Ulvehunger
By: Elise Fagerli
Publisher: Cappelen, Norway, 1995
Hardcover
A very, very hungry little girl
Hold on to your red hood! The first pages of Ulvehunger might lure you to think you are going to meet the sweet, little girl from the original Grimm fairy tale. If so, you are in for a big surprise...
Ulvehunger starts with a full page of text, taken verbatim from a traditional Norwegian translation of Little Red Riding Hood. The picture next to the text is also traditional: a mother giving her cute little girl a basket of goodies to bring to her grandmother. The last sentence of the text is little Red Riding Hood's promise to remember to be "good and careful".
The rest of the book is anything but traditional. A fearless, and very, very hungry, Red Riding Hood eats the entire contents of her grandmother´s basket already on the next page, and proceeds with gobbling down the wolf. She then considers eating her grandmother, but ends up just looking at her instead, with the comment "Du er for seig" ("You are too chewy"). The last double spread shows her greeting her mother with a big burp.
Fagerli´s bold black and white woodcuts, with the red hood as the only splash of color, are stunning, perfect for this dramatic story. Woodcuts do not allow for the smallest of details, but Fagerli still manages to portray plenty of meaning just through the different expressions in Red riding hood´s eyes. The title, "Ulvehunger", is lost in translation to English. In Norwegian, it is a term combined of the two words "ulv" (wolf) and hunger ("hunger"). It is used as a word for being ravenously hungry, like a wolf would be - but it has a double meaning, it can also mean to be hungry for a wolf.
The book is out of print, but I found it is quite easily available at antiquarians. A digital copy is also available at the Norwegian National Library, free for all to read. "Ulvehunger" won second prize in a national picturebook competition, no small feat for a silent book in Norway back in the 1990's!
Elise Fagerli was a Norwegian illustrator. She passed away way too early due to a traffic accident, only 26 years old. Because of that, "Ulvehunger" was her only picturebook published.
