The Three Bears

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For other uses, see The Three Bears (disambiguation).
Illustration by Arthur Rackham from a 1918 English Fairy Tales, by Flora Annie Steel.
Illustration by Arthur Rackham from a 1918 English Fairy Tales, by Flora Annie Steel.

The Three Bears or Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a notable children's bedtime story. Often considered an anonymous folk story, even one of the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm, it actually first saw print in 1837 as a prose story composed by the poet Robert Southey and collected in his book The Doctor. Possibly based on an even older story (though this is by no means certain), the story became widely known after being published by Southey, and was so often retold, that it has lost connection to its author.[1]

The story was very popular and retold by many others. George Nicol retold Southey's story in verse. Southey's story included the three bears, but the visitor to the bears' home was "an old woman"; later versions of the story replaced the old woman with a girl named Silver-hair. George MacDonald mentions the three bears of Silverhair in his 1867 story The Golden Key. Joseph Jacobs included a fairy tale Scrapefoot in his More English Fairy Tales, identical in every respect to "The Three Bears" except that milk replaces the porridge, and the visiting character is a lame fox. This saw print later than Southey's version, but it may have predated it in the oral tradition; some have hypothesized that Southey heard a tale about a literal vixen and mistook it for a figurative vixen, a harridan.[2] Charles Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" contains a reference to a version of the story with three hobgoblins instead of bears.[3]

Goldilocks first appeared in the 1904 printing of Old Nursery Stories and Rhymes. The story continues to grow and change. Recent versions include the story told from the point of view of the three bears. The story was humorously adapted into a popular song in 1946 by songwriter Bobby Troup; this song too is often erroneously credited as "anonymous".

Contents

[edit] Synopsis

The three Bears, illustrated in a 1927 story anthology
The three Bears, illustrated in a 1927 story anthology
Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

The story tells of three anthropomorphic bears and their encounter with a young girl called Goldilocks (after her golden hair).

A family of three bears (a mother, a father, and a baby) live in a quite civilized house in the woods. One day, waiting for their porridge to cool, they leave the house unlocked as they go for a walk in the woods. While they are out, Goldilocks comes to the house. Curious, she enters and meddles with the bears' belongings, sampling their porridge (eating all of the baby's bowl), sitting on their chairs (breaking the baby's one), and then trying out their beds (falling asleep in the baby's one). Every member of the bear family has their own unique chair, porridge, and bed, which have unique characteristics. The exact adjectives differ from story to story, but generally the mother and father's beds and chairs are "too hard" and "too soft" and their porridges are "too hot" and "too cold", with the baby bear's porridge, chair, and bed being "just right".

Goldilocks is still asleep in the baby's bed when the bears return home. They wake her up, and depending on the brutality of the story-teller, either kill her or scare her away. The moral of the story can differ as well, a general theme is that the privacy of others should be respected.

[edit] Adaptations

A silent film version called The "Teddy" Bears was created in 1907. It referenced the Theodore Roosevelt "teddy bear" story by having a hunter protect Goldilocks from the pursuing bears by gunning the two parents down, and letting her adopt the cub.

Walt Disney created a black and white silent short in 1922 called Goldilocks and the three bears

Jasper Fforde's The Fourth Bear incorporates many elements of the story in a nursery rhyme/noir cross-genre tale.

In 1970, the Sherman Brothers created a musical television version (Goldilocks (TV)) which starred Bing Crosby.

In 1982 Roald Dahl rewrote the story in a more modern and gruesome way in his book Revolting Rhymes.

In 1984 Faerie Tale Theatre aired an episode based on the fairy tale called Goldilocks and The Three Bears.

BBC aired an episode of Tweenies with these characters playing a kind of mini-opera as the Three Bears and the Golden Hair (List of Tweenies episodes, episode 383 - Opera). This episode was also included in a Tweenies DVD - Let's All Make Music 1999.

[edit] Quotations

Someone’s been eating my porridge said the daddy bear,
Someone’s been eating my porridge said the mama bear,
Hey Ba-ba Re-bear said the little wee bear someone has broken my chair!

[edit] Hypothetical prehistoric origins of the story

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The story has the feel of a traditional story, and many have assumed that Southey adapted it from European folklore. Some scholars have hypothesized that the story goes back even to Paleolithic times, when cave bears were honored in shrines deep inside caverns. In these shrines, the skulls of sacrificed bears were set up in places of honor, and food offerings were placed in front of them. Perhaps in some original version of the story, some impious person committed sacrilege by eating from these ritual offerings, and the spirits of the vengeful bears tore him to pieces. Over the millennia, the story could have been softened from these gruesome origins, until we come to 20th century versions in which the intruder is always a sweet but rambunctious little girl named Goldilocks, who always escapes and is sometimes reconciled with the Bears. Despite this attempt to explain a traditional story's origins, there is no record of the story preceding Southey's publication in 1837.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Maria Tatar, p 245, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, ISBN 0-393-05163-3
  2. ^ Iona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales p 119 ISBN 0-19-211550-6
  3. ^ Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, Book 3, Chapter 16
  • Abrams, MH, et al. Norton Anthology of English Literature (3rd ed). NY: Norton, 1974.
  • Ober, Warren. The Story of the Three Bears. Scholars Facsimilies & Reprint, September 2000 ISBN 0-8201-1362-X

[edit] External links

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