The Big Bad Wolf is a fictional wolf appearing in several cautionary tales, including some of Grimms' Fairy Tales. Versions of this character have appeared in numerous works, and it has become a generic archetype of a menacing predatory antagonist.
Disney's version of the Big Bad Wolf
A depiction of the Big Bad Wolf with Little Red Riding Hood by Jessie Willcox Smith
Illustration by L. Leslie Brooke, from The Golden Goose Book, Frederick Warne & Co., Ltd. 1905
Illustration for Charles Perrault's Le Petit Chaperon Rouge from Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé: Les Contes de ma Mère l'Oye (1697). Gustave Doré's illustrations appear in an 1867 edition entitled Les Contes de Perrault. Second of three engravings
"The Three Little Pigs" is a fable about three pigs who build their houses of different materials. A Big Bad Wolf blows down the first two pigs' houses which are made of straw and sticks respectively, but is unable to destroy the third pig's house that is made of bricks. The printed versions of this fable date back to the 1840s, but the story is thought to be much older. The earliest version takes place in Dartmoor with three pixies and a fox before its best known version appears in English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs in 1890, with Jacobs crediting James Halliwell-Phillipps as the source. In 1886, Halliwell-Phillipps had published his version of the story, in the fifth edition of his Nursery Rhymes of England, and it included, for the first time in print, the now-standard phrases "not by the hair of my chiny chin chin" and "I'll huff, and I'll puff, and I'll blow your house in".
The wolf blows down the straw house in a 1904 adaptation of the story. Illustration by Leonard Leslie Brooke.