When I think about how much things have changed over the past two hundred years – trying to place myself in John Adams’ shoes, or contemplating what time travel would really be like – I am struck by ho much things have changed in that relatively short stretch of time. I’m not talking about the obvious technical improvements (computers, electricity, internal combustion engine), or about more fundamental ideas (evolution, abolition of slavery), but about how so many of the things we take as cultural background simply weren’t there.

The monsters and bogeys that we conjure up in our stories, for instance, are all surprisingly new. There were stories and traditions of vampires going back quite a long time, but The Vampire As We Know him developed in the nineteenth century, the faux-ancient “traditions” coagulating around the literary image kicked off by John Polidori’s “The Vampire” (1816). Polidori gave us the Titled Vampire (who probably bore a lot of the traits of Polidori’s friend and companion, Lord Byron). Writers through that century added bits of lore or ignored others, until Bram Stoker established many of the rules in his landmark Dracula, actually making a lot of them up himself. The point is that Ben Franklin might have recognized a “vampire” as a ort of blood-sucking ghost, but the idea that this thing slept all day in a coffin of his native earth, bore no reflection in a mirror, and was dispatched by a stake through its heart would probably not be familiar to him.

Similarly, our ideas about Mad Scientists Creating Life in the Lab had to await Mary Shelley’s 1818 publication of Frankenstein (and, again, much of the imagery and lore surrounding that Creature was created much later, in plays and films). Re-animated mummies first appeared in Jane Webb’s 1827 novel The Mummy! And in Edgar Allen Poe’s satiric Some Words With a Mummy (1845). Our current image of the Werewolf as a half-man/half-wolf creature unwillingly transformed by a full moon and killed by a silver bullet is entirely a creation of the cinema. And so on.

Perhaps these don’t surprise you. Well, consider this: “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” didn’t assume the form we’re all familiar with until 1918. That was the year that Flora Annie Steel gave the heroine her name. The basic story first appeared in print in Robert Southey’s book The Doctor in 1837. It’s suspected that Southey wasn’t copying an old folk tale, but cobbled together bits from other stories to concoct a tale about an old woman, a vagrant, who breaks into a house inhabited by three brother bears. It took thirteen years to metamorphose into a story about little girl, and two more years for the bears to become a family of Mama Papa, and Baby.

And then, consider the case of “The Three Little Pigs”. The useful Annotated Classic Fairy Tales (annotated by Maria Tatar, 2002) prints the earliest “definitive” version of each tale, and it’s telling that the definitive version of The Three Little Pigs comes from Joseph Jacobs’ 1898 book English Fairy Tales. It is supposed to be based on an earlier version in James Orchard Halliwell’s Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Tales, but I note that the on-line copy of the fourth edition (http://www.presscom.co.uk/halli_1.html) does not include the story. This is very surprising. I would have been sure that The Three Little Pigs had deep roots, but it, too, seems to be a recent construct. As Tatar notes, there are suspicious similarities between TTLP and a story recounted by the Brothers Grimm, “The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids”. In that story, too, the titular animals are eaten by the Wolf, although in that case it’s because they didn’t take their mother’s advice. One bit of evidence that supports the connection is the familiar refrain “not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin”. Goats have hair on their chins. Pigs, except for a few scraggly outliers, don’t.

In the story as told by Jacobs (and, presumably, Halliwell), three brother pigs set out to seek their fortune in the world. The first sees a man carrying straw, and asks him for some, from which he built a house. The second saw a man carrying some furze (scraggly bushes), and asks the man for some of it, from which he built his house. The third encountered a man carrying bricks. He asked for some of the bricks, from which he built his house.

Let me just note, at this point, that these are, or were, all house-building materials. Straw doesn’t sound very likely, but a search of the internet reveals several sites about building homes from bales of straw (for instance, http://www.eere.energy.gov/EE/strawhouse/house-of-straw.html) But even before baled hay was used for houses, straw houses were being built by careful weaving and bundling. There’s an example of one of these in Salem, Massachusetts, at Salem Pioneer Village. The village was built in the 1930s, and is still standing. There are reconstructions of many of the houses built by the earliest settlers, from what are little more than holes in the earth to timbered frame houses. One of the striking examples is a house built entirely of straw. The house looks snug and cozy, fully protected from winter drafts, with proper door and fireplace (but no windows). There used to be two such houses there, but one of them caught fire – a bigger hazard than wolves.

Furze was apparently also construction material, especially by those of limited means. In American editions this gets changed to “sticks”, but the idea is the same.

A wolf comes along and knocks on the door of the fist pig’s house. We all know how this goes, because the rhymes are the same ones we grew up with.

“Little pig, little pig, let me come in.”
“Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin.”
“Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in.”

This the wolf does, of course, after which he eats up the first pig. I confess to some surprise here, although I probably shouldn’t. The version that’s told today pretties this up by having the first pig run to the furze/stick house of his brother, where the performance is repeated. But in the earliest version, the first pig gets eaten. I thought at first that we owed this bit of Bowdlerization to Disney, but it turns out to predate the Silly Symphony cartoon. Andrew Lang has the pigs survive in his re-telling of the story.

And, of course, I have to point out that straw houses are pretty resistant to winds far in excess of wolf-gale force. The one in Salem has been standing against New England winter winds for some seventy years.

After eating the pig in the Straw House, the Wolf moves on to the pig in the furze house and goes through the actions again. Once again, the house gets blown down and the pig eaten. Again, furze doesn’t sound like the ideal building material to us modern city dwellers and suburbanites, but I’ll bet that to those who had no other stuff, furze could be woven into a pretty solid and snug house.

Finally, of course, the wolf goes o the house with the third pig living in his House of Bricks. The same dialogue ensues, but

Well , he huffed and he puffed, and he huffed and he puffed, and he puffed and huffed; but he could not get the house down.

But the wolf is resourceful, and he tells the pig that he knows where there’s a field of turnips and makes an appointment to go with the pig to the field at six o’clock the next morning. The pig gets up at five o’clock, goes to the field, and picks all the turnips. When the wolf comes by at 6 AM, the pig is snug in his house with the turnips and refuses to come out. (To me, it’s a little surprising that there were turnips there at all – you’d think that the wolf would simply have made them up.)

The wolf still intends to get the pig, so he tells him where to get apples. They agree to meet the next day at five. The pig, of course, gets up at four and picks all the apples (which, again, really are there). The wolf gets there at the appointed time, apparently not having learned a thing, and misses the pig again. So he makes another appointment to go to the fair with the pig. Again, the pig goes an hour early, and the clueless Wolf is cheated again.

Finally, exasperated, he decides to climb in through the pig’s chimney. The pig puts on a pot of water in the fireplace and gets it boiling by the time the wolf gets there. The wolf falls into the pot and is cooked, and the pig eats him for dinner. In all the versions I’ve read, the wolf gets a superheated tail and runs away, never to bother the pigs, but that’s the cleaned-up animal-friendly twentieth century version, where the two other pigs live.

Modern tellings, as I note, clean the story up. They also eliminate the three times the third pig gets the better of the wolf, probably because the incident seems so out-of-place. Certainly those incidents didn’t show up in the Disney cartoon.

The Silly Symphony “The Three Little Pigs” was released in 1933, and was a big hit. (http://disneyshorts.toonzone.net/years/1933/threelittlepigs1.html) A full color cartoon with its memorable song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?” must have stood out against the black-and-white movies of the era. Its lighthearted song was seen, say many critics, as an antidote to the Depression. It was so popular that it spawned three sequels, and The Three Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf (and, later, his apparent son L’il Wolf) appeared in Disney comics.

Disney’s cartoon not only perpetuated the version in which no one – not even the wolf – dies, it also transformed the story. In the cartoon, the first two pigs are shown as too lazy and easygoing to build substantial housing. They’d rather dance and play. The third pig is called Practical Pig, and he goes to the extra time and effort to build a tough house. His brothers learn the error of their ways when the wolf blows down their cheap housing. There’s not a trace of this in the original story (and building a house of straw or furze is not a quick, cheap solution). In the story, the material they build their houses of is “the luck of the draw” – the pigs ask the first person they see. The Disney studios transformed the story into a little morality play, strongly resembling their 1934 cartoon, The Grasshopper and the Ants (http://disneyshorts.toonzone.net/years/1934/grasshopperandtheants.html).

Bibliography

1.)The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales Edited with an introduction by Maria Tatar. W.W. Norton and Co., 2002. A god book, but it has two flaws: a.) There aren’t anywhere near enough annotations; b.) Although they went to the trouble of getting classic illustrations (by people like Arthur Rackham), and reproducing them in color, they’re the size of postage stamps! You need a magnifying glass to see them.

2.)An on-line annotated Fairy Tales. But The Three Pigs doesn’t have any annotations yet. http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/threepigs/

3.)Interesting on-line site about The Three Pigs http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0124.html

4.)Euty’s Encyclopedia of Disney Shorts, the essential reference: http://disneyshorts.toonzone.net

5.)Halliwell’s book on-line complete 1846 edition. But it doesn’t have The Three Little Pigs: http://www.presscom.co.uk/halli_1.html

6.)One of a great many websites on Straw Houses. (Sorry, I couldn’t find any with pictures of the one in Salem): http://www.eere.energy.gov/EE/strawhouse/house-of-straw.html

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