The Three Bears or Goldilocks and the Three Bears is a notable children's bedtime story. It first became widely known in 1837 when the poet Robert Southey composed it as a prose story, collected in his book The Doctor, although it was possibly based on an even older story.

The story was very popular and retold by many others. George Nicol retold Southey's story in verse. According to Southey's story, a copy of which is displayed in Keswick Museum and Art Gallery in Cumbria, the visitor to the bears' home was a "naughty old woman"; later versions of the story replaced the old woman with a girl named Silver-hair. George MacDonald mentions the three bears of Silverhair in his 1867 story The Golden Key. Joseph Jacobs included a fairy tale Scrapefoot in his More English Fairy Tales, identical in every respect to "The Three Bears" except that milk replaces the porridge, and the visiting character is a lame fox. This saw print later than Southey's version, but it may have predated it in the oral tradition; some have hypothesized that Southey heard a tale about a literal vixen and mistook it for a figurative vixen, a harridan. Charles Dickens' "Our Mutual Friend" contains a reference to a version of the story with three hobgoblins instead of bears.

Goldilocks first appeared in the 1904 printing of Old Nursery Stories and Rhymes. The story continues to grow and change. Recent versions include the story told from the point of view of the three bears. The story was humorously adapted into a popular song in 1946 by songwriter Bobby Troup; this song too is often erroneously credited as "anonymous".

Synopsis

The contemporary version of the story tells of three anthropomorphic bears and their encounter with a young girl called Goldilocks (after her golden hair).

A family of three bears (a mother, a father, and a cub) live in a quite civilized house in the woods. One day, waiting for their porridge to cool, they leave the house unlocked as they go for a walk in the woods. While they are out, Goldilocks comes to the house. Curious, she enters and meddles with the bears' belongings, sampling their porridge (eating all of the baby's), sitting on their chairs (breaking the baby's), and then trying out their beds (falling asleep in the baby's). Every member of the bear family has their own unique chair, porridge, and bed, which have unique characteristics. The exact adjectives differ from story to story, but generally the father and mother's beds and chairs are "too hard" and "too soft" and their porridges are "too hot" and "too cold", with the baby bear's porridge, chair, and bed being "just right". Goldilocks is still asleep in the baby's bed when the bears return home. They wake her up, and depending on the decision of the story-teller, either kill her or scare her away. The moral of the story can differ as well; a general theme is that the privacy of others should be respected.