Little Red Riding Hood couldn’t see through the wolf in grandmother’s clothing, ended up eaten and needed the hunter to rescue her and cut her free from the wolf’s belly.  Right?

Almost.

In my recent hunger for myths, legends and tales I have not yet read, I came upon a wonderful collection of stories by Kathleen Ragan entitled Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters.  I stared at the book a few times, putting it down more than once and failing to buy it because I just wasn’t sure the stories inside were what I was looking for.  But, I eventually gave in, and could not be more excited about what I found.

This is a book filled with tales and legends that had been lost to history.  Tales that were deemed unworthy of collections when they were being put together so many years ago, and in all of them the women are strong, capable, smart, and often the hero of the story.  There are no swooning maidens, no girls locked in towers just waiting for some knight to come and save them.  These women take matters into their own hands, and come out victorious.

Which brings us back to Little Red Riding Hood (who is Little Red Cap in this retelling of the tale).  Yes, the hunter comes by and, upon hearing such loud snoring, decides to check on the old woman.  Recognizing the wolf, he cuts Little Red Cap and her grandmother free, and fills the wolf’s stomach with rocks.  Upon waking, the wolf tries to run, but the rocks are so heavy that he falls down and dies.

Normally, that is the end of our story.  But wait.

Little Red Cap takes cakes to her grandmother a second time.  And this time, when a wolf appears again, she is prepared.  This time, she does not listen to the wolf and keeps right on walking.  She and grandmother lock themselves inside, Little Red Cap proclaiming that she knows the wolf would have gobbled her up had she not been on the open road.  The wolf hops up onto the roof, planning to wait until Red sets out to return home in the night.  Red and Grandmother set a trap for the wolf, with sausages in a large water trough.  The smell is so enticing the wolf leans so far over the edge of the roof that he falls in and drowns.  Little Red Cap then goes home safely, skipping all the way.

Hm.  Interesting.  So she learned from her first mistake (near death experience, really), and as such was able to save herself the second time.  Sounds like a good lesson to me.  Why was this ending left off for so many years?  Perhaps because the Hunter makes a better looking hero–swinging his axe and pulling the girl from the belly of the beast.  Wonderful imagery.  But what a hero in the little girl who learns to protect herself.  Now that’s a hero I would read about to my children.  Be confident enough to save yourself, to be your own hero.  And you don’t need muscles to do it.  Sometimes all you need is a brain.  And while we may not all be body builders, we do all have a brain.

This book is filled with stories of heroes long lost to time.  And not all of them are cases of endings being left off familiar stories.  There are tales of wives who outsmart vampire skeletons, saving the lives of themselves, their children, and entire villages.  A tale of the Thai people, of the seven wives of an evil goblin king, who discover the only way to kill him is to strangle him with a hair from his own head, then must take turns each carrying his head for a year so that it does not touch the ground and cause fire and ghosts to rise.  A Hawaiian story of a woman who wields the power of lightening and fire (powers most often given to male gods) and with it defeats dragon-gods, though always motivated by compassion.

This book is a treasure chest full of heroes that have gone unsung for too long.  Heroes who use their brains, their hearts, their heads, to accomplish great things.  Stories that teach us that we already have everything we need to be heroes ourselves.  Even if we never discover that we are really the child of a powerful god, or king, or the chosen one.

These tales have made me rethink the way I write my own characters and heroes.  And really, in many ways this tradition still endures.  Books nowadays often open with the most unlikely of candidates–the outcast, the geek–we love to cheer the underdog.  But maybe we could limit the amount of “gifts” we bestow upon them and let them save the day with the gifts they already possess.

That is something sword and sorcery has always done well.  The bad guys may have magic, but the hero has a heart.  And the heart is one of the most powerful weapons in our arsenal.