By and by along comes little Red Riding-Hood, who had been amusing herself by gathering nuts, running after butterflies, and picking flowers. 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.

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! The work you are putting into your business is such a great investment in the lives of so many others.But instead of going his ways he turned back, took the straight road to the old woman's cottage, and knocked at the door.

It is interesting that in some of the older versions the intended victim/lunch saves herself (or himself – in one version where the predator is a tiger, disguised as an aunt rather than a grandmother, the hero is a little boy) by her own quick wits.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. Little Red Riding-Hood tells him she lives in the first house in the village, on the other side of the mill. and provides what we think is the perfect combination of creative craft and creative play opportunity. So little Red Riding-Hood pulled the bobbin, the latch went up, and there, she thought, was her grandmother in the bed; for the cottage was so dark one could not see well. 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.

It turns out that this, too, is older than the 1690s version of the fairy tale published by Perrault. These are the links for other translations by different authors - The Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault! The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. 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). 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.

Thank you for the great job you do making Activity Village such a great place for us to find fun learning activities!

Should ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ have a happy ending, or should Little Red Riding-Hood meet a grisly end? 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. And with that, the wolf eats Little Red Riding-Hood, and that’s the rather less-than-happy ending of this classic fairy tale.

Read about the adventures of a little girl who went to deliver a cake and a pot of butter to her granny, and defeated a big bad wolf in the process! It rapidly established itself as one of the best-loved and familiar fairy stories in the western world. You can have endless fun retelling the story of Little Red Riding Hood if you create this "small world" scene.