Jack and the Beanstalk

"Beanstalk" redirects here. For other uses, see Beanstalk (disambiguation).
Jack and the Beanstalk

Illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1918, in English Fairy Tales by Flora Annie Steel
Folk tale
Name Jack and the Beanstalk
Also known as Giant
Data
Aarne-Thompson grouping AT 328 ("The Treasures of the Giant")
Country England
Published in Benjamin Tabart, The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk (1807)
Joseph Jacobs, English Fairy Tales (1890)
Related Jack the Giant Killer

"Jack and the Beanstalk" is an English fairy tale. It appeared as "The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean" in 1734[1] and as Benjamin Tabart's moralised "The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk" in 1807.[2] "Felix Summerly" (Henry Cole) popularised the tale in The Home Treasury (1842),[3] and Joseph Jacobs rewrote it in English Fairy Tales (1890).[4] Jacobs' version is most commonly reprinted today and it is believed to be closer to the oral versions than Tabart's because it lacks the moralising.[5]

"Jack and the Beanstalk" is the best known of the "Jack tales", a series of stories featuring the archetypal Cornish and English hero and stock character Jack.[6]

According to researchers at the universities in Durham and Lisbon, the story originated more than 5,000 years ago, based on a widespread archaic story form which is now classified by folkorists as ATU 328 The Boy Who Stole Ogre's Treasure.[7]

Story

Jack is a young, poor boy living with his widowed mother and a dairy cow as their only source of income. When the cow stops giving milk, Jack's mother tells him to take it to the market to be sold. On the way, Jack meets an old man who offers "magic beans" in exchange for the cow, and Jack makes the trade. When he arrives home without any money, his mother becomes furious, throws the beans on the ground, and sends Jack to bed.

During the night, the magic beans cause a gigantic beanstalk to grow, which Jack climbs to a land high in the sky. When Jack finds an enormous castle, he either breaks in or is allowed in by an unusually large woman who feeds him. Soon after, the castle's owner, a giant, returns home. He senses that Jack is nearby, and speaks a rhyme:

Fee-fi-fo-fum!
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead,
I'll grind his bones to make my bread.[4]

In the versions in which the giant's wife features, she persades him that he is mistaken. When the giant falls asleep Jack steals a bag of gold coins and makes his escape down the beanstalk.

Jack climbs the beanstalk twice more. He learns of other treasures and steals them when the giant sleeps: first a goose that lays golden eggs (the most common variant is a hen; compare the idiom "to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs."), then a harp that plays by itself. The giant wakes when Jack leaves the house with the harp and chases Jack down the beanstalk. Jack calls to his mother for an axe and before the giant reaches the ground, cuts down the beanstalk, causing the giant to fall to his death. Jack and his mother live happily ever after with the riches that Jack stole.

Origins

In Walter Crane's woodcut the harp reaches out to cling to the vine

"The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean" was published in the 1734 second edition of Round About Our Coal-Fire.[1] In 1807, Benjamin Tabart published The History of Jack and the Bean Stalk, but the story is certainly older than these accounts. According to researchers at Durham University and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, the story originated more than 5,000 years ago.[8]

In some versions of the tale, the giant is unnamed, but many plays based on it name him Blunderbore. (One giant of that name appears in the 18th-century "Jack the Giant Killer".) In "The Story of Jack Spriggins" the giant is named Gogmagog.

The giant's cry "Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman" appears in William Shakespeare's early-17th-century King Lear in the form "Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man." (Act 3, Scene 4),[9] and something similar also appears in "Jack the Giant Killer".

Analogies

"Jack and the Beanstalk" is an Aarne-Thompson tale-type 328, The Treasures of the Giant, which includes the Italian "Thirteenth" and the French "How the Dragon was Tricked" tales. Christine Goldberg argues that the Aarne–Thompson system is inadequate for the tale because the others do not include the beanstalk, which has analogies in other types[10] (a possible reference to the genre anomaly.)[11]

The Brothers Grimm drew an analogy between this tale and a German fairy tale, "The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs". The devil's mother or grandmother acts much like the giant's wife, a female figure protecting the child from the evil male figure.[12]

"Jack and the Beanstalk" is unusual in that the hero, although grown, does not marry at the end but in some versions, returns to his mother. In other versions he is said to have married a princess. This is found in few other tales, such as some variants of "Vasilisa the Beautiful".[13]

The beanstalk is reminiscent of the ancient Northern European belief in a world tree connecting Earth to Heaven.

Controversy

The original story portrays a "hero" gaining the sympathy of a man's wife, hiding in his house, robbing, and finally killing him. In Tabart's moralised version, a fairy woman explains to Jack that the giant had robbed and killed his father justifying Jack's actions as retribution.[14] (Andrew Lang follows this version in the Red Fairy Book of 1890.)

Jacobs gave no justification because there was none in the version he had heard as a child and maintained that children know that robbery and murder are wrong without being told in a fairy tale, but did give a subtle retributive tone to it by making reference to the giant's previous meals of stolen oxen and young children.[15]

Many modern interpretations have followed Tabart and made the giant a villain, terrorising smaller folk and stealing from them, so that Jack becomes a legitimate protagonist. For example, the 1952 film starring Abbott and Costello the giant is blamed for poverty at the foot of the beanstalk, as he has been stealing food and wealth and the hen that lays golden eggs originally belonged to Jack's family. In other versions it is implied that the giant had stolen both the hen and the harp from Jack's father. Brian Henson's 2001 TV miniseries Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story not only abandons Tabart's additions but vilifies Jack, reflecting Jim Henson's disgust at Jack's unscrupulous actions.[16]

Film adaptations

Jack and the Beanstalk (1917)

Other adaptations

See also

References

  1. 1 2 Round About Our Coal Fire, or Christmas Entertainments. J.Roberts. 1734. pp. 35–48. 4th edition On Commons
  2. Tabart, The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk. in 1807 introduces a new character, a fairy who explains the moral of the tale to Jack (Matthew Orville Grenby, "Tame fairies make good teachers: the popularity of early British fairy tales", The Lion and the Unicorn 30.1 (January 2006:1–24).
  3. In 1842 and 1844 Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake, reviewed children's books for the Quarterly Review (volumes 71 and 74), recommending a list of children's books, headed by "The House [sic] Treasury, by Felix Summerly, including The Traditional Nursery Songs of England, Beauty and the Beast, Jack and the Beanstalk, and other old friends, all charmingly done and beautifully illustrated." (noted by Geoffrey Summerfield, "The Making of The Home Treasury", Children's Literature 8 (1980:35–52).
  4. 1 2 Joseph Jacobs (1890). English Fairy Tales. London: David Nutt. pp. 59–67, 233.
  5. Maria Tatar, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, p. 132. ISBN 0-393-05163-3
  6. "The Folklore Tradition of Jack Tales". The Center for Children's Books. Graduate School of Library and Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 15 Jan 2004. Retrieved 11 June 2014.
  7. BBC. "Fairy tale origins thousands of years old, researchers say". BBC News. BBC. Retrieved 20 January 2016.
  8. BBC. "Fairy tale origins thousands of years old, researchers say". BBC News. BBC. Retrieved 20 January 2016.
  9. Tatar, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, p. 136.
  10. Goldberg, Christine. "The composition of Jack and the beanstalk". Marvels and Tales. Retrieved 2011-05-28.
  11. D. L. Ashliman, ed. "Jack and the Beanstalk: eight versions of an English fairy tale (Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 328)". 2002–2010. Folklore and Mythology: Electronic Texts. University of Pittsburgh. 1996–2013.
  12. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, "The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs", Grimm's Fairy Tales.
  13. Maria Tatar, Off with Their Heads! p. 199. ISBN 0-691-06943-3
  14. Tatar, Off with Their Heads! p. 198.
  15. Joseph Jacobs, Notes to "Jack and the Beanstalk", English Fairy Tales.
  16. Joe Nazzaro, "Back to the Beanstalk", Starlog Fantasy Worlds, February 2002, pp. 56–59.
  17. http://www.bleedingcool.com/2013/08/21/exclusive-lots-of-details-of-disneys-unannounced-animated-film-giants
  18. Barbera, Joseph (1994). My Life in "Toons": From Flatbush to Bedrock in Under a Century. Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing. pp. 162–65. ISBN 1-57036-042-1.
  19. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1351685/
  20. "Tom and Jerry's Giant Adventure Blu-ray". Blu-ray.com. April 25, 2013. Retrieved 2013-04-25.
  21. Jack and the wonder beans (Book, 1996). [WorldCat.org]. Retrieved on 2013-07-29.
  22. Jack and the Beanstalk Slots. [SlotsForMoney.com]. Retrieved on 2014-09-18.

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