meaning of Little Red Riding-Hood, as it is told in our nursery
tales. Little Red Riding-Hood is the Evening _Sun_, which is always
described as red or golden; the old grandmother is the _Earth_, to whom
the rays of the Sun bring warmth and comfort. The wolf--which is a
well-known figure for the _Clouds_ and blackness of _Night_ (in
Teutonic mythology)[558:1]--is the dragon in another form. First, he
devours the grandmother; that is, he wraps the earth in thick clouds,
which the Evening Sun is not strong enough to pierce through. Then, with
the darkness of Night, he swallows up the Evening Sun itself, and all is
dark and desolate. Then, as in the German tale, the night-thunder and
the storm winds are represented by the loud snoring of the wolf; and
then the huntsman, the _Morning Sun_, comes in all his strength and
majesty, and chases away the night clouds and kills the wolf, and
revives old grandmother Earth and Little Red Riding Hood to life again."

Nor is it in these stories alone that we can trace the ancient Hindoo
legends, and the Sun-myth. There is, as Mr. Bunce observes in his "Fairy
Tales, their Origin and Meaning," scarcely a tale of Greek or Roman
mythology, no legend of Teutonic or Celtic or Scandinavian growth, no
great romance of what we call the middle ages, no fairy story taken down
from the lips of ancient folk, and dressed for us in modern shape and
tongue, that we do not find, in some form or another, in these Eastern
poems, _which are composed of allegorical tales of gods and heroes_.

When, in the Vedic hymns, Kephalos, Prokris, Hermes, Daphne, Zeus,
Ouranos, stand forth as simple names for the Sun, the Dew, the Wind, the
Dawn, the Heaven and the Sky, each recognized as such, yet each endowed
with the most perfect consciousness, we feel that the great riddle of
mythology is solved, and that we no longer lack the key which shall
disclose its most hidden treasures. When we hear the people saying, "Our
friend the Sun is dead. Will he rise? Will the Dawn come back again?" we
see the death of Hercules, and the weary waiting while Leto struggles
with the birth of Phoibos. When on the return of day we hear the cry--

"Rise! our life, our spirit has come back, the darkness is
gone, the light draws near!"

--we are carried at once to the Homeric hymn, and we hear the joyous
shout of all the gods when Phoibos springs to life and light on
Delos.[558:2]

That the peasant folk-lore of modern Euro