“The Three Little Pigs and the Fox” is a variation on the traditional fairy tale “The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf” (hereafter Three Pigs Story). The story was collected from the oral tradition by the Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang (1844–1912) in The Green Fairy Book (1892), but similar tales exist in other European as well as African American and Appalachian traditions. “The Three Little Pigs and the Fox” is a didactic (morality) tale typical of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It features three anthropomorphic pigs (often given names and human characteristics) whose choices make them either victim or vanquisher of the villainous fox.
Lang’s collection offers no origin or source for the story but is similar in plot, themes, and characters to other contemporary versions. A Three Pigs Story featuring a treacherous wolf was collected under the title “The Story of the Three Little Pigs” by the English scholar James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps in The Nursery Rhymes of England (1886) and shortly thereafter by the Australian folklorist Joseph Jacobs in his collection, English Fairy Tales (1890). These and other variations are commonly categorized under the Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) index 124, a system for cataloging folk and fairy tales. Tales categorized as ATU 124 follow a basic pattern: several creatures who live in houses made of various foolish or wise building materials are hunted by a cunning trickster, often a fox or wolf. One early example of the story, found in verse format in A Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young People (1856) edited by J. Cundall, features three young geese who are pursued by a trickster fox. In this version of the story, the fox is referred to as Reynard, suggesting a link between the fairy tale and the medieval satirical cycles of Reynard the Fox, first recorded beginning in the twelfth century.
The Three Pigs Story collected by Lang includes elements that are repeated in most of the other tales, but the tale is notable for its depiction of Victorian morality. Like the Cundall story, the villain is a crafty fox, though the protagonists are instead three pigs named Browny, Whitey, and Blacky. The pigs’ dying mother charges her children to build houses to protect them from the clever fox, and Lang’s retelling has the pigs’ choice of building material reflect their own specific moral failing or success. Browny, the eldest, is a dirty, slothful pig who likes nothing more than to wallow in the pigsty. Accordingly, he builds his house of mud and is promptly dug out by the fox. Whitey, who is greedy and gluttonous, chooses to build her house of cabbages, and the fox eats through her walls. But Blacky, who is both the best looking and most sensible, asks for a house of bricks, the walls of which are able to withstand the fox’s attempts to enter. Blacky is also clever and industrious, and after the fox attempts to break down his doors, Blacky goes to town to buy a big kettle. The fox follows him home, but clever Blacky jumps into the kettle and escapes by rolling down the hill to the brick house. Once inside the house he fills the kettle with water and builds a fire under it. When the fox comes down the chimney, the trickster falls into the pot and is scalded to death. Unlike many of the other Three Pig Stories, in which the villain promptly eats his earlier victims, the fox in Lang’s tale holds the first two pigs captive in hopes of having a great feast once he catches the final pig.
This plot device allows Blacky to rescue his foolish siblings from the fox’s den at the end of the story and for the foolish pigs to repent of their bad habits. The ending to Lang’s version highlights the story’s moral instruction about cleanliness, moderation, and industry and demonstrates one way in which Victorian collectors and folklorists altered traditional folk tales to make them more suitable for children. In contrast, the two unfortunate geese in the version edited by Cundall were not only eaten, but torn to pieces by the vicious fox.
Lang’s treatment of the story also bears a resemblance to variations of the Three Pigs Story found in American folklore. The American folklorist Joel Chandler Harris (1848–1908) recorded two similar stories in his collections of African American folktales. In most of the Three Pig Stories, the villain is trapped by his final victim and boiled or scalded to death. In “The Awful Fate of Mr. Wolf,” collected in Harris’s Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Brer Rabbit dispatches the bothersome Brer Wolf by trapping him inside a chest and scalding him to death with boiling water. Harris’s later collection, Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), includes “The Story of the Pigs,” which is very similar to Lang’s version, except for the number of pigs (five instead of three). In Harris’s telling, the five pigs (named Big Pig, Little Pig, Speckled Pig, Blunt, and Runt) build houses out of brush, sticks, mud, planks, and rocks respectively, and the foolish choices of the first four pigs make them vulnerable to Brer Wolf’s attacks. As in Lang’s version, two of the pigs fall prey to the wolf because of their gluttony; both Big Pig and Little Pig are tempted into opening the door to Brer Wolf when he offers “roasting ears” (Harris 1883, 38–43). And, as in Lang’s telling, it is the youngest and most clever pig that is able to defeat the villain, though Harris’s version departs from the trope of boiling or scalding and has Runt burn Brer Wolf to death in the fire. In “The Story of the Pigs,” Brer Wolf tries to trick Runt into opening the door by pretending to be Speckled Pig and Big Pig, but Runt notices that Brer Wolf has too many teeth and too much hair to be either of his siblings. This echoes both “The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids” and “Little Red Cap,” German folk tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in Kinder und hausmärchen: gesammelt durch die Brüder Grimm (1857).
Both tales collected by Harris show that the Three Pigs Story was well established in American folklore before the twentieth century, and later collections indicate the story was also part of the Appalachian oral tradition. Although Appalachian versions of the story were not written down until the twentieth century, those collected during the first half of the century show that elements from many of the European and African American tales were incorporated into the Appalachian traditions. The fox in James Taylor Adams’s “The Big Old Sow and the Three Little Pigs” collected in 1940 resembles Reynard from Cundall’s story in his use of deception in leading the two foolish pigs astray, while Jack, the youngest pig in Richard Chase’s “The Old Sow and the Three Shoats” collected in Grandfather Tales (1948) tricks the fox into hiding in a churn like Ganderee, the clever goose. A much later publication, collected from Appalachian oral tradition and published by William H. Hooker as The Three Little Pigs and the Fox (1989), follows much the same story as Lang’s version, including the survival of the two foolish pigs. In Hooker’s version the wise pig, named Hamlet, is both the youngest and a girl.
Elizabeth A. Koprowski
See also Babes in the Woods; Hoe Handle, Snake, and Barn; Uncle Remus
Further Reading
Cundall, J. 1856. A Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young People. London: Sampson Low & Son.
Halliwell-Phillipps, James Orchard. 1886. The Nursery Rhymes of England. London: Frederick Warne.
Harris, Jason Marc. 2008. Folklore and the Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate.
Harris, Joel Chandler. 1880. Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings. New York: D. Appleton.
Harris, Joel Chandler. 1883. Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin.
Jones, Steven Swann. 2002. The Fairy Tale: The Magic Mirror of the Imagination. New York: Routledge.
Lang, Andrew. 1892. The Green Fairy Book. London: Longmans.
Ziolkowski, Jan M. 2009. Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.