The Three Bears

Okay, so for my fairy tale posts, I decided to start with one of the first fairy tales I can remember being read to me; "The Three Bears."

Now, I was very, very, VERY young when this story was first read to me. I was two years old or younger. I had the book that you can see in the picture below (that is, you can see the picture if that stupid glitch doesn't happen).

Now, I'm sure everybody knows this story already, because it's one of the most famous fairy tales out there. Basically, it's this family of bears that go for a walk while their porridge is cooling, and a little girl named Goldilocks goes into their house and eats their porridge, sits in their chairs, and lays in their beds. Then the three bears come home. Their porridge bowls have been eaten out of, and their child's porridge is completely gone. Their chairs have been sat on, and their child's chair is broken. Their beds have been used, and Goldilocks is still in their child's bed. Goldilocks wakes up and sees the bears and runs away in fear, never to return again.

Now, of course, this book that had been read to me was a little kid version of the story. So, of course, it had an innocent little girl who survives at the very end. And the bears end up sharing their porridge in order for their son to have some after his is eaten, and they fix his chair. Yeah. It was for kids.

Now, I was one of those kids who wanted my favorite stories read to me over and over and over again. So this book got read to me about a million times, and I never got tired of it. In fact, this WAS the story of "The Three Bears" for me until I was about five years old, and my parents bought another book called, "The Golden Goose Book."

If it looks familier, it's because it's a very famous book that has illustrations by Leonard Leslie Brooke. His drawings in the book are fantastic and worth looking at if you haven't seen them. This book is in the public domain, and is on Project Gutenberg, so you can take a look at it if you want.

This book included the stories of "The Golden Goose," "The Three Bears," "The Three Little Pigs," and "Tom Thumb." My parents started reading me and my brothers "The Three Bears" out of this book, and we enjoyed it a lot. In this book, the girl who trespassed in the Bears' house was named "Goldenlocks" instead of "Goldilocks," which I thought was kind of funny.

I found out more about this story when I was in middle school (which is when I started looking into the older versions of the fairy tales). I found out that most modern versions are based on a story by Robert Southy I was surprised to find out that originally, the intruder was not a little girl at all. Instead, it was an old, ugly woman. And not only that, but the story describes many times how she uses bad language, and how she would have stolen the Bears' spoons if they had been made of silver instead of wood. And at the end, they leave it up to the reader what happens to her after she jumps out the window after the Bears discover her. It gives you the idea that maybe she broke her neck, or ran into the woods and was lost, or found her way out and was "taken up by the constable to the house of correction for the vagrant she was." Clearly, this was not the innocent story that most kids heard from their parents. This was a breaking and entering story.

But that wasn't the most surprising part. The most surprising part was that the Bears weren't even a family. We're used to hearing "Father Bear," "Mother Bear," and "Baby Bear." But in this version, they were "the Great Huge Bear," "The Middle Bear," and "The Little Small Wee Bear." And ALL THREE OF THEM were male bears! Haha! I'll let you have your own opinion on whether these Bears were just friends who lived in the same house or something more...adult.

The version of the story in "The Golden Goose Book" was Southy's version. But it had been edited to replace the Old Woman with Goldenlocks (as well as remove the nasty things that she does), and change the Middle Bear to female.

Apparently, the change from an Old Woman to a little girl first appeared about ten years after the story's publication, where she was replaced with a girl named "Silver-Hair." This girl apparently went through a lot of name changes before publishers decided that "Goldilocks" was the name that most people preferred.

Interestingly, there is a variant of this tale, called "Scrapefoot," which includes a fox as the intruder instead of a human. Joseph Jacobs thought that maybe when Southy heard the story, it had included a vixen (female fox) as the intruder, but he misunderstood "vixen" to mean "spiteful woman." That's a very plausible theory, in my opinion.

The funny thing about modern versions of this story is that they appear to make Goldilocks the character that most kids connect with. It's the character that they like to hear about the most, and they're happy when she escapes the Bears. In reality, it's really the BEARS that we should be connecting with. They're the ones who have trespassing problems. The intruder is the antagonist, not the hero, and I'm afraid that modern versions have made that hard for kids to realize. In fact, Roald Dahl made note of this in a parody poem he wrote of the story, where Goldilocks does really awful things in the Bears' house, and then gets eaten by them at the end!

All, in all, this story hasn't really changed that much from the older versions. But it's still worth noting that modern versions should probably cast Goldilocks in a more negative light, and make the Bears the characters that we identify with. 

As a story that I remember fondly as a kid, it's nice to go back and remember it. Next time... I'll be talking about a VHS tape that I watched as a little kid. What VHS is it? Well... You'll just have to wait and see!