Who Wrote The Story Of Goldilocks And The Three Bears?

For some time, this was believed to be one of the few fairy-tales with a known author. In 1837 Robert Southey, the Poet Laureate, published a story called "The Three Bears," which hadn't been printed in English before. Except that the heroine was an old woman rather than a young girl, it was the story we know today. Goldilocks (or the old lady) enters an empty house, tastes three bowls of porridge, and eats the one that is neither too hot nor too cold. She then goes upstairs, chooses the best bed in the same way, and is asleep on it when the owners – the Three Bears – come home. In Southey's, and most modern versions, she jumps out of the window and escapes, though in some older versions the bears eat her.
It eventually turned out that Southey's tale wasn't the original (to be fair, he never claimed it was); an older version was found long after his death, and research has since revealed several sources for the story in old Scandinavian folktales.

Henry Butler