![]() ![]() The story has seen various interpretations and has been adapted to board game format, film, opera, and other media. What was originally a fearsome oral tale became a cozy family story with only a hint of menace. Southey's elderly antagonist ( an old hairy woman, described at various points in the story as impudent, bad, foul-mouthed, ugly, dirty and a vagrant) was transformed in fact into a pretty little girl called Goldilocks, and his three male bears (once known as “Little, Small, Wee Bear, Middle-sized Bear, and Great, Huge Bear”) became Father, Mother, and Baby Bear. Since then, a many publications of the story, told by different authors, followed and it is important to point out that the tale experienced two significant changes during its early publication history. Both versions tell of three bears and an old woman who trespasses upon their property. (The same year, writer George Nicol published a version in rhyme based upon Southey's prose tale, with Southey approving it). Robert Southey was the first author to record it in narrative form and so it was first published in a volume of his writings (‘The Doctor’) in 1837. This famous children's story was already known at Southey’s time but it was present only in the oral tradition. But the three Bears never saw anything more of her. Out the little old woman jumped, and whether she broke her neck in the fall or ran into the wood and was lost there, or found her way out of the wood and was taken up by the constable and sent to the House of Correction for a vagrant as she was, I cannot tell. Now the window was open, because the Bears, like good, tidy bears as they were, always opened their bedchamber window when they got up in the morning. Up she started, and when she saw the three bears on one side of the bed she tumbled herself out at the other and ran to the window. But when she heard the little, small, wee voice of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, it was so sharp and so shrill that it awakened her at once. And she had heard the middle voice of the Middle Bear, but it was only as if she had heard some one speaking in a dream. The little old woman had heard in her sleep the great, rough, gruff voice of the Great, Huge Bear, but she was so fast asleep that it was no more to her than the moaning of wind or the rumbling of thunder. But she was an impudent, bad old woman, and set about helping herself. If she had been a good little old woman she would have waited till the bears came home, and then, perhaps, they would have asked her to breakfast, for they were good hears-a little rough or so, as the manner of bear's is, but for all that very good-natured and hospitable. So the little old woman opened the door and went in and well pleased she was when she saw the porridge on the table. The door was not fastened, because the bears were good bears, who did nobody any harm, and never suspected that anybody would harm them. She could not have been a good, honest, old woman for, first, she looked in at the window, and then she peeped in at the keyhole, and, seeing nobody in the house, she lifted the latch. ![]() And while they were walking a little old woman came to the house. One day, after they had made the porridge for their breakfast and poured it into their porridge pots, they walked out into the wood while the porridge was cooling, that they might not burn their mouths by beginning too soon to eat it.
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