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Folktales are the focus of research by scholars from a wide range of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, folklore, history, literature, library science, and education. Scholars have used a range of methods (for example, comparative analysis, historical research, close readings, etc.) and theoretical approaches (structuralist, mythological, Marxist, feminist, intertextual, ecocriticism, etc.) to interpret tales, to illuminate their history, and to better understand their role, influence, and appeal within a culture or cultures.

The underlying presumptions and focus of research in folktales have changed over time. Early folklorists, following in the footsteps and methods of the Brothers Grimm, believed that folktales were universal in their structures and meanings across time and place. These folklorists, known as the Finnish School, collected and categorized European tales according to their plot or motifs, assigning tales with similar plots or motifs a classification number and title. In 1910, Finnish folklorist Antti Aarne published Verzeichnis der Märchentypen (The Types of the Folktale), an index to European tales. American folklorist Stith Thompson translated and expanded Aarne’s work, creating The Types of the Folktale: Classification and Bibliography (1928, 1961), known as the Aarne-Thompson (AT) Tale Type Index. In 2004, Hans-Jörg Uther published The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography, updating and expanding the AT Index to include tales from around the world. Sample entries for the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Index include “Little Red Riding Hood,” both Perrault’s and the Grimms’ versions, which are listed as tale type ATU333 The Glutton (Red Riding Hood; The Six Little Goats) while “The Three Little Pigs” is sometimes listed as tale type ATU123 The Three Rams/Wolf and the Kids (Thompson 1977, pp. 39–40; see also University of Missouri Libraries 2021) and sometimes as ATU124 Blowing the House In (3 Pigs) (Ashliman 2008; see also University of Missouri Libraries 2021). These tale-type indices, which help scholars identify tales and their variants, remain a key resource in folktale research.

Oral and written variants of The Three Pigs have been found in Britain, Italy, and the United States (Virginia, North Carolina, African American in Joel Chandler’s Nights with Uncle Remus). These stories share similar plots, but can differ in the kind, number, and fate of the animal characters. Protagonists can be pigs, geese (Bernoni 1885; see also Haviland 1965), or rabbits (Harris 1880), and although the wolf is the most common predator, in some versions the fox takes on that role (Nanny Goose 1813; Cundall 1850; Lang 1892). The number of prey animals can be unnumbered as in the case of the rabbits, but typically range from one to seven. Gender also varies: the pigs, especially the two older ones, are usually males, while the geese are female. Variants also reflect differences in building materials, from sticks, straw, cabbages, and mud to brick, stone, and iron (Graham and Shefrin 1988).

The Grimms’ tale “The Wolf and the Seven Kids” (ATU123) contains motifs related to both the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap” and The Three Pigs. As in The Three Pigs, the wolf comes knocking on the goats’ door looking for a meal. The wolf’s fate is similar to that of the wolf in the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap”: the wolf’s victims are rescued from the wolf’s sleeping body. Although not as popular in the United States as either Little Red Cap or The Three Pigs, there are several noteworthy nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and French illustrated versions. It is also a story that shares motifs in several of Aesop’s wolf and goat fables. This indicates the long-lived nature of these tropes.

The collection and study of tales about little girls and wolves reveal that there are many variants of the tale we know as “Little Red Riding Hood.” At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, French folklorists working in southern France and northern Italy recorded and transcribed 35 versions of an oral folktale featuring a girl’s encounter with a wolf, known collectively as The Grandmother’s Tale. Folklorist Paul Delarue (1956) traced these tales to an initiation ritual of the sewing communities from this region. He also compared them to Perrault’s “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge.” Of these initiation tales, 20 were distinct from Perrault’s tale, two were oral retellings of Perrault’s tale, and 13 were hybrids of Perrault’s tale and The Grandmother’s Tale. Although the source for Perrault’s “Le Petit Chaperon Rouge” remains unknown, its similarities to The Grandmother’s Tale help support the contention that Perrault modified an oral tale to make it suitable for an aristocratic audience. Subsequent comparisons of Perrault’s text with transcriptions of the oral versions suggest that Perrault cleaned up the language, added details (such as the red headdress) not present in the oral versions, and simplified and sanitized the plot by omitting scenes (i.e. the young girl unknowingly eats part of her dead grandmother; and the girl removes her clothing before getting in bed with the wolf). Several of the oral versions end with the girl outwitting and escaping the wolf. Perrault ends his tale with the girl’s death. Perrault also added a moral in verse warning young children, especially girls, of the dangers of courtly and aristocratic wolves.

Some tales, such as Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty, share similar plots, characters, and motifs with tales found in different parts of the world. For instance, variants of Little Red Riding Hood/The Grandmother’s Tale have been found in France, Italy, and Germany but also in China, Korea, and Japan (Delarue 1956). Several theories attempt to explain the origins and evolution of tales and their variants. One theory popular during the nineteenth century was monogenesis. It posited that all folktales came from a single point of origin, specifically Indo-European culture, from where they emerged, evolved, and diffused. As people and cultures dispersed, they carried their stories with them, adapting them to reflect new social, cultural, and physical environments. During the late nineteenth century, a second theory, polygenesis, began to emerge. It argued that tale variants arose independently in different places as different cultures evolved and responded to the challenges and concerns that confront all humans (Thompson 1977, p. 380; see also Warner 1994, pp. xxi–xxii).

Literary scholar Jack Zipes (2009) proposed an explanation for the persistence of tales variants across time and cultures. Drawing on relevance theory, mimetics, and evolutionary psychology, Zipes proposed that the enduring and widespread appeal of certain folktales lies in story memes. Story memes are cultural artefacts that act like genes: they replicate, adapt, and spread. Embedded in our neurons, they have become part of our genetic make-up and are triggered by different situations to help us cope. And as with genes, story memes are passed on from generation to generation. Zipes cautioned, however, that not all folktales become memes. Only those tales that benefit or are perceived to benefit humans (tales such as Cinderella, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, and The Frog Prince) become embedded in our neurons, surviving through adaption and dissemination. While Zipes does not offer a theory for the origin of tales, he does attempt to explain the persistence of tales across time and cultures.

Early folklorists looked to myths and mythic rituals to help uncover a tale’s meaning. Charles Ploiz (1891) saw the wolf as representing the night that swallows the light (Little Red Cap) and the hunter as the Greek hero who cuts open the wolf’s belly and releases the “light” of a new day. In P. Santyves’s (1923) analysis of the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap,” Little Red Cap represents the German May Queen and the wolf is akin to Fenrir, the wolf that swallows the sun in Norse mythology.

Other scholars have turned to psychoanalytical theory to explain a character’s behavior. Erich Fromm (1955) and Bruno Bettelheim (1975) base their analyses of Little Red Riding Hood on the Grimms’ version, “Little Red Cap.” Fromm, focusing on details present in only the print versions (i.e. the red cape), sees the wolf’s feasting on both the grandmother and the little girl as reflecting male–female conflict and women’s deep-rooted hatred toward men. Bettelheim, although aware of the oral versions of the tale, also narrows his focus to the Grimms’ print version. Fromm interprets “Little Red Cap” as a cautionary tale about the loss of virginity and the dangers of sex. For Bettelheim this tale is about pleasure principle (id) or the conflict between doing what one wants to do and what one ought to do. In his reading, Little Red Cap ignores her mother’s instructions and allows herself to be seduced by the wolf, because she wants to be seduced. Géza Róheim (1953) and Alan Dundes (1988) look beyond the two main print versions of the tale to the oral version The Grandmother’s Tale. For both of them, the cannibalism of the girl partaking of her dead grandmother’s flesh and blood underscores oral aggression and intergenerational conflict. Dundes, who also analyzes the defecation scene found in some versions of “The Grandmother’s Tale,” offers yet another layer of meaning: anality. As the wolf moves to devour the girl, she announces her need to defecate. Although the wolf (the adult figure) invites her to defecate in the bed, the girl insists on going outside, thus ensuring her escape. Dundes reads this reversal of the parent–child toilet training roles as a form of anality (p. 225).

To better understand how a tale or group of tales were adapted to function within specific social, cultural, or political contexts, several researchers have begun to treat them as historical documents. Historian Robert Darnton (1984) looked to the oral tales recorded by French folklorists at the end of the nineteenth century – tales that would have been passed down from generation to generation within families and communities – to better understand how eighteenth-century French peasants (a group of mostly illiterate people who left no written records behind) viewed the world.

Research on the historical and cultural contexts within which the collectors of tales worked have helped to dismantle the perception that folktales are timeless, universal, and the voice of the volk. Marina Warner’s (1994) and Lewis Seifert’s (1996) research on late seventeenth-century France and Charles Perrault’s work situate his collection of folktales within the cultural debate known as the Querrelle des Anciens et Modernes, or the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns,” which lasted from 1687 to 1694. The debate focused on whether France’s cultural greatness lay in modeling its artforms on those of Ancient Greece and Rome or whether it could be found in its own vernacular artforms, of which fairy tales (les contes de fées) were one (Seifert 1996, p. 906). The debate was played out at the court of Louis XIV and in the salons of Paris. Perrault, as a champion of the Moderns, reworked and published oral folktales into narratives appropriate for an educated, aristocratic adult audience of the salons.

Similarly, studies focusing on the Brothers Grimm and their collection of tales have helped to debunk the Grimms’ claims that their tales were uniquely German and reflected the timeless wisdom of the German volk. Their sources included not only oral tales but also literary ones. That only German volk contributed the tales was also a myth. Although the Grimms idealized the peasant storytellers, they obtained most of their tales from educated, middle-class and aristocratic tellers, including Wilhelm’s wife, Dortchen Wild. Most of these tellers came from the regions of Kassel and Westphalia. One group of contributors were the Hassenpflugs, descendants of French Huguenots. The Hassenpflugs recounted tales such as “Little Red Cap” and “Briar Rose,” both of which suggest that the tellers knew Perrault’s tales of Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty. Over time, Wilhelm Grimm’s continued revisions to the tales rendered them increasingly moralistic and Christian while ultimately undermining the claim of their timelessness (Bottigheimer 1987; see also Tatar 1987; Jack Zipes 2001; Haase 2013).

The first wave of feminist studies focused on and found fault with some of the most popular tales (Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty) for reinforcing gender stereotypes and traditional hierarchies of power (Lieberman 1972). More recently, feminist approaches have also considered the gender of the tellers, writers, and collectors of folktales. Jack Zipes (1993), in The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood, argued that the oral tradition of peasants (where women were storytellers) was coopted and transformed by Perrault into a story for aristocrats: “Perrault transformed a hopeful oral tale about the initiation of a young girl into a tragic one of violation in which the girl is blamed for her own violation” (p. 7). Marina Warner (1994, p. 238), in From the Beast to the Blonde, proposed a different understanding of Perrault’s tales, arguing that taken in its entirety, his collection of tales reflects the realities of life for seventeenth-century French women and thus serves as a warning about the potential hazards that await the young women at court.

Betsy Hearne’s (1989) Beauty and the Beast: Visions and Revisions of an Old Tale offers yet another way into the history of a particular tale. Instead of focusing on seeking out the tale’s elusive and ever-changing meaning, she provides a history of the tale through an analysis of how the tale’s structure, its art and artifice, has been revised over time and across different media. Similarly, in Marvelous Transformations: An Anthology of Fairy Tales and Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Christine Jones and Jennifer Schacker (Schacker and Jones 2013) demonstrate how a close reading of a tale like Little Red Riding Hood reveals its details, ambiguities and internal contradictions, as well as its connections to other literary forms and the culturally and socially specific meanings it carries. Intertextuality, or the web of references and connections between texts, takes several forms, including narrative conventions of a genre, such as the folktale genre, which trigger a reader’s expectations of characters, plot, and setting and the text or images that reference works of literature. Intertextuality is not limited to folktales and folktale revisions referencing other works of literature, since other works of literature also often reference folktale characters. For instance, Molly Clark Hillard (2013) argued that references to Sleeping Beauty in Victorian novels became a way to debate “gender relations in social and political life” (p. 546).

In her book Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales, Vanessa Joosen (2011) proposed another form of intertextual relationships: the relationship between fairy tales and literary criticism. Focusing on three key works of criticism, Joosen explored how literary criticism has influenced and shaped retellings and how retellings have influenced and directed literary criticism.

In children’s literature, illustrated editions of folktales, especially picturebooks, play an important role in telling tales. Picturebooks are made up of multiple narrative forms: the verbal (symbolic), the visual (iconic), and the visual and verbal together. From clarifying to expanding on, highlighting, and even contradicting each other, the relationships between the text and image are multilayered, dynamic, and complex. Further, illustrators use images to visually refer to other texts as well as other pictorial works. Images can reenforce or contradict particular aspects not only of the tale, but also of the cultural expectations of a character’s appearance (Beckett 2002; see also Mitts-Smith 2010).

Two studies examine the illustrations in Little Red Riding Hood. In “A Second Gaze at Little Red Riding Hood’s Trials and Tribulations,” Jack Zipes’s (1984) analysis of several of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century illustrated editions featuring the Perrault and the Brothers Grimm versions of Little Red Riding Hood stressed the socio-psychological repercussions of image and text. He noted that all the first illustrators of fairy tales were men who “projected their sexual phantasies through the images they composed” in which the young girl desires to be raped (p. 233).

In Recycling Red Riding Hood, Sandra Beckett focused on the “narrative strategies used to retell the fairy tale for contemporary children and young adults” (2002, p. xx). Beckett pointed out that “contemporary retellings of Little Red Riding Hood often use complex narrative structures and techniques, such as polyfocalization, genre blending, metafiction, parody, mise en abyme, fragmentation, gaps, anticlosure and the carnivalesque” (p. xx). In her chapter on illustrations, Beckett applied narrative theory to her examination of “visual interpretations of the classic tale [that] constitute truly original retellings” focusing on how an illustrator’s choice in matters of characterization, medium, and color affects the way in which a story is read and understood (p. xx).

My own study of the visual image of the wolf in children’s books included the wolf as depicted in Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Pigs, The Wolf and the Seven Kids, and the wolf fables of Aesop. A comparison of the images of the wolf within and across illustrated editions of these tales revealed commonalities in its depiction. Not only is the wolf shown as being physically larger than his victims, but since the wolf’s role in these tales is that of predator, the images emphasize the wolf’s mouth, the visual manifestation of the wolf’s predation. Whether wide-open with tongue hanging out or tightly closed, revealing just a hint of the teeth and danger within, the wolf’s mouth becomes the focal point of the image (Mitts-Smith 2010).

Reviewing the scholarly research and debates on folktales reveals a major pitfall in analysis and interpretation of the genre: the assumption that there is one true and original version of a tale. Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Pigs have shown there are different oral variants across time and place. And even in print (a medium once considered to preserve and freeze tales) there are different versions, from adaptations and translations of Perrault’s “Little Red Riding Hood” or the Grimms’ “Little Red Cap” to retellings that modify, combine, or parody them. Picturebook retellings and revisions of tales like Little Red Riding Hood or The Three Pigs underscore their continued evolution through variations in text, visual images, plot, and characterization. Traditional European tales such as Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella have been the focus of much of the research on folklore in children’s books, yet since the mid-twentieth century, there has been an increase in the publication of folktales from a wider range of cultures (Bader 2010). The disparity between the publication of Western and non-Western folktales reflects a source of tension, raising questions of insider vs outsider, ownership, appropriation, and privilege. Further, as folktales in children’s books have become more culturally diverse, scholars need to focus on these tales as well. But one of the most important areas of research that is relatively absent from scholarship is the intended recipient of these books: the child. How does the child understand, respond to, or interpret these tales?

Folktales, whether in the form of anthologies, picturebooks and novels, or as references and visual allusions in other texts, add a richness to the landscape of children’s literature. Yet children’s books are only one of the spaces where folktales can be found. They are featured in cartoons and films and used to advertise a range of products from lipstick to plumbing fixtures and prescription medicine. Folktale characters adorn our clothing and household items. Their abundance in children’s books and beyond reflects an expectation that children will be exposed to these stories from an early age and that these stories are not only part of our common knowledge but are requisite knowledge.