The earliest published version of the story is from Dartmoor, Devon, England in 1853, and has three little pixies and a fox in place of the three pigs and a wolf. The story in its arguably best-known form appeared in English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, first published on June 19, 1890, and crediting Halliwell as his source. "The Three Little Pigs" was included in The Nursery Rhymes of England (London and New York, c.1886), by James Halliwell-Phillipps. It is a type B124 folktale in the Thompson Motif Index. Many versions of The Three Little Pigs have been recreated and modified over the years, sometimes making the wolf a kind character. The phrases used in the story, and the various morals drawn from it, have become embedded in Western culture. The earliest version takes place in Dartmoor with three pixies and a fox before its best known version appears in English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs in 1890, with Jacobs crediting James Halliwell-Phillipps as the source. The printed versions of this fable date back to the 1840s, but the story is thought to be much older. A Big Bad Wolf blows down the first two pigs' houses which are made of straw and sticks respectively, but is unable to destroy the third pig's house that is made of bricks. " The Three Little Pigs" is a fable about three pigs who build their houses of different materials. Most, it seems, are merely humans in lupine clothing.The wolf blows down the straw house in a 1904 adaptation of the story. Wolves that populate our dreams and our literature, more often than not, stand in for ourselves. When Sergei Pankejeff – a patient of the famous psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud – spoke of his dream of ‘six or seven’ white wolves sitting on a walnut tree and looking through his bedroom window, he was – according to Freud – dealing with a decidedly human issue the trauma of having seen his parents having sex. Werewolves – like many monsters, especially those that can take our form – hold a mirror up to us, showing us our fears and desires, the parts of us that we would rather remain hidden, buried in the subconscious. Such features of myth-making are bound up in misogyny, as well as fear and ignorance surrounding mental illness. It also evokes ‘ lunacy’, temporary mental illness believed, in the Middle Ages (and to an extent, beyond), to have been related to the phases of the moon.
BIG BAD WOLF FULL
One feature of twentieth-century werewolf lore which also relates to anxieties about women – the full moon as a stimulant for transformation – seems to suggest that human metamorphosis into a beast echoes the female hormonal cycle.
They are Lycaon’s daughters, enacting mythology thousands of years older than themselves. They also seem to have a certain taste for children, upsetting the notion of innate maternal instinct, replacing it with far more animalistic ones. Beautiful, seductive, and often dressed in white fur when in human form, female werewolves are typically depicted as sirens luring strapping young heroes to their doom. Female werewolf stories, in particular, emerge across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it is no coincidence that these tales were written and published at a time when women’s rights were increasingly the subject of public debate. Of course, malicious werewolves still stalked the pages of novels and literary magazines. As such, some werewolf tales feature benign werewolves, far from the evil pig-, child-, or granny-eating wolves of children’s fairy stories. They also call to mind our longstanding relationship (and co-evolution) with the domestic dog, an inter-species bond that began, some scientists speculate, when friendly wolves approached human settlements. They are not the undead, but fellow living people trapped between human and animal states. Werewolves, however, are closer to us as living readers. Certainly, the two are connected in their supernatural abilities and appetite for human flesh. In popular culture, werewolves have been somewhat overshadowed by their cousin, the sexier (and sparklier) vampire. This is a taboo that has spanned millennia. In Silver Bullets, a collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century werewolf stories that I have recently selected for the British Library, this anxiety surrounding cannibalism is still detectable.
This etymological lending was not the only feature of werewolf stories that Lycaon contributed to later narratives: in many subsequent tales, becoming a werewolf is associated specifically with the consumption of human flesh. Lycanthropy – the transformation from human to wolf – takes its name from Lycaon. To punish Lycaon for his transgressions, he transformed him into a wolf. To do so, he served Zeus the roasted flesh of his son, Nyctimus. Ovid’s Metamorphoses – his epic poem detailing over 250 myths from classical antiquity – contains the story of Lycaon, a king of Arcadia who sought to test the omniscience of the god Zeus.
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