“Little Red Riding Hood was going to her grandma’s and here in the wood comes the Big Bad Wolf, and he says what do you have Little Red Riding Hood? And she says something about taking things to the grandma, but in the mean time the Bad Wolf went to the grandma’s first and ate up the grandma and the Wolf was in bed in grandma’s clothes, Little Red Riding Hood didn’t know. But I don’t know what happened to her.”

This is a variation through omission. Midori tried very hard to tell this tale, but this was as close as she got in her interview to completing the story. She seemed very fixated on the fact that the grandma was eaten my the wolf. This might be in part because she is a grandmother herself.

I thought that maybe the fixation on the wolf could be like her concerns with growing old and dieing. She has in the past stated that she does not want to pass away because there is so much that she wants to she me and my sister accomplish before her time is up. I wonder if really she is subconsciously interpreting the wolf eating the grandmother kind of like death coming to get her. This would be a logical explanation for her fixation on the wolf eating the grandmother, and why she really didn’t know what happens to Little Red Riding Hood.

I also found it interesting that her variations were all incomplete in my experiences with these tales. This might be because she has not had a need to retell these tales to anyone, so the details are a little hazy now. This might be a reason for variations in any type of folklore. As people grow and mature so does their folklore and like anything else that it learned, if it isn’t used frequently parts are lost or forgotten. This might also have to do with the fact that we do not necessarily have as much folklore that is told by word of mouth instead we have written tales, so the room for error is much less.

Annotation:

Taylor, Archer. California Folklore Quarterly, vol. 3, No. 4. Western State Folklore Society. October 1944. p. 318.