Synopsis of little red riding hood
Little Red Riding Hood by Paul Galdone
Folk Tale Classics Series
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“Once upon a time there was a sweet little maiden who was loved by all who knew her . . .”
So begins this classic tale about Little Red Riding Hood and her encounter with the wolf one day when she is on her way to visit her sick grandmother. Paul Galdone has drawn on the Brothers Grimm version of Little Red Riding Hood, and lends beautiful,
vibrant illustrations to his exciting retelling of this classic fairy tale. Small children and Paul Galdone’s older fans will cheer as the old tale comes enchantingly alive in lovely,
nostalgic, full-color pictures.
A retelling of the folk tale about a little girl who finds a wolf in her grandmother's clothing.
40 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
About the author
Paul Galdone (1907 - November 7, 1986) was a children's literature author and illustrator. He was born in Budapest and he emigrated to the United States in 1921. He studied art at the Art Student's League and New York School for Industrial Design. He served for the US Army during world War II.
He illustrated nearly all of Eve Titus' books including the Basil of Baker Street series which was translated to the screen in the animated Disney film, The Great Mouse Detective.
Galdone and Titus were nominated for Caldecott Medals for Anatole (1957) and Anatole and the Cat (1958). The titles were later named Caldecott Honor books in 1971.
He died of a heart attack in Nyack, New York. He was posthumously awarded the 1996 Kerlan Award for his contribution to children's literature. His retellings of classic tales like "The Little Red Hen" or "Three Billy Goats Gruff" have become staples.
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Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
Matt
3,668 reviews12.
8k followers
A wonderful retelling of this classic story that caught Neo's attention. Many will know the story of a little girl in red, who makes the journey to see her grandmother with sweets (and wine?) to help her feel better. Encountering a wolf along the way, Red Riding Hood gets distracted and picks flowers, which allows the crafty animal to rush over and devour the grandmother whole. When Red arrives, she is not sure what is going on and encounters our antagonist. Will she be saved? Can a random individual save the day? Cue the intense violin music and keep your children close. Neo loved the story and thought the photos were very nice, with no blood or violence at all.
- children-s read-with-neo
Jenny
2,708 reviews25 followers
April 18, 2017Nice illustrations accompany this version of the classic tale. I did think it odd (different than other versions I have read) that the hunter finds the wolf and just opens its mouth and the grandmother and granddaughter are able to climb out.
..that is certainly a milder ending than most versions but just felt odd to me.
- children-s-books folk-fairy-tales-and-adaptations picture-books
February 5, 2021
Well it’s a pretty good book it’s just that when little red riding hood said “what a big mouth you have!“ to the grandma/ wolf he said "just as big enough to eat you!" I giggled because it’s something that my sister would say like she would say you have a big mouth and then I would say just as big to eat you LOL
February 8, 2021
This seems like a tale of a young woman foolish enough to trust a wolf. The horror of Grimm’s tale is the wicked, clever wolf.
- 2021
June 6, 2016
My initial thought was pure delight on the packaging of this book. A square hardcover that looks very collector's edition and beautiful with bold colors. Upon reading the story I was struck by two things: one being that the illustrations are fabulous and second that the wordage seemed a little odd to me at places.
Before recently I was not really familiar with Paul Galdone's adaptation retelling of Classic tales, but in researching preschool and early elementary homeschool curriculum his books as suggested read alouds are popping up again and again. I'm glad to have discovered his work and will have to look for others.
*Thanks to HMH*
- ages-3-to-8 ages-6-to-9 children-s
April 22, 2018
Copyright- 1974
Number of Pages-31
Book format-hardcover
Reading Level- Preschool- 3 GR Level- N/A
Genre- Fiction
Lit. Requirement- Picture Storybooks-1
This is a rather older version of Little Red Riding Hood. A mom tells her daughter named Little Red Riding Hood to take some cake and wine to her grandma. Little Red Riding Hood goes out in the woods to her grandmother's house and runs into a wolf. The wolf then asks where she is going and Little Red Riding Hood tells him where her grandmother's house is. The wolf then plans to eat the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood.
He gets to the grandmother's house before Little red Riding Hood and he eats the grandma and puts on her clothes and gets in her bed. Little Red Riding Hood enters the house even though she knows something is wrong. She sees her grandma tucked in but notices a few strange characteristics. She says the famous lines asking the wolf about the appearances ending with, "But grandmother, what big teeth you have." and the wolf replying with, "The better to eat you with, my dear." The wolf then eats Little Red Riding Hood and falls asleep. A huntsman hears snoring coming from the house and goes to check on the grandmother. He sees the wolf in the bed and suspects the wolf ate the grandmother. He slices the wolf's stomach open while he is sleeping and takes out Little Red Riding Hood and the grandmother alive. They place stones in the wolf's stomach and he cannot get up and eventually dies. They live happily ever after.
This is a simple read with simple text. The text is also larger, and the book overall is fairly short.
The illustrations accurately depict the story line so it is easy to infer what is going on. I would however not recommend this version to young children. I think sharing the traditional fairy tales with children is important, however I think this version might scare kids. I think it would be fine to read a different version. I think having the wolf eat Little Red Riding Hood and the grandmother is a bit scary and then the huntsman cutting out them is dark. I think it would be a good version for adults to read or college students to see the older version that was created by Brothers Grimm.
May 7, 2017
This classic tale of Little Red Riding Hood by Paul Galdone about a young girl giving her name because of a red velvet cloak made for her by her loving grandmother. Little Red Ridings Hoods mother instructs her to take her sickly grandmother cake and a bottle of wine, which was different from any other version I had ever read, and not to stop for anyone along the way.
Entreated by a clever wolf, who goes before her, eats her grandmother and later with big eyes, big ears, big hands and big teeth swallows up Little Red Riding Hood also. The huntsman goes into the house looks into the sleeping wolf's mouth and out pops the both of them. This story reflects the importance of listening and following instruction. This version is great for preschool to 3rd grade.
- traditional-literature
November 19, 2017
Summary:
This story is an adaptation of the original Little Red Riding Hood about a little girl who finds a wolf dressed up in her grandmother's clothes.
Writing Trait:
Organization - The story is carefully organized into paragraphs on each page. The first letter of the story is a large "O" beginning the word "once". The paragraphs help the reader stay connected and create the flow of the story.
Mentor Text:
I could use this text in my classroom when students are practicing writing paragraphs.
The story does a great job of grouping ideas and events together in paragraphs which would be beneficial for students to view as an example.
Reading Level: 3.8
- organization-trait traditional-literature
Lindsay
477 reviews3 followers
September 15, 2017Paul Galdone is one of my favorite children's authors. He has some great stories that any literature lover would enjoy. In this tale of Little Red Riding Hood, she stops to smell some flowers while the wolf heads to grandmas. This version of the story is slightly different from some of the other tales. Enjoy!
October 5, 2017
For the classic children's stories, I love to go to Paul Galdone's books. His illustrations are charmingly old school and his telling of the age-old stories spot on.
Ages: 4 -7
Cleanliness: mentions wine. The hunter calls the wolf "you old sinner."
- children childrens-classics fairy-tale
January 31, 2018
The language was too old fashioned; "whither are you going" etc.
But the fact that the huntsman had a gun and not a knife, and the wolf essentially had a heart attack instead of being sliced open to rescue the damsels was annoying.
- 5-8 fairy-tales picture-books
May 29, 2019
I used this for a 2nd Grade Reading Group. Fairy Tales - 10 lessons understanding fairy tales. (special words like Once upon a time and Happily Ever After, Royalty, Good Character, Evil Character, Magic Numbers 3 and 7, problem and solution) 2.RL.5, 2.RL.6, 2.RL.7
- 2nd-grade-reading-groups fairytales
October 1, 2021
I never realized how slightly disturbing this book was! What an ending.
March 9, 2023
Not my favorite version but probably closer to the original. Red and Grandmother are eaten in this version, but the Huntsman gets them out. Always a good story to prompt a conversation on strangers.
- fairy-tales
December 3, 2020
This is the classical tale that I grew up listening to and I think that I don't really feel like this is the best book, I think that there are others that are better and I think it is kind of basic even though its a classic.
Dolly
Author 1 book643 followers
April 9, 2013This version of the classic story by Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm has an interesting and unusual ending, compared to some of the versions I grew up reading. The story is short, but entertaining and the illustrations by Paul Galdone are colorful and will appeal to young children.
After reading the reviews here on Goodreads, I think I'll have to look for the versions by Trina Schart Hyman and Andrea Wisnewski, too.
- 2013 childrens germany
February 25, 2014
I really enjoyed this classic folk tale, I hadn't read it in years and it was nice to revisit it. I especially noticed the illustrations, the author is a Caldecott Award winner and it shows! The book tells the story of Little Red Riding Hood in a simple, yet captivating way. I remember this tale being sort of scary as a child, with the wolf eating the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood.
The author did a good job of making it sound "less scary" through the text and illustrations. This classic book is great for children of all ages, especially pre-K through grade 2.
October 15, 2014
Galdone's telling of this classic tale contains a few phrasings and words that may be unfamiliar to young readers ("whither") but the story remains familiar. Galdone illustrations in a small, square format will attract young readers, though.
This is really a weird story, when you think about. There's no ending that's not gross, truthfully. This is probably the least gory ending I've read. No hatchet or gunshots, just pulling Red and Granny out through the wolf's throat and then a wolf so scared by the sight of the hunter that he falls down dead from fright. Well, that was easy.
- folklore kids-picture-books
June 3, 2013
This book has a different story from the little red ridding hood that I know.
In here a huntsman was passing by the house and thought " how loudly the old lady is snoring" and wanted to see is there was anything wrong happening to her. When going inside the found the wolf and save both the grandma and little red riding hood from the evil wolf! That's a new detail I learn to this old tale!
September 21, 2014
This is the same morbid tale I grew up with. I know in the past I've read a few watered down versions that are just foolish, but this one includes the danger, the death, and the moral at the end. Read/listen free here: http://www.curiousgeorge.com/kids-sto...
February 2, 2017
I'm personally not a fan of the basic story of Red Riding Hood, but as far as renditions go this one is done well.
- kids-books
Displaying 1 - 27 of 27 reviews
A Summary and Analysis of the ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ Fairy Tale – Interesting Literature
LiteratureThe meaning of a classic story – analysed by Dr Oliver Tearle
‘Little Red Riding Hood’ was, Charles Dickens said, his first love.
It is one of the most universally known fairy tales: if you were to ask 100 people to name a fairy tale, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ would be one of the most popular answers.
And much like a number of other fairy tales, which seem to have grown up around older oral tales (‘Rumpelstiltskin’, for instance, is reckoned to be a whopping 4,000 years old), ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ can be traced back to the 10th century when it was circulating as a French oral tale, and also existed as a fourteenth-century Italian story named ‘The False Grandmother’, though it only became popular under this name in the 1690s, when it appeared in the work of the French fabulist Charles Perrault. It rapidly established itself as one of the best-loved and familiar fairy stories in the western world.
Yet what is the meaning of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’? Before we venture an answer to this – via an analysis of the story’s key features – it’s worth recapping the plot in a brief summary.
Little Red Riding Hood: plot summary
A young village girl who lives with her mother is given a little red riding-hood to wear, and everyone starts to refer to her as ‘the Little Red Riding-Hood’ on account of it.
One day, the girl’s mother asks her to go and visit her grandmother, who lives in the next village, through the forest. Little Red Riding-Hood is given some food to take with her to give to her grandmother. She sets off, and on the way, while travelling through the woods, she meets a talking wolf, who asks her where she’s going.
Little Red Riding-Hood tells him that she’s going to visit her grandmother, and the wolf asks where her grandmother lives. Little Red Riding-Hood tells him she lives in the first house in the village, on the other side of the mill. The wolf says he’ll head there himself, taking a different route, and they can have a competition to see who can get there first.
While Little Red Riding-Hood takes her time walking to her grandmother’s house, picking nuts and flowers in the forest, the wolf legs it as fast as he can.
When he gets there, he knocks at the door and pretends it’s the woman’s granddaughter bearing food for her. The grandmother, who is in bed unwell, tells the wolf, believing him to be Little Red Riding-Hood, to pull the latch and come in.
The wolf does so, and immediately falls upon the grandmother, devouring her. Then he gets into bed and pretends to be the woman he’s just so rudely gobbled up.
When Little Red Riding-Hood eventually hobbles into view, and knocks at the door, the wolf pretends to be the girl’s grandmother, whose voice sounds hoarse because ‘she’ has a sore throat.
Little Red Riding-Hood pulls the latch and enters the house, and is surprised by her grandmother’s big arms (‘all the better for embracing you, my child!’ her ‘grandmother’ replies), her deep voice (‘all the better for greeting you’), her big ears (‘all the better for hearing you’), her big eyes (‘all the better for seeing you’), and her big teeth (‘all the better to eat you with!’).
And with that, the wolf eats Little Red Riding-Hood, and that’s the rather less-than-happy ending of this classic fairy tale.
Or rather, that is how many versions of the tale of Little Red Riding-Hood end. But Little Red Riding-Hood doesn’t always die.
Should the wolf be allowed his dessert (he has, after all, already devoured the grandma), or should he get his just deserts? Should ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ have a happy ending, or should Little Red Riding-Hood meet a grisly end?
Surprisingly, it was the Victorian Dinah Mulock Craik who allowed the poor girl to be eaten up, while the Brothers Grimm – hardly queasy about the idea of children meeting a gruesome death – have the wolf fall asleep after he’s lunched on Little Red Riding-Hood and her grandmother, only for a huntsman to turn up and cut open the wolf’s stomach, freeing the (remarkably still living) young girl and her grandparent. Other versions let the girl live.
One French version from 1868 has her saved at the last minute, thanks to the remarkable deus ex machina involving a wasp stinging the wolf’s nostril, the sound of which gives a signal to a tomtit, which warns a nearby huntsman that something’s up, so he promptly shoots an arrow through the window, ending any further plans for lupine feasting.
Some people went to considerable lengths to avoid Little Red Riding Hood ending up as lunch.
Little Red Riding Hood: analysis
But since she does tend to end up being eaten by the wolf, it’s worth asking what the moral of this fairy tale is supposed to be – assuming it has a moral.
A number of fairy tales are about the dangers of going off into the woods alone and talking to strange men (or, for that matter, talking wolves): compare here ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’. Little Red Riding-Hood goes out into the big bad world unsupervised, and is taken advantage of by the predatory wolf, which, thanks to her loose tongue, kills both her and her grandmother.
Little Red Riding-Hood is too innocent: she fails to realise that divulging the whereabouts of a vulnerable old woman might put her grandmother in danger, and then fails to run there as quickly as possible, in the hope of warning her grandmother or foiling the wolf’s plans (though it could be countered that a little girl would find it hard to outrun a wolf running at full pelt!).
The Brothers Grimm made the moral clearer, with Little Red-Cap being told by her mother not to stray from the path. It is the girl’s failure to follow this instruction that leads to her encounter with the big bad wolf, and her subsequent fate (though as we’ve seen, she’s brought back from the dead, or at least from the wolf’s belly, in the Grimms’ version).
But it is that final conversation between the wolf and Little Red Riding-Hood which remains iconic. It turns out that this, too, is older than the 1690s version of the fairy tale published by Perrault. The Opies draw a link between this exchange and one found in the Elder Edda (thirteenth century), which sees the Norse night-god Loki explaining the somewhat unfeminine attributes of the ‘woman’ who is being offered to the giant Thrym as his bride. The bride is really Thor in disguise (the similarities between this tale and Little Red Riding-Hood are already becoming apparent), so the mischievous Loki has to do some serious sales patter here:
‘These maids of Asgard,’ said the Giants to each other, ‘they may be refined, as Thrym’s mother says, but their appetites are lusty enough.
’
‘No wonder she eats, poor thing,’ said Loki to Thrym. ‘It is eight days since we left Asgard. And Freya never ate upon the way, so anxious was she to see Thrym and to come to his house.’
‘Poor darling, poor darling,’ said the Giant. ‘What she has eaten is little after all.’
Thor nodded his head toward the mead vat. Thrym ordered his servants to bring a measure to his bride. The servants were kept coming with measures to Thor. While the Giants watched, and while Loki nudged and nodded, he drank three barrels of mead.
‘Oh,’ said the Giants to Thrym’s mother, ‘we are not so sorry that we failed to win a bride from Asgard.’
And now a piece of the veil slipped aside and Thor’s eyes were seen for an instant. ‘Oh, how does it come that Freya has such glaring eyes?’ said Thrym.
‘Poor thing, poor thing,’ said Loki, ‘no wonder her eyes are glaring and staring. She has not slept for eight nights, so anxious was she to come to you and to your house, Thrym.
’
All the better for conning you with, we might say.
We’ve been calling her ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’, but of course that’s only a nickname. In the version of the fairy tale included by the Opies in their indispensable The Classic Fairy Tales, the Christian name of Little Red-Riding Hood is given as ‘Biddy’.
As Dickens recalled in his short sketch ‘A Christmas Tree’: ‘I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding-Hood, I should have known perfect bliss. But, it was not to be.’
In summary, Little Red Riding-Hood is one of those fictional characters whom we meet in childhood and who remain as archetypes emblazoned on our imaginations. How we should analyse the story’s ultimate moral remains unclear, but it may well have stemmed from that age-old advice parents pass on to their children: don’t talk to strange men. Or wolves.
But we’ve somehow lost that last bit.
Discover more classic fairy tales with our pick of the best fairy stories, our summary of the frog prince story, our summary of the tale of Bluebeard, and our analysis of the ‘Puss in Boots’ story.
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.
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Tags: Analysis, Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, Children's Literature, Classics, Fairy Tales, Literature, Little Red Riding Hood, Meaning, Summary
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