Goldilocks and the Three Bears

Three Versions of Goldilocks

The Story of the Three Bears by Joseph Jacobs

Link: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/goldilocks/stories/jacobsoriginal.html

    This story from England is the closest version to the original tale first published by Robert Southey in 1837. It tells the story of a little old woman who invades the home of three bears while they’re out letting their breakfast porridge cool. The “impudent, bad old woman” helps herself to an entire bowl of porridge, swears after breaking the smallest chair, and naps “upon the bed of the Little, Small, Wee Bear, and that was neither too high at the head nor at the foot, but just right.”
    When the bears return they are upset to see their home has been disturbed. When the smallest bear finds the old woman asleep in his bead, his high, squeaky voice wakes her up and “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. But the Three Bears never saw anything more of her.”

Scrapefoot by Joseph Jacobs

Link: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/goldilocks/stories/scrapefoot.html

    Scrapefoot is another English Tale that introduces a character that most of us have never heard of; a fox named Scrapefoot. Scrapefoot lived in the same woods as the three bears and although they scared him, he was also very curious about them. One day he decided to enter the castle that housed the bears to do some exploring. He tried out all three chairs, tasted three saucers of milk, and fell fast asleep in the littlest bed.
    When the bears found Scrapefoot asleep, they debated whether they should hang him, drown him, or throw him out the window. The latter was his fate, but Scrapefoot survived and ran all the way home, never to return to the bear’s castle again.

The Three Bears by James Taylor Adams

Link: http://www2.ferrum.edu/applit/texts/the3bears.htm

    This Appalachian version of the story includes a little girl (though she is never called Goldilocks) who went out into the woods to pick flowers for her grandmother’s birthday. After discovering she is lost, she wanders through the woods until she discovers a little house. After tip-toeing inside, she samples three bowls of sweet milk, sits in three chairs, and falls asleep in the “teeniweeny” bed.
    It turns out that the little house belonged to a family a bears, “the old big daddy bear, the little mother bear and the teeniweeny baby bear.” The sleeping girl is discovered by the baby bear who lays in his bed and says, “’Oh! Somebody's has been layin' on my bed an' they are layin' here now.’” The little girl wakes up and runs scared from the house all the way home and “she got there with the flowers she'd held to all the time and give them to her grandmother.”

Additional Resources:

History: http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/goldilocks/history.html
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3k4_rEaTy4
Songs: http://dragon.sleepdeprived.ca/songbook/songs4/S4_36.htm
Essays:

Goswami, Usha. "Transitive Relational Mappings in Three- and Four-Year-Olds: The Analogy of Goldilocks and the Three Bears." Child Development 66.3 (1995): 877. Academic Search Premier. Web. 13 June 2011.

De Rijke, Victoria. "Goldilocks And The Three Bears By Lauren Child." The Art Book 16.4 (2009): 80. Academic Search Premier. Web. 13 June 2011.