The story of a young girl imperiled by a wolf or similar monster of the forest is a folk tale found across several European cultures dating to the late medieval and early modern periods. The tale was first recorded in the form familiar to modern audiences by the French author Charles Perrault in his collection subtitled Tales of Mother Goose (1697). Perrault named the story “Little Red Riding Hood” (La Petit Chaperon Rouge) and introduced the detail that the young girl’s cloak was red.

In Perrault’s version, an innocent young country girl is deceived by a wolf into telling him where to find her grandmother, whom the wolf devours. The wolf disguises himself as the grandmother and tricks the girl into climbing into bed with him, then devours her, too. Perrault claimed the moral of this story was that young girls should be wary of talking to or taking the advice of strangers, with the implicit metaphor of sexual assault in that the wolf lures the girl into bed. Perrault is credited with inventing the literary genre of the fairy tale through his collection, which was enormously popular at the court of the French king and subsequently circulated widely.

Later, other versions of this folklore were collected by German folklorists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who gathered examples of oral literature and published them in their 1812 collection, now a literary classic referred to as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. One of their sources offered a variant in which a hunter or woodsman finds the sleeping wolf and cuts open his belly, releasing Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother, unharmed. In retaliation, the humans sew rocks into the wolf’s belly, by which the wolf drowns.

The tale was translated into English and retold several times throughout the 19th century, in which certain features became standardized, including Red Riding Hood’s mission to take cakes or sweets to visit her grandmother, her detour to pick a bouquet of flowers which allows the wolf to locate her grandmother’s cottage, and an exchange in which Red Riding Hood interrogates the disguised wolf about his eyes and teeth. In some versions, a huntsman comes along and kills the wolf before he can hurt Red Riding Hood, and in others, the ally is a woodsman who helps Red Riding Hood and her grandmother dispose of the wolf in various ways. In its themes of disguise, imperiled innocence, and restoration, the tale shares motifs with other folktales that are found across cultures and time periods.

The picture book Little Red Riding Hood (1983) by Trina Schart Hyman captures the version of this tale now considered the standard for modern English audiences. Many retellings in the 20th and 21st centuries translate the story into the genres of satire or horror, and several more give the fairy tale a twist of female empowerment, as in Angela Carter’s story “The Company of Wolves” in her collection of dark, feminist fables, The Bloody Chamber (1979). Carter’s interpretation of Red Riding Hood as a figure of agency, not a victim, lays the ground for more recent versions of this tale inspiring middle grade and young adult fantasy, including Whitten’s For the Wolf as well as novels like Scarlet (2013) by Marissa Meyer, Crimson Bound (2015) by Rosamund Hodge, and Sisters Red (2010) by Jackson Pearce.