When deciding what to write for this project, I wanted to pick a topic that combined a well-known motif of fairy tales with the core learning objectives of this course. This led me to seek to examine the role of the wolf in a variety of tales as a metaphor for lessons for children and adults alike. The dual meaning to be found in these tales fascinated me and I felt compelled to unearth the darker and more risqué messages within the stories. We all know the simple moral lesson to be learned from confronting a wolf that seeks to test children and their ability to follow instructions. This is what we find in versions from Perrault and Grimm. Through the analysis of the oral folktale versions of these stories, I found a hidden and much more mysterious backstory. The sexual awakening Red and the carnivorous nature of the wolf in the older versions lead to a totally different way of interpreting the intent of the tales. I found the wide spectrum of fairy tale tropes and archetypes found in these tales to be both perfect for examination through the course objectives as well as eye-opening in terms of finding deeper meaning in a seemingly simple tale. These tales, in some combination, all contain themes discussed in this course; such as the maid-mother-crone spectrum, the woods as a liminal and mysterious space, trials and tests, sexual maturation, heroic rescue, and anthropomorphism. Though I found connections between all three tales, I felt Little Red Riding Hood was somehow separate from the other two and I struggled to incorporate those two tales fully into the discussion around the psychoanalytical analysis in Red Riding Hood. If I had it to do over again, I may have searched for tales that included the maturation or predation of a young maiden figure as the central connection. Though I feel, in retrospect, a somewhat incomplete connectivity of these tales to one another, I still learned a tremendous amount about the evolution of fairy tales in a socio-historical context and further developed the tools for analysis that we focused on in the class.