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posted by [identity profile] wheeloffire.livejournal.com at 08:11pm on 27/03/2006
Perhaps this will add something to the discussion? The supposed original story-

http://www.edsanders.com/stories/3bears/3bears.htm

Seems a pretty straightforward morality play
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posted by [identity profile] clockwise.livejournal.com at 09:28pm on 27/03/2006
Sure, the "Don't be a vagrant and steal peoples stuff" is pretty clear, but that's not often considered the heart of the story.

What is the whole business with "too X, too Y, just right" all about? I don't think this version comes any closer to answering that. Is it just "don't question your lot in life"?
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posted by [identity profile] benlehman.livejournal.com at 01:36am on 28/03/2006
If it was "don't question your lot in life" there wouldn't be a "just right," right?
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posted by [identity profile] ornithoptercat.livejournal.com at 04:03am on 28/03/2006
Possibly it's a warning about being picky. You know, if you didn't waste all that time worrying about "just right", maybe you'd get out before the bears came back.

It may, however, just (or additionally) be a way of adding rythym and patterning to the story, and/or the general significance of threes. Remember, it comes from an oral tradition, so stuff may be in there for the sake of making it easy to retell. An awful lot of fairy tales have stuff like that, almost always in threes, in their older versions - I'm pretty sure The Little Mermaid originally had her come to the surface three times; the 12 Dancing Princesses also has a bunch of random threeness (especially the bit with the trees of silver, gold, and diamond); and I know older versions of Cinderella (or Ashputel) have her go to three nights of the ball before the business with the slipper happens. Speaking of Cinderella, there's something rather parallel in the "heel too big/toe too big/fits just right" bit with the shoe.
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posted by [identity profile] ornithoptercat.livejournal.com at 04:21am on 28/03/2006
Having thought about it a few more minutes: you know that phrase "third time's a charm"? That's what's going on. It's a genre trope, and doesn't have to have any particular extra signifcance in a given story. Sort of like the thing in movies/TV where ALL bags of groceries contain a loaf of French bread, or how Beowulf is loaded with alliterative epithets, or the sea in Homer is always wine-dark... it's the structure and tradition of the medium, a thing that gives it the appropriate flavor and cadences and lets people make mental shortcuts, rather than content as such.
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