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By Root 1115 0

folk in medieval and early modern times, and theirs was a world that went through frequent bouts of scarcity and starvation (until steamships and railroads finally solved the problem of distribution in the mid–nineteenth century). Fairy tales feature magic tables that, on command, cover themselves in tender meats and wine; and mud pancakes that turn real. Fairy tales also harbor all sorts of ravenous creatures interested in eating little girls and boys, from Jack’s ogre atop the beanstalk, who has such an experienced nose he can distinguish the blood of an Englishman, to the old woman who lives in a candy house but prefers oven-baked children for her table. The wolf wants to eat the three little pigs, and Goldilocks wants to eat the bears’ porridge. Jack’s experience with the beanstalk begins when an unscrupulous person essentially seduces a naive child out of what his family needs to survive. The currency here is all food: cows, beans, bread, geese, eggs. Everyone in the story is hungry: Jack, the mother who sends him on his mission, and the ogre who wants to grind his bones for bread. The stolen golden goose will provide not real eggs, the ultimate symbol of fertility and nourishment, but rather golden eggs, extremely valuable, but barren and inedible. The golden egg is a hilarious conflation of money and food: gold, the standard of material value, that comes into being when it gets laid by a silly goose—the biological process of a domestic animal.

Everyone was hungry, children and grandmothers as well as ogres and witches, but the great hunger was imagined in the form of the wolf. In the dominant Italian and Austrian version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the wolf eats most of Grandma, then sadistically gets Little Red to drink the old lady’s blood and eat her flesh, and then he eats the little girl.14 No one comes to save them. In the 1697 Charles Perrault version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” the wolf is clearly a seducer and molester as well as a vicious carnivore.15 A wolf in Grandma’s clothes offers a shadow suggestion that Grandma is hungry and will make demands. Red Riding Hood gets into her trouble in the first place because she must risk the woods to bring Grandma a basket of food.16 The wolf may seem very male to us, but it is not so clear. In Gustave Doré’s classic illustration of wide-eyed Red Riding Hood in bed with the nightgowned wolf, it looks for all the world as if the little girl is staring, aghast, not at a man-wolf in drag, but rather at a she-wolf in a nightdress. Roman slang for whore was lupa—literally, “she-wolf.” The equation of “wolf” and “sexually voracious female” persisted in Europe into the twelfth century, and it was not until Elizabethan times that wolves became primarily symbolic of male lust. The wolf is your fear of hungers, of family hungers, the nightmare of eating, the thrust of one’s own hunger, the threat of being eaten. The wolf is what gets your attention.

Wolves usually ate small mammals in the forests, but when there were no mice or rabbits, they would stalk the sheep. Little shepherds and shepherdesses might find a bloodied carcass in the morning, and if things got bad enough, the monster would come out in daylight and the youngster would see it: lips pulled back showing jagged, wet teeth; furious creased snout; shoulders muscular and huge—the whole beast weighing more than a grown man. There were numerous reports of lone wolves stalking groups of children at play, catching some littlest member, and eating him or her entirely, then and there. (Wolves can eat a huge amount at one meal and then go without for days.) When drought or cold made food especially scarce in the forests and the fields, wolves came right up to the houses. Families hid their animals and their people indoors, in defense, and that is when the wolves would start trying to get into the houses. Today we need some imagination in order to conjure up the horror the wolf represented. When you watch a movie and see a man swimming in the ocean and there is a shark fin nearby, you understand that the guy is now food,