Books for Children Raised by Wolves: The Better to Empower You, My Dear!

When my daughter was little, she objected to the anti-wolf bias common to Grimm-based fairy tales. "Don't say, 'big, bad,'" she would instruct me as I read to her. "Just say, 'wolf.'" She had good instincts. The idea of wolves as loner creeps lurking in the woods to victimize innocent humans isn't universal; its narrative dominance has been pushed around the world via the colonization of W.E.I.R.D. (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) cultural empires.

In European folklore before commercialization, the wolf was not always a symbol of big badness. The oldest known variant of the "Little Red Riding Hood" story emphasizes wolves' maternal care. In this version, the girl is an infant in a little red baptismal garment. The wolf is a mother who steals the child to feed to her pups. But the pups immediately love the sweet baby and refuse to harm her, so the mother wolf chooses to let her live, for tender love is as nourishing as meat to the growing heart. In the old tale, the wolf is dangerous, yes, but not evil. The lesson found within it is complex about the relationship between humans and wild creatures, not condescending with the blunt force of stranger-danger propaganda or camp monster horror.

In many Indigenous cultures across the Americas, wolves are admired as teachers of positive qualities for humans to learn. Far from being seen as lonely monsters, wolves embody the idea that "teamwork makes the dream work." Wolves are highly social animals with strong and loyal family bonds. They are excellent, ride-or-die parents and grandparents and aunties and cousins. They love one another with abandon, communicate over long distances, coordinate successful hunting expeditions for the good of the whole community, and can't be fooled as easily as dogs.

W.E.I.R.D. cultures hold up the domesticated dog as a symbol of loyalty, but to whom? Dogs have weak familial bonds amongst their own kind. Although dogs are better than wolves at reading human facial expressions, they perform worse on tests of logic and tend to trust humans more than each other or even the evidence in front of their own eyes. Dogs are good at licking the boots of their primate masters. They are designed for domination.

But wolves? I understand why Victorian-era bourgeoisie daddies, who drove the market-based editing and popularization of the Grimm Brothers' tales, desired to prevent their children (especially daughters) and servants (especially maidservants) from admiring the strong qualities of wolves.

Wolves teach us to watch, don't just listen. Does the evidence before your eyes belie what the man is telling you? Does his behavior match his words?

Wolf mothers and wolf fathers (and wolf extended families) provide for their children without crushing their spirits with dominance. We give to our children an abundance of gifts and then accept, with respectful curiosity, how our children choose to accept those gifts.

We don't punish them for not finishing their unbaptized baby dinner. We thank them for correcting us when we parrot propaganda like "big, bad." We fill their shelves with doorways to the imagination and invite them to follow their instincts along narrative paths of their choice.

Here is my reading list for children raised by wolves. All purchases made on Bookshop support real indie shops in the wild.

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Jean Michelle Miernik is the author of Leirah and the Wild Man: A Tale of Obsession and Survival at the Edges of the Byzantine World and The Grove of Thorismud: A Beauty, a Beast, a Slayer, and a Priest.