The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids

Wolf attacking the seven kids.

The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids (original: Der Wolf und die sieben Geißlein) is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, tale number 5.^[1]

Synopsis

A mother goat warns her children to be wary of the wolf while she is out shopping. The wolf comes and claims to be their mother. They tell him his voice is harsh, while hers is soft. He goes and eats a chunk of chalk to make it soft. They tell him his paws are black, while hers are white. He goes to the miller and gets flour on his paws. They let him in, and he, tearing apart the house to find them, swallows them all except the youngest, who hid in the clock.

The mother returns to the damage and the youngest emerges. She steps outside, and they find the wolf sleeping, and something struggling in his stomach. They cut him open, and the other six emerge alive. She puts in stones instead. When he wakes, he goes to a well to drink, and the stones drag him in, so he drowns.

See also

• Three Little Pigs
• Big Bad Wolf

Trivia

• A spoof of this story appears in an episode of The Noozles, with the goat family replaced with a koala family and the wolf replaced by a human who plans to sell them to a zoo.
• In Richard Scarry's version of the story, the wolf does not eat the kids when he gets into their house. Instead, he puts them into a large sack and trys to take it back to his cave. The mother goat cuts the sack open and frees the kids. She then fills it with stones.
• There is children's tabletop game based on this tale, The Uncatchables (Nicht zu fassen),^[2] designed by Fréderic Moyersoen and originally published in Germany in a multilingual edition by Zoch in 2009.^[3]

References

External links

• Nice old English version