ABSTRACT
AS IN THE FAIRY TALE ABOUT The Wolf and the Seven Kids, the wolf also appears in Little Red Cap as devious, wicked and mean. His crime—the swallowing of grandmother and grandchild—is not motivated by a voracious appetite, nor is it explained sufficiently in any other way. The narrator assumes that the wolf is "radically evil by nature," and here, too, one greatly suspects that the assertion of general animal aggression involves an early justification of socially conditioned human aggression. Yet, once again, progressive folklorists have been successful in their research about this case. They recently uncovered a fairy-tale fragment which had been believed to have been forgotten, and now this fragment can shed light on the true motives of the wolf.
