Before Goldilocks: The Three Bears Tried to Burn a Woman Alive

Goldilocks made the Three Bears cute. The original story was anything but.

Most people know Goldilocks and the Three Bears as a harmless children's fairy tale about a little girl who enters the home of three bears, eats their porridge, sits in their chairs and sleeps in their beds. But the original Three Bears story was not about Goldilocks at all.

The earliest recorded written version of The Three Bears dates to 1831, when Eleanor Mure handwritten and illustrated the story as a birthday present for her young nephew, Horace Broke. Her version featured an old woman, not Goldilocks. The bears were not Papa Bear, Mama Bear and Baby Bear, and the story did not end with a frightened little girl simply running away.

Eleanor Mure's Three Bears try to punish the old woman by throwing her onto a fire. When she will not burn, they put her into water. When she will not drown, they finally throw her onto St. Paul's churchyard steeple. Mure described the story as a "celebrated nursery tale," suggesting that the Three Bears story was already being told before she recorded it in 1831.

Six years later, Robert Southey published The Story of the Three Bears in 1837. Southey also used an old woman as the intruder. Over the following decades, however, the story changed dramatically. The old woman became a young girl, the bears became a family, and eventually the girl acquired the golden hair and name recognized around the world: Goldilocks.

This episode follows Goldilocks and the Three Bears backward, from the modern children's story to the strange and much harsher versions that came before it. Along the way, we look at Eleanor Mure's 1831 manuscript, Robert Southey's 1837 version, the transformation of the Three Bears into a family, and how Goldilocks herself was gradually inserted into the story.

But the larger question is about the bear. How did an animal historically feared, hunted, displayed, used in heraldry and represented as a symbol of power become one of childhood's most comforting characters?

From the Three Bears and Goldilocks to teddy bears, Winnie-the-Pooh, Paddington Bear, Yogi Bear, Gentle Ben, Baloo, the Care Bears and the Berenstain Bears, popular culture transformed the bear into a friend, protector and children's companion. Yet movies such as Grizzly, The Edge, Backcountry and The Revenant continue to present the other bear: powerful, unpredictable and dangerous.

The trail even leads to Theodore Roosevelt and Germany. In 1902, Roosevelt's refusal t