Goldilocks and the three bears true story

The True Story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Everyone knows the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears...but does anyone know who Goldilocks truly is?
I mean, we know Goldilocks is this girl who, for some reason, was taking a walk all by herself in a strange forest. We know she rudely invaded the Three Bears’ privacy by eating their porridge, sitting in their chairs and sleeping in their beds. Yet, did we ever stop and ask ourselves why? This is the true story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
No more simplifications.
No more secrets.

Goldilocks woke up in her small, cramped room to the sounds of screaming and broken glass.
A lovely start to a brand new day, Goldilocks thought to herself as her bare feet touched the cold, hard floor. She walked two feet in front of her (as that was about the extent of her room’s width) and looked at herself in the mirror.
Goldilocks was small for her age - only 4’ 5”- yet she had the amount of spunk, enthusiasm and exuberance that a “normal-sized” 10-year-old would be expected to have. Her long, wavy hair was light ash blonde in the cheap artificial lighting of her room, but in the sunlight it shone like golden glitter (which she only knew because she had once snuck out a broken shard of glass to see herself in the light of the sun). The freckles that dotted the tops of her rosy cheeks and the tips of her button-shaped nose made her look like an adorable, innocent young girl yet she actually possessed a lot of bravado and sass. Her eyes were pale blue - almost gray - and her skin was exceptionally fair.
She sighed as another loud crash could be heard from the room downstairs in her small cottage. She looked to her right at the minuscule broom closet to figure out what she was going to wear and decided on a long-sleeved maroon shirt with thin white pants and brown leather sandals. She brushed her long, knotted hair as much as she could, put on her special beaded leather necklace and made her way downstairs to see what chaos awaited her today.

Goldilocks took each of her steps with caution as she stepped over the knocked-over furniture, broken glass vases and disheveled blankets and rugs. Some would recoil in shock or disgust and cringe at the state of the small living room.
But for Goldilocks, this was normal.
She crept around the corner of the room to take a peek at the state of the kitchen and saw her mother furiously preparing breakfast. Her mother kept dropping pots and pans, utensils and at one point an egg, resulting in multiple fits of cursing on her part. Goldilocks watched with rapt attention before deciding she had a good enough idea of the mood her mother was in right now.
Angry. Very angry.
Goldilocks took a deep breath, adjusted her protective necklace and stepped tentatively into the small kitchen, her leather sandals making a hard sound as they came into contact with the cold tiles.
She sat down at the low wooden table that stood in the center of the room, “Morning, Mother”, she said softly resulting in a grunt from her mother.
Goldilocks took advantage of the next few moments of silence by looking around the room to assess the damage. There were stacks of dirty dishes that filled the small sink. The icebox was wide open and Goldilocks noticed several ice cubes had fell out of the icebox, resulting in a puddle of water in the middle of the room. Goldilocks could see multiple mysterious stains all over the stove top where her mother worked furiously as well as all over the cheap plastic tablecloth that covered the table she sat at.
“Eat”, Goldilocks’s mother demanded as she dropped a plate of half-cooked eggs on the table in front of Goldilocks. Golidlocks’s heart skipped a beat as she examined the runny puddle of egg yolk oozing from the half-baked breakfast and tentatively picked at the sorry excuse for a breakfast with her dirty fork.
Goldilocks heard heavy footsteps making their way towards the small kitchen and it appeared her mother heard them too as she started to grumble incoherently and her fingers began to tremble even more resulting in more broken pots and pans falling to the floor.
Goldilocks’s father walked into the room, although Goldilocks thought of it more as stumbling rather than walking as her father’s feet seemed to be stumbling over the other as he walked almost reluctantly into the kitchen. His hair was a tangled mess, a beard was starting to make an appearance on his unclean face and his clothes were wrinkled and dirty, his button-down shirt ripped open, revealing his hairy chest. His eyes were bloodshot and there was a potent scent of alcohol in the air as he staggered into his chair.
He stared at his plate of uncooked egg for about two seconds before almost jumping out of his chair, startling Goldilocks so much that she dropped her dirty fork into her gooey egg.
“WHAT ARE YOU TRYING TO DO TO ME _WOMAN_!?”, he bellowed, Goldilocks’s mother flinching at his shouts, but standing her ground and making the most repulsive face Goldilocks had ever seen her mother make (and that was saying something), “I WORK MY BUTT OFF DAY AND NIGHT AND YOU TREAT ME LIKE TRASH, FEEDING ME THIS FREAKING GARBAGE”, he grabbed the pathetic plate of uncooked eggs and swiftly flung it at the wall, the yellow mess of egg yolks splattering the white wall, and the dirty plate shattering to the ground. His words grew louder and filthier, as brash as his attitude and as unclean as his physical appearance.
Goldilocks tried as best as she could to sit there and pretend as if nothing out of the ordinary - Goldilocks’s ordinary anyway - was happening, yet her parent’s shouts continued to grow louder and could probably be heard from halfway across the enormous forest where their tiny cottage stood. The forest that Goldilocks was prohibited from going into.
Not that I’m even allowed to step foot outside, Goldilocks thought bitterly to herself, her nails digging into her palm.
Her mother was shouting now, so loud that Goldilocks was half-expecting her mother to lose her voice right there, yet her voice never wavered as she yelled angrily and accusingly at her husband, “’WORK MY BUTT OFF?’ WHEN HAVE YOU EVER? YOU SIT THERE WITH YOUR BEER AND YOUR RADIO PUTTING YOUR EAR UP TO IT FOR HOURS ON END WHILE I TAKE CARE OF EVERYTHING-“, she was cut off by Goldilocks’s father who was obviously not retaining anything his wife was saying and was instead lost in his own fantasy where he was a perfect being and she was an ugly stain tainting his beautiful world.
“FILTHY LIAR! I SLAVE DAY AND NIGHT FOR YOU AND WHAT DO YOU DO? FEED ME SLOP AND ACCUSE ME OF LIES! AND-“, he was cut off again by his wife, and it went back and forth like this for several minutes, neither person listening to what the other person had to say. They might as well have been talking to brick walls, although a wall would’ve at least stayed quiet.
They talk as if I don’t even exist, Goldilocks thought to herself solemnly as she realized that it was true. Whenever she heard her parents yelling at each other she couldn’t help but notice that they talked as if they never had a child, as if they lived alone in the middle of the forest and that only their wants and needs were important, not Goldilocks’s.
All of a sudden, the loneliness and bitterness that Goldilocks felt towards her parents for casting her aside like she was nothing and speaking to her only to judge her appearance and behavior welled up inside her like a heavy lead ball swinging on a weak chain in the pit of her stomach.
The ball swung...
The uncooked egg yolk continued to spread over her dirty plate.
The ball swung...
Her parents’ shouts grew louder: “MISERABLE PIECE OF-“ “SON OF A-“
The chain snapped!
“DON’T YOU HAVE A CHILD!? DON’T _I_ MATTER!? PAY ATTENTION TO ME FOR ONCE IN YOUR DAMN LIVES YOU LOUSY ANIMALS!”, Goldilocks got up abruptly from her chair and yelled at the top of her lungs, silencing her parents for the first time in her life. Never had she ever talked back to them and stood up for herself like that.
Yet here she was.
Her father’s bloodshot eyes bore down onto her like a viper waiting for its next meal. Her mother looked at her like she didn’t even recognize her and that Goldilocks had just appeared in the room out of thin air.
The silence was suddenly deafening.
Out of nowhere, Goldilocks felt a sharp pain in the back of her head as she realized her father had hit her. Suddenly her father was all over her, slapping and hitting her chest, arms and, at one point, slapping her hard across the face, all the while Goldilocks screamed and struggled. Goldilocks could see out of the corner of her eye of her mother’s figure just standing there doing nothing as she was beat, but most of Goldilocks’s view was taken up by the frightening image of her father’s venomous eyes as he viciously beat her.
Eventually the sharp stabs of pain stopped, but not before Goldilocks’s father tugged at the protective necklace that hung lamely around Goldilocks’s neck until it finally came undone and the beads fell to the floor. Goldilocks’s father swiftly turned on her mother, continuing his shouts of accusations and shoving her, leaving Goldilocks on the floor in pain and shock, staring at the remains of the necklace that she had for as long as she could remember.
Goldilocks didn’t know if it was a minute or 10 minutes or an hour that passed, but she eventually gingerly lifted herself up, picked up as many beads of the broken necklace that she could with her trembling hands - making sure to pick up the broken piece of leather cord as well - and stumbled out of the kitchen and into the ransacked living room where she threw herself onto the flipped-over sofa chair and sobbed, cradling her broken necklace in her weak arms.
Her parents’ shouts never ended.
After what seemed like hours of crying - but what really was only 5 minutes - Goldilocks was again filled with this alien feeling of overwhelming anger and despair. Her parents didn’t care for her, she told herself, they despised her, and she would be better off without them.
She knew then what she had to do.
She ran out the door onto the small, wooden porch that wrapped around the cottage, the one she hadn’t stepped foot on since she was a small child, the one she had been too scared to escape to until then.
It was a sunny day, Goldilocks could see. She had only ever seen the sun and walked in the sun’s rays only once or twice before, as there were no windows to be found in her home and she was prohibited from going outside.
But that changed now.
Goldilocks ran down the three steps of the porch onto the soft green grass and looked around her at the tall trees that loomed over the tiny cottage in the middle of the woods. She felt like crying again.
But she didn’t. Grasping the broken parts of her necklace tightly, she ran as fast and as far as her little legs could take her, deep into the forest, her parents being left inside the cottage too preoccupied with screaming at each other that they never saw their daughter leave.
And they’d never see her again.

Now we come to the part of the story that everyone knows.
The story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Goldilocks ran as fast as she could into the dense forest, only stopping when she spotted a stream, the golden sun rays reflecting beautifully off of the crystal clear water.
Goldilocks promptly collapsed next to the edge of the stream, cupped her hands against the cool, flowing water and drank a few handfuls, satisfying her parched throat.
She looked around her and, for the first time since sitting down, noticed the small cottage that lay to her far right, a little bit away from the edge of the flowing stream. In her panicked state of mind, Goldilocks thought she had somehow ran back to her own cottage before she realized that not only was that impossible, as she knew she had ran in a straight line, but that this cottage was a little bit bigger than the one she had lived in - or rather, been trapped in - all those years.
Goldilocks felt exhausted, yet she forced herself to get up and walk towards the strange cottage. She raised her hand to knock on the door before she realized that the relatively large wooden door was already opened.
I will spare you the details of this all-too-familiar tale as the young girl tasted and ate the Bears’ porridge, sat and broke the Bears’ chairs, and slept in the Bears’ beds.
Soon after Goldilocks fell asleep, the Bears came home and found the young girl sleeping almost peacefully in the soft, warm bed of Baby Bear. They growled in surprise at the human, and Goldilocks’s eyes fluttered open to the sight of two large and one not-so-large grizzly bears. She shrieked in fright, grabbed the remains of her necklace and ran out of the cottage.
Of course, this is where the familiar tale ends, however there is a little more to the story than that.
You see, after Goldilocks fled the Bears’ cottage, Mama and Papa Bear were puzzled by the human who had broken into their home.
“What a strange occurrence!”, Papa Bear exclaimed after Goldilocks ran out the front door of the cottage.
“Indeed”, Mama Bear agreed, “Son, go after that human girl. She looked awfully frightened. Go see what she wanted”.
Baby Bear nodded and headed out the front door of the cottage, looking around for the strange human girl.
It didn’t take him long to find her just a few yards up the stream. She seemed to be weeping, holding a strange piece of yarn and some wooden beads.
“Hello”, he greeted her as friendly as he could.
She turned around in fear and screamed, “Get away from me!”, she shouted, holding a thin branch as a weapon.
“I won’t hurt you”, he assured her, holding up his paws in surrender, “I was just wondering why you broke into my home.”
“I-I was tired and I was going to knock but your front door was open and-“, she cut herself off as she started to weep again and Baby bear felt a pang of sympathy for the strange human girl.
“Are you okay? What’s that you got in your hands?”, he asked as quietly as he could.
This last question seemed to stop her from crying as she gingerly held out the pieces of leather cord and wooden beads, “It-It used to be a protective necklace...my only possession I had before..”, she cut herself off and sniffled, seeming to remember bad times.
Baby Bear didn’t press for answers, he simply stated, “My Papa can fix that for you, if you like, he’s great with tools”.
“Would he?”, she asked as nonchalantly as possible, yet her eyes almost begged for the answer to be “yes”.
“Sure! Come back with me to our cottage and my Mama will fix you up some tea!”
Goldilocks thought for a moment before nodding enthusiastically and following Baby Bear back to the cottage.
After a few apologies and proper greetings, Goldilocks sat on Mama Bear’s chair - the one she hadn’t broken - wrapped in a silk blanket, with a warm cup of tea while Papa Bear mended Goldilocks’s necklace.
“If you don’t mind me asking, Goldilocks”, Mama Bear said gently, “What’s a sweet little girl like you doing in the middle of the woods?”
Goldilocks seemed uncomfortable, but she knew she owed a proper explanation to the nice Bear family that had forgiven her so easily, and so she told them of the terrible events of her childhood, how she was never allowed to leave her cottage and how that day there had been a terrible fight and she had fled her home for a better place.
A better life.
Mama Bear looked appalled at the awful story, and Baby Bear glanced at Goldilocks sympathetically.
After a few moments of silence, Mama Bear said quietly, “You were quite brave Goldilocks. I hope you realize that”.
Goldilocks looked down at her bruised arms and chest and nodded.
“Goldilocks, if you have nowhere else to go, you could stay with us for a while if you like”, Mama Bear said gently. Papa Bear grunted in agreement as he was still concentrating on fixing Goldilocks’s necklace. Baby Bear seemed the most thrilled about the idea.
“Yeah! You could! I could show you all the wooden toys Papa carved for me and we could play!”, he exclaimed, his face delighted by the thought of having someone else his age to play with.
“I couldn’t burden you all like that...”, Goldilocks said, yet she knew she indeed had nowhere else to go, and this family was so nice to her...
“Nonsense!”, Papa Bear exclaimed, finally speaking up since Goldilocks arrived, “I insist you stay! You’ve been through so much, human girl, we couldn’t bear to set you free in the woods! Not all the animals in this forest are as nice as we are, you see, and they might not be as nice to strange little girls that walk into other animals’ homes”.
“Well as long as you all don’t mind”, Goldilocks said, warming up to the idea, “Then I’d be delighted to stay with you!”, she exclaimed with a smile.
“Perfect!”, Papa Bear announced, raising his hairy arms in joy, “I fixed your necklace for you, dear”, he handed her the newly-mended necklace and Goldilocks stared at it in awe before attaching it around her neck and giving Papa Bear a grateful bear-hug.
Soon Mama Bear and Baby Bear joined in the hug and Goldilocks giggled, not only because the fur of the three bears tickled her nose but because she realized that she finally had a loving family after so long.

Months later, Goldilocks could be seen running around the forest with Baby Bear, playing with him, swimming with him in the stream and eating with the family outside in the evenings, when the air was chilly and you could look up in a clearing in the trees and see the stars as they twinkled in the black night.
Goldilocks loved to go fishing with the family, Mama Bear enjoyed making tiny clothing - or tiny compared to what she was used to anyway - for Goldilocks, Papa Bear loved to make wooden toys for both his son and Goldilocks and Baby Bear loved the fact that he had an actual friend to play and laugh with.
Goldilocks’s parents were never to be heard from again and for the first time in Goldilocks’s life, she was finally happy.
That’s the true ending of the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
Everyone lived happily ever after...

The Three Bears Before Goldilocks: The History of a Fairy Tale

The story of the Three Bears is a familiar one. A troublesome interloper breaks into the home of three bears. She samples food and breaks furniture before being sent on her way. But, did you know that the housebreaker was originally an old woman, not a little girl named Goldilocks? Or, that the first Three Bears were friends instead of Mama Bear, Papa Bear and Baby Bear?

The Three Bears started as an oral tale and was first written down almost 200 years ago. Over the decades, the story has changed and grown into the tale we know today. Our Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books has materials which reveal the history of The Three Bears story.

Eleanor Mure’s manuscript

Eleanor Mure wrote the first recorded version of The Three Bears story in 1831. Osborne Collection has Mure’s original manuscript, a handmade book created as a gift for her nephew Horace Broke. The story is set at Cecil Lodge, the Mure family estate in Hertfordshire, England. Mure's The Story of Three Bears (1831) (see digitized book or records for our physical copies) is told in verse and illustrated with original watercolours.

The Three Bears discover their milk has been drunk in The Story of the Three Bears (1831).

Described as “the celebrated nursery tale,” the story was shared orally by Mure’s family long before she set it to paper. In Mure’s telling, the Bears are not a family. They are three friends who “fancy a home amongst the dwellings of men.”

The Old Woman is discovered by the Three Bears in The Story of the Three Bears (1831).

Instead of a little girl, the Bears’ house is invaded by an old woman. Mure’s old woman meets a bad end. As punishment for housebreaking, the Bears try to burn and drown the old woman. When nothing works, they “chuck her aloft on St. Paul’s church-yard steeple.”

The Three Bears celebrate after throwing the old woman atop St. Paul's Cathedral in The Story of the Three Bears (1831).

Robert Southey’s published story

In 1837, English poet Robert Southey released the first printed version of The Three Bears. The story appeared in Southey’s prose anthology The Doctor (1834-47). As with Mure's family, The Three Bears was a popular story among Southey’s family. Southey likely heard The Three Bears from his uncle, William Tyler. Tyler was illiterate, but had a great memory for folktales.

The bears' size difference is illustrated through font in Southey's The Three Bears (1837).

Southey’s story is the first version to discuss the Bears’ size. He introduces the Three Bears as Little, Small, Wee Bear; Middle Bear; and Great, Huge Bear. The story has no illustrations, but the Bears’ size is represented by typography. Great, Huge Bear speaks in large gothic letters. Little, Small, Wee Bear speaks in tiny italics.

Unlike Mure’s telling, the Southey’s bears do not punish the intruding old woman. Instead she makes an escape through an open window. Southey speculates that she might be “sent to the House of Correction” for vagrancy, or perhaps “she broke her neck in the fall.”

The old woman samples the Bears' porridge. From George Nicol's verse adaptation of The Story of the Three Bears (1837) illustrated by Robert Hart.

Southey’s The Three Bears was an instant hit. Within months publisher George Nicol released his own version of The Story of the Three Bears (1837). Nicol’s story was in verse, but otherwise was a direct retelling of Southey’s version.

A little girl with metallic hair

In early tellings of The Three Bears, the protagonist was an old woman. But, in 1850 Joseph Cundall wrote the first retelling featuring a little girl. Cundall called his character Silver-Hair and justified the switch by saying “there are so many other stories of old women. ” Published in A Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children (1850), Cundall’s retelling otherwise closely followed Southey’s version of The Three Bears.

The Three Bears watch Silver-Hair sleep in A Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children (1850).

Following Cundall’s publication, little girl protagonists named Silver-Hair became a common feature of The Three Bears retellings. The character was sometimes called Silver-Locks, Golden Hair and other variant names.

Goldilocks popularized

The name Goldilocks was first used for the Bears' nemesis in two 1904 fairy tale anthologies. Old Nursery Rhymes and Stories (1904) and Old Fairy Tales for Children (1904) both feature "Little Goldilocks" as The Three Bears' intruder. It is possible that the name Goldilocks was inspired by an entirely different fairy tale. French fairy tale writer Madame d'Aulnoy's story The Beauty with Golden Hair is sometimes translated as The Story of Pretty Goldilocks.

The Three Bears confront Goldilocks in English Fairy Tales (1918).

In the 20th century, Goldilocks became the character's standard name. Popular fairy tale collections like Flora Annie Steel's English Fairy Tales (1918) used the Goldilocks name. Now the story is sometimes simply titled Goldilocks without any mention of The Three Bears.

Modern variations

The Three Bears continues to be reimagined by writers and illustrators. The Bears have been portrayed as dinosaurs, panda bears, polar bears, rhinos and everything in between.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears: A Tale Moderne (2000) by Steven Guarnaccia combines the classic fairy tale with modernist art and design. In this version, Goldilocks breaks a "pint-sized" mid-century modern chair.

The Ghanaian Goldilocks (2014) by Tamara Pizzoli features Kofi, a little boy nicknamed Goldilocks. Instead of intruding on bears, he sneaks into the house of family friends. Pizzoli's version focuses on the story's moral message about good manners, while also exploring Ghanaian culture and traditions.

#Goldilocks: A Hashtag Cautionary Tale (2019) by Jeanne Willis and Tony Ross uses the story to teach internet safety. Their Goldilocks is an online video star. Her quest for views and likes goes too far when she sneaks into the Bears' home for video content.

Three Bears and...: ru_psiholog — LiveJournal

This is a post-continuation of the previous one: The Mystery of the Three Bears

The discussion turned out to be very interesting, I did not even imagine that it was possible to find so many original interpretations of this fairy tale!

The problem of the fairy tale "Three Bears" is that outwardly it is very reminiscent of "initiation tales", in which a girl (or children) finds herself in a deep forest, ends up in the house of a bear (Baba Yaga, a witch, Mrs. Metelitsa, Morozko and other formidable and frightening creatures) and must pass the test, showing her best qualities - and receiving an award, after which she returns home in a new capacity.

Sometimes, along with a positive heroine in a fairy tale, there is her negative half-sister, who behaves inappropriately, that is, she does not pass the test and receives punishment.

A typical example can be seen in this cartoon, where two sisters in turn end up right in the house of a bear:

However, in the fairy tale "Three Bears" the heroine behaves more like a "bad sister" - but does not receive any punishment.
In addition, she is impersonal: nothing is said about her, she does not even have a name; it is not known how and why she got into the forest and where she went after. It is not clear whether the girl is a positive heroine or a negative one. Some astute commentators have noticed trickster ears sticking out in this tale)

Leo Tolstoy retold the famous English fairy tale "Goldilocks and the Three Bears", while slightly shortening it and Russifying it: the bears got Russian names (they are nameless in the classic English version), but the girl lost her name. But this does not give a clue, since Tolstoy did not change anything by and large: Goldilocks, in the same way, appears in the English forest from nowhere and disappears at the end of nowhere. Moreover, in the English version, she "goes upstairs to the bedroom" (since the bedrooms in the English house are located on the second floor) and thus jumps out the second floor window, after which she runs away as if nothing had happened - what a miracle girl !

The tale of the three bears was first published in 1837 in the collection The Doctor in a literary adaptation of the English writer and poet Robert Southey under the title The Story of the Three Bears.
Bears - large, medium and small - were not a family in this story, but simply three friends who lived together.

But the most interesting thing is that the uninvited guest who invaded their house was not a little girl at all, but a disgusting old woman.

All Southey's sympathies are clearly on the side of the bears: he describes them as good-natured, respectable and tidy owners, whose quiet life is grossly disturbed by the intrusion of an impudent tramp. Southey does not skimp on details designed to arouse the reader's dislike for the intruder: a dirty and ugly old woman not only illegally enters the house of harmless gullible bears and makes a mess there, but also swears disgustingly. At the end of the tale, she is given a very harsh alternative: if she did not break her neck by jumping out of the window and perish in the forest, then she was undoubtedly captured by the constable and sent to the house of correction. However, the narrator honestly admits that these are only his assumptions, and the real fate of the old woman is not known to him.

However, this is not the most violent version. Eleanor Muir's handwritten watercolor sketchbook, given as a four-year present to her nephew Horace, is in the Toronto Public Library. The manuscript is dated 1831 and contains the original interpretation of "The Story of the Three Bears" in verse. It is believed that Eleanor learned the tale from Southey, but creatively reworked it. Three bears, tired of the wild forest life in an undeveloped lair, move to the city and buy a house. What follows is a familiar story.

Bears in this, we recall, female version, are distinguished by terrible bloodthirstiness. Having seized the criminal old woman, they decide to put her to a cruel death. At first, the bears make unsuccessful attempts to burn and drown the unfortunate woman, but she turns out to be unusually stable - she does not burn in fire and does not sink in water. Then, in front of the astonished audience, they throw the old woman up, and she sits on the steeple of the bell tower of St. Paul's Cathedral. I don’t know what destructive tendencies little Horace was that it seemed necessary to a caring aunt to frighten him with such horrors. Modern psychologists would no doubt anathematize it.

Southey's version seems to solve the mystery of the appearance of an intruder at the bears' forest home: the wanderings of a homeless old woman look more natural than the lonely walks of a little girl. However, it highlights a new problem: why in this tale a pronounced negative character is embodied in a human form, while positive characters, in whom the features of peaceful villagers rather than wild animals are guessed, appear in the form of bears?

Be that as it may, it is clear that no "initiations" or other mythical subtexts can be found in this story. The pathos of Southey's tale is completely aimed at protecting the private property of respectable inhabitants from the encroachments of marginal elements.

But this effect was almost destroyed after only 12 years, when the English writer Joseph Candall included "The Story of the Three Bears" in a children's collection, with some changes, because he decided that it would be more interesting for children if the heroine was a girl named Silverhair, not an old woman.

All negative characteristics of the intruder have been purged from the text - only the instructive remark "If she were a good little girl, she would have waited until the bears came home" was left. And, of course, she doesn't swear like a bad old woman. The end of the tale takes on the brevity we know: "Our little Silverweasel jumped out of the window and ran into the woods, and the bears never saw her again." This is how the fairy tale ends with Tolstoy. It is believed that in the girl's silver hair color there was still a hint of the old woman's gray hair, but over time she turned into Goldilocks, and the bear friends became a family.

What was the source of the story told by Robert Southey? Probably the original original version was the Scottish tale Scratchypaw and the Three Bears. In it, it is not a girl or an old woman who invades the bears' house, but a fox (or a fox) named Scrapefoot (Scrapefoot).

Here the bears appear not as good-natured bumpkins, but formidable masters of the forest, they even live not just in a house, but in a castle. The fox is very afraid of them, but curiosity still overpowers, and making sure that the bears are not at home, he carefully climbs inside. And then everything goes according to the known scheme.
When the bears discover the insolent, they wonder what to do with him. The big bear offers to hang it, the middle one - to drown it, and the small one - to simply throw it out of the window, which they do, apparently deciding that this is the least energy-consuming way.

In this version, the main character is a fox. The bears here are impersonal and practically devoid of characteristics (with the exception of size), their actions are said extremely sparingly: they lived, came home, entered the hall, said, began to think what to do with it. But everything that concerns the fox is described so vividly and funny that it is impossible not to sympathize with this frivolous prankster. Before the reader's eyes there are hilarious pictures: how he looks around to make sure there is no one nearby; how he sneaks up to the doors and, finding to his joy that they are not locked, cautiously sticks his nose in there, and then his paws - one at a time; how he turns on uncomfortable seats and beds; how he tries to collect a collapsed chair; how he forgets about caution, roaring in warmth and comfort. In the finale, the poor fellow shakes his paws in horror to make sure that they are not broken, and flies home with all his might. The adventure ended relatively well for him, but he is so frightened that he no longer thinks of approaching the bear's house.

The last mystery remains: how did the fox turn into an untidy little old woman?

It has been established that Robert Southey could have heard the story of the fox and bears from his uncle William Tyler as a child, who was an excellent storyteller and could imitate the voices of animals unsurpassed (maybe Southey recalled his lively manner when he tried to convey the difference in the voices of bears in type - the idea use a font of different sizes for the replicas of bears belongs to him). If Tyler was telling a fairy tale in which not a fox appeared, but a fox - vixen, then little Robert could understand this word in its figurative meaning - a grumpy woman, a vixen. The riddle of the parkour girl is also resolved: having made the bears unambiguously positive characters, Southey could no longer make them throw the old woman out of the window, despite all her sins, and she, and after her and the girl who replaced her, had to jump from the second floor on their own.

So everything falls into place. Initially, this is a fairy tale about a rogue and a rogue fox, who gets into trouble, but successfully gets out of them, quite in line with the folklore tradition. Southey pretty much reworked it, shifting the focus and turning it into an edifying story with a clear emphasis on positive and negative characters. Replacing the unpleasant old woman with a little girl returned an intriguing ambivalence to the tale: despite sympathy for the affected bear family, especially the little bear cub, readers cannot but empathize with the ill-mannered girl - after all, she is just a child who got into trouble due to inexperience.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears: aneitis — LiveJournal

"As K. Lévi-Strauss wrote: 'Let's start with the facts'"

Let's follow this motto.

In his article, Leonid Chernov writes: "The fairy tale "Three Bears" today is perceived and presented as a folk tale, but meanwhile, it was invented by Tolstoy and is purely his author's work. Tolstoy's talent and the irony of time do their job in relation to this particular fairy tale – this tale is perceived as a folk tale" .

He is right about one thing - a fairy tale is really perceived as a folk tale. True, Tolstoy's talent has nothing to do with it, because it is popular. After looking through the collections of "Russian Folk Tales" by A. N. Afanasyev and not finding anything similar to the plot of "The Three Bears", Chernov, with his characteristic courage, comes to the conclusion: "there must be a primary source, and since it was not possible to find it, we believe, that it simply does not exist, and we consider this tale a work of Tolstoy" .

He believes so in vain - just in those blessed times of a careless attitude towards copyright, Tolstoy did not consider it necessary to mention the original source, and how could one guess that one should look for it not in Russian folklore, but in English. Now Wikipedia will tell anyone who is interested that this is a popular English fairy tale, well known since at least the beginning of the 19th century. However, in the pre-Internet era, it was probably not so easy to find out about this, and even now few people are interested, and therefore few people know. At best, they will remember that Tolstoy wrote it, but usually they continue to consider it Russian folk.
I also thought so and was quite surprised by this discovery when G. Spirin's book "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" fell into my hands:

The Three Bears is really an English fairy tale? - no one knew, and everyone was also very surprised)

But unexpectedly, overseas origin is not the most surprising thing in the history of this fairy tale. She is amazing in itself, if you look closely, here Leonid Chernov is right again, and how right.

This fairy tale really stands out from the series of fairy tales about a girl who ended up in the forest, and there are many such: about Masha and the bear, about Snegurushka, about Snow White, about the dead princess, about Morozko, etc.

Firstly, the heroine impersonal. Nothing is said about her, she doesn't even have a name. It is not known how she got into the forest. That is, it is mentioned that she “left home for the forest” and got lost there, but we don’t know why she left - did her evil stepmother kick her out, did she run away herself, or simply went into the forest “for mushrooms, for berries”, but Why was she alone then? Such an ontogenetic gap is completely uncharacteristic of fairy tales - some description of the initial situation and motivation for the actions of the heroine is always given.

Secondly, having got into a strange house in a dense forest, the girl again behaves completely uncharacteristically. That is, it is not typical for a positive heroine, who in such a situation must show all her best sides: be modest, show housekeeping and care - tidy up, cook dinner (and not eat someone else's) and wait for the owners to return. The girl in The Three Bears behaves exactly like a "bad sister", whose repulsive behavior in such tales is only intended to shade the virtues of the main character. But the bad sister at the end of the tale will certainly be punished.

However, thirdly, there is no punishment for wrong behavior at the end of the tale. The girl, who has pissed on a cute bear family for nothing, just jumps out the window and runs away - "and the bears did not catch up with her." It is not clear whether the girl is a positive heroine or a negative one.

It is pointless to look for answers to all these questions from Tolstoy, since he only made a slightly adapted translation without making any significant changes, so you have to turn to the original version. To begin with, to the same Russian translation of an English fairy tale made by G. Spirin (you can see it in full here).

And then the first surprise awaited me. The tale of Goldilocks and the three bears does not begin with Goldilocks at all, but with bears!
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And this is not a trifle - after all, in this case, according to the logic of a fairy tale, the main characters are bears, and not a girl. And the initial situation turns out to be in place - it describes the life of bears:

True, no intelligible explanations of the reason for the appearance of Goldilocks in the forest are given here either: she invades the narrative as unexpectedly as in the house of bears:

A little girl walks alone in the forest, wanders to an unfamiliar house and climbs in the window! Where are her parents and what are they thinking? This question remains as yet unanswered.

On the other hand, it becomes clear that the same initial situation is actually preserved in Tolstoy's fairy tale, albeit in a truncated form. He simply removed her from her rightful place at the beginning of the tale, which is why she was no longer perceived by readers as the original one. Why did he do it? Obviously, in order to make the main character a girl, not bears. And this is logical: it is the girl who is the only active character here. Bears, in the English version, formally occupying the place of the main characters, behave passively throughout the story: they are only indignant, discovering new traces of intrusion into their home, and only the most injured baby bear cub tries to bite the girl, who, however, manages to escape with impunity from angry bears.

A strange picture emerges: the adults in this tale are completely passive and helpless. The girl's absent parents neglect her upbringing and safety concerns, leaving her free to roam where she pleases, behave inappropriately and get herself into dangerous situations; the bear cub's parents do not try to protect him: the baby, who has experienced a real shock - his dinner is eaten, his high chair is broken, his bed is occupied by an alien - is forced to independently defend his place in his home. Children do not receive instructions, support, or evaluation of their behavior from anyone. Finally, the girl disappears into the forest as mysteriously as she appeared: it is not known whether she got home (and whether she has one at all) and whether she (and the child-listener with her) made the conclusion from what happened that it is possible encroach on someone else's property with impunity and you won't get anything for it, the main thing is to run away in time. However, it is quite possible that a prosperous child will associate himself more with a bear cub who has parents, a house, a blue cup, a high chair with a blue pillow and his own bed, than with a homeless girl who has arisen out of nowhere and violates all established rules, and in this case he will be left wondering why her misbehavior had no consequences.

The result of the tale is so unsatisfactory that parents and educators feel obliged to complete the "correct" beginning and end - or at least conduct an educational conversation after reading to make sure that the child does not draw undesirable conclusions. This often manifests itself when transferring a fairy tale to the screen. In our 1958 cartoon, the girl gets a name and a grandmother, who gives her granddaughter the necessary instructions at the beginning and the necessary teachings at the end:

However, we have another, not so straightforward version 1984 years old - in it the original interpretation is achieved by other methods:

In numerous English cartoons, it is always emphasized at the end that Goldilocks was very scared and never went into the forest again.

However, it is worth mentioning that not always everything ended so happily for Goldilocks: in some early versions, the bears ate her. However, now the girl simply explains that she was hungry and tired, repents and asks for forgiveness, and the softened bears send the bear cub to accompany her home.

In one variation, Goldilocks and the bear cub then play together and become friends.
In another, mom is shown pouring porridge out of her bowl for a baby bear, and dad is fixing his chair.