The Myth’s Decline

The myth of the werewolf entered a waning phase in the nineteenth century. Paradoxically, the way in which the Brothers Grimm transformed Perrault’s story contributed to the decline. Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf had already been translated into English in 1729 and the German romance writer, Ludwig Tieck, adapted it as a theater play in verse in 1800. The story was widely diffused and reintroduced into popular French culture. As such, it came to the attention of the Grimm brothers many years later. They became aware of it, thanks to a woman who came from a Huguenot family that had escaped from France. The story underwent an important mutation in the hands of the Brothers Grimm: they added a happy ending and eliminated what they saw as too sexual, sinister, and brutal. In the new version, the werewolf was dehumanized more, so to speak, and was left as a simple ferocious animal, used as a moral lesson. With this cleansing, the Grimms’ story, published in 1812, circulated much more widely than Perrault’s. Now Little Red Riding Hood was rescued, together with her grandmother, when a hunter opens the wolf’s stomach, and the wolf dies, with its body full of stones. In a continuation of the tale, the Grimms added the story of a forewarned Red Riding Hood, who again is going to her grandmother’s house. She is approached by the wolf, who suggests she take another longer path. Paying no attention to the beast, she arrives at her grandmother’s first. Furious, the wolf gets up onto the roof and waits for its opportunity. The grandmother asks the girl to take the water she has boiled some sausages in and pour it into the stone trough. The girl fills it to the brim. Attracted by the smell, the wolf sticks its neck out over the edge of the roof, loses its balance, falls into the trough, and drowns. As can be seen, Red Riding Hood is no longer a naive little girl; she is smarter, and the wolf is very stupid. In the nineteenth-century German version, the former werewolf of the French popular tradition ends up filled with stones or drowned.