This page has a selection of different versions of the famous story of LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD, a famous folktale about a young girl's encounter with a wolf. The story has changed much in its history, and been subject to numerous modern adaptations and readings.

The version most widely known today is based on the Brothers Grimm version. It is about a girl called Little Red Riding Hood, after the red hood she always wears. The girl walking through the woods delivering food to her grandmother meets a wolf (often identified as the Big Bad Wolf) who wants to eat the girl but is afraid to do so in public (sometimes there are woodcutters watching). He approaches the girl, and she naïvely tells him where she is going. While the girl picks some flowers for her grandmother the wolf goes to the grandmother's house, eats her and waits for the girl. Disguised as the grandmother, the wolf greets and eats Little Red as well. A woodcutter, however, comes to the rescue and cuts the wolf open. Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother emerge unharmed. They fill the wolf's body with heavy stones, which kills him. Other versions of the story have had the grandmother shut in the cupboard instead of eaten, and some have Little Red Riding Hood saved by the woodcutter as the wolf advances on her rather than after she is eaten.

The moral of the story is to teach children not to ‘wander off the path’ or too far from home.