffs and huffs and puffs and huffs and puffs and keeps huffing and puffing till he’s out of puff. And he hasn’t managed to blow the pig’s house down! He thinks for a moment, and then tells the little pig that he knows a field where there are some nice turnips for the taking. He tells the pig where the field is and says he will come round at six o’clock the next morning and take him there.

But the little pig is too shrewd, so the next morning he rises at five o’clock, goes to the field, digs up some turnips and takes them back to his brick house. By the time the wolf knocks for him at six, he is already munching on the turnips. He tells the wolf he has already been and got them. The wolf is annoyed, but he comes up with another plan, and tells the wolf that he knows of some juicy apples on a tree in a nearby garden, and says he will knock for the pig the next morning at five o’clock and personally show him where they are.

The little pig agrees, but rises the next morning before four o’clock, and goes to the garden to pick some apples. But the wolf has been fooled once and isn’t about to be fooled twice, so he heads to the apple tree before five and catches the pig up the tree with a basket of apples. The pig manages to escape by throwing the wolf an apple to eat, but throwing it so far away that by the time the wolf has fetched it and returned, the little pig has escaped with his basket and gone home to his brick house.

The wolf tries one final time. He invites the little pig to the fair with him the next day, and the pig agrees; but he heads to the fair early on, buys a butter churn, and is returning home when he sees the big bad wolf on the warpath, incandescent with rage at having been thwarted a third time. So the pig hides in the butter churn and ends up rolling down the hill towards the wolf. The pig squeals in fear as he rolls, and the sound of the squealing and the speed of the churn rolling towards him terrifies the wolf, and he tucks tail and runs away.

The next day, the wolf shows up at the little pig’s house, to apologise for not accompanying him to the fair the day before. He tells the pig that a loud, scary thing was rolling down a hill towards him. When the pig tells him that it must have been him inside the butter churn, the wolf loses his patience, and climbs on the roof, determined to climb down the chimney into the little pig’s house and eat him. But the pig has a pot of water boiling under the chimney, and when the wolf drops down into the house, he plops straight into the boiling hot water. The little pig puts the lid on the pot and cooks the wolf and then eats him for supper!

The Three Little Pigs: analysis

We all know these essential features of the story: the three little pigs, the big bad wolf. Yet neither of these is an essential feature of the story, or hasn’t been at some point or other in the fable’s history. In one version – the earliest published version, from English Forests and Forest Trees, Historical, Legendary, and Descriptive (1853) – the little pigs were actually little pixies, and the wolf was a fox; the three houses were made of wood, stone, and iron. In another version, the Big Bad Wolf was actually a Big Kind Wolf. In at least one telling, the middle pig builds his house out of furze (i.e. gorse, a kind of shrub) rather than sticks.

As the Writing in Margins blog observes, an 1877 article published in Lippincott’s detailing folklore of African Americans in the southern United States outlines a story involving seven little pigs, which contains many of the details we associate with the Three Little Pigs tale, including the chimney-fire-pot finale and the chinny-chin-chinning. Joel Chandler Harris’ 1883 collection Nights with Uncle Remus contains a similar tale (featuring six pigs rather than three), suggesting that the tale was part of African-American folklore in the nineteenth century. Was the tale related to race relations in the United States during the antebellum (and immediate postbellum) era?

Perhaps, although it’s worth noting there were also Italian versions of the tale in circulation around the same time (with three geese rather than three pigs). The definitive English version – with all of the features of the story outlined in the plot summary above – appears to have made its debut in print only in 1886, in James Orchard Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes of England.

This was a sort of hybrid version of the various tellings of the story in circulation, incorporating aspects of the Italian, African-American, and English versions. We recommend the Writing in Margins post linked to above for more information on the evolution of the story. Among other fascinating insights, the author suggests that the ‘pixies’ version of the tale arose from a mishearing of the Devon dialect word for pig, ‘pigsie’, as ‘pixie’. Certainly, no other version of the Three Little Pigs contains pixies, and the pixies in the story behave unlike the pixies found in other stories from English folklore.

1886 is rather late for the tale (as we now know it) to be making its debut in print. It feels much older, especially since it contains so many features we commonly associate with fairy tales and children’s stories. Indeed, it’s thought that the story is considerably older, and was perhaps circulated orally before it finally made its way into published books. Certainly, despite these slight differences between disparate versions of the tale, the raw narrative elements are those we are used to finding in fairy tales.

The rule of three – a common plot feature in classic fairy tales – is there several times over in the fable of the Three Little Pigs. There are three little pigs; there are three houses; the wolf tries to trick the last of the three pigs three times. In each case, the third instance acts as the decisive one: the first two pigs are eaten, but the third survives; the first two houses are insufficient to withstand the wolf, but the third is able to; and the third trick played by the wolf proves his ultimate undoing, since it is the last straw (no pun intended) which makes him erupt in rage and go on the offensive, with devastating consequences (for him).

This helps to build a sense of narrative tension, even if we suspect we know where the tale is going. And of course, there is a delicious irony (delicious in more than one sense) in the pig eating the wolf at the end of the fable, rather than vice versa.

But if fables are meant to have a moral message to impart, what is the meaning of the Three Little Pigs tale? In the last analysis, it seems to be that plucky resourcefulness and careful planning pay off, and help to protect us from harm. There’s also a degree of self-sufficiency: the mother cannot look after the three little pigs, so they must stand on their own two (or four) feet and make their own way in the world. (This is another popular narrative device in fairy tales: the hero must absent themselves from home early on and go out into the world alone.)

Of course, the third little pig survives not just by standing on his own feet but by thinking on his feet, too: it’s his quick thinking that enables him to outwit the wolf, himself not exactly a simpleton, even if he isn’t the sharpest straw in the hay-bale.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.

Image: via Wikimedia Commons.

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Tags: Analysis, Animal Fables, Children's Literature, Fairy Tales Analysis, Origins, Summary, Three Little Pigs

Summary Mikhalkov Three little pigs for the reader's diary, read a brief retelling online

There once lived three brothers of a little pig. They were similar to each other, one was called Nif-Nif, the second Naf-Naf, and the third Nuf-Nuf. In summer, the piglets rested, enjoyed the warm weather, frolicked and basked in the sun. But soon the first cold came, and with them autumn.

Naf-Naf was the first to think about the arrival of cold weather, he woke up early in the morning and suggested that the brothers build a house for the winter. Both brothers did not want to take part in the construction and help, as they believed that winter was still far away and therefore they would have time to build a shelter at any moment.

Naf-Naf went to build a house while the brothers continued to rest. They said that from tomorrow they would start building houses for themselves, but this did not happen. The games of the two piglets continued until the puddles were covered with a thin layer of ice. Nif-Nif made a house out of straw, he believed that it would serve as an excellent material. As a result, he built the house in one day.

Nuf-Nuf also set to work, but without much enthusiasm, at first he also wanted to build from straw, but he decided that it did not retain heat enough. Therefore, this piglet took branches and thin rods for himself. When the houses of Nuf-Nuf and Nif-Nif were ready, they decided to visit the third brother and see what he had built.

Naf-Naf, unlike his brothers, did not build in one day, he kneaded clay and wanted to build a reliable and strong house for himself. The brothers did not understand why Naf-Naf was building such a house for himself, they say, why build a whole fortress. Naf-Naf said that he was afraid of the wolf, and the brothers only laughed in response, because they believed that wolves were not found here.

On the way home, Nuf-Nuf and Nif-Nif met a wolf, he was very scary and big. Nif-Nif was the first to run into his straw house, the wolf asked to open the door for him, but the pig did not open it. Then the wolf simply blew and demolished the roof first, and then the whole piglet's house. Nif-Nif ran with all his might to Nuf-Nuf. The wolf went to the trick and crept up to the house of Nuf-Nuf in sheep's clothing and pretended to be a poor sheep. The piglets, not suspecting anything, decided to let the sheep go, but they saw a wolf outside the door. He started blowing on the house again, but this time it took more effort. As a result, the house collapsed.

Pigs were saved only in the house near Naf-Naf, as it was strong, since then the brothers lived together.

The author of this fairy tale teaches us not to be lazy, to approach things wisely, not to procrastinate, and also to help our loved ones.

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    There once lived three brothers of a pig. They were similar to each other, one was called Nif-Nif, the second Naf-Naf, and the third Nuf-Nuf. In summer, the piglets rested, enjoyed the warm weather, frolicked and basked in the sun.

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Summary of the fairy tale The Three Little Pigs of Mikhalkov in 2 minutes retelling of the plot

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Three pig brothers lived in the forest. Their names are: Nif-Nif, Nuf-Nuf and Naf-Naf. Outwardly, they looked like pink, round and with funny tails.

On summer days the brothers played in the soft grass and ran in the warm puddles. Autumn came. Naf-Naf suggested that the brothers start building a cozy dwelling so as not to freeze in the cold.

Nif-Nif and Nuf-Nuf had no desire to build, they continued to frolic carelessly. Day after day they said they would start building a house, but they didn't.

But then it became cold, and frosts appeared. The puddles were covered with thin ice, and only then the pigs set to work.

Nif-Nif wanted to make a simple thatched house. Toward evening the house was ready. The pig sang a cheerful song for joy. It said that you can go around half the world, but you won’t find such a wonderful house.

Humming, Nif-Nif went to his brother Nuf-Nuf to look at his work. Nuf-Nuf also did not want to do boring work for a long time. He made his house from branches and twigs found in the forest. I threw dried leaves on the roof, and the house was ready. With joy, Nuf-Nuf also sang a song about how strong and beautiful his house is.

Here came Nif-Nif. The piglets hurried to Naf-Naf to see his house.

Naf-Naf built a house of clay and stones so that it would be strong and protect it from bad weather and an evil wolf. At the entrance to the house, the pig put a door made of oak with a bolt.

The visiting brothers began to laugh at the way the founder approached Naf-Naf to build the house. Naf-Naf paid no attention to the brothers and continued to work. After laughing a little more, Nif-Nif and Nuf-Nuf went back to their homes.

On the way, they saw a live terribly bad wolf with red eyes. The pigs froze in horror, and the wolf prepared to attack. The brothers, squealing, rushed to run to their homes.

The wolf approached the straw house of Nif-Nif and threateningly demanded to open the door. The pig refused. Then the wolf blew hard several times and the straw house shattered. Nif-Nif rushed to run to his brother's house.

As soon as the pigs closed the door, the wolf said that he would eat them both.

The wolf was cunning, he pretended to go into the forest, and he covered himself with a sheepskin and knocked on the door.

The brothers thought it was a little sheep and opened the door, and there was a wolf. Out of fear, the brothers ran to Naf-Naf's house.

Seeing the brothers, Naf-Naf let them in and pulled the bolt. The frightened piglets crawled under the bed and fell silent, and Naf-Naf began to sing a song that no evil and terrible beast would open his door.

There was a knock and the wolf demanded in an angry voice that the door be opened for him. Naf-Naf replied that he would not think of opening it.

The wolf blew on the house. Nothing worked out for him, and in a rage he began to scratch the walls and gnaw on stones.

The wolf broke his teeth and claws, and then he saw a chimney on the roof of the house. Rejoiced, the wolf climbed into the pipe. Naf-Naf guessed what the wolf was up to. He quickly removed the lid from the boiler, which contained hot water.

The wolf fell right into the cauldron. His eyes popped out, his fur ruffled, with a roar the wolf jumped out of the pipe and disappeared into the forest.

After the incident, the piglets began to live together in a stone house with an oak door.

The tale teaches that together you can defeat any enemy.

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