In a previous post, I introduced Jack tales and some of their tellers in the archive of the American Folklife Center. As we saw, Jack tales are adventure stories, usually featuring a central character named Jack. Faced with various forms of adversity, Jack uses his wits and luck to win the day. Some of these stories feature magical elements such as giants and unicorns, but in others Jack uses only his brains, his hands, and his meager possessions. As we also saw in that earlier post, the strongest family tradition of Jack tales represented in the archive seems to have come to North America from Britain in the late seventeenth century, and indeed we find Jack tales all over Britain too. More than that, Jack is part of a wider European tradition. Let’s look at old world and new world elements of this tradition, and hear some more tales along the way!
“Now They Call it Luck”: Lucky Jack
One element of Jack tales that seems to have come from the Old World to America is luck; In most tales, Jack is one lucky customer. Samuel Harmon recognized Jack’s constant good luck. In 1939, he remarked to collector Herbert Halpert (1943: 187), “if I was to name my boys over, I’d name all of them Jack. I never knowed a Jack but what was lucky.”
C. Paige Gutierrez (1978) identified three types of luck in Jack tales. Sometimes, Jack’s luck is mere chance. For example, consider Andrew Stewart’s Scottish version of “Jack and the Three Feathers,” which you can hear at this link from the School of Scottish Studies. In this long magic tale, Jack throws a feather in the air and follows it to its landing, there to discover a magic frog who helps him win the kingdom. The feather seems to have been directed by pure chance.
In other stories, Jack’s luck is linked to his virtue. Consider Maud Long’s fantastic tale “Hardy Hardback, or ‘Sail, Ship Sail!’” In this story, Jack, Will, and Tom all try to win the princess’s hand, but only Jack succeeds. I’ll try not to spoil the tale, but let’s just say that Jack’s kindness to a hungry stranger leads to his having just the tools and companions he needs to succeed. Is he lucky? Of course! But without this repayment for his kindness, it’s not clear he’d be lucky enough. Hear the story in the player below.
If Jack’s luck is sometimes pure chance and sometimes a reward for virtue, there are other times when Jack’s luck is helped along by skill and cleverness. Ray Hicks specialized in tales like this–in fact, he suggested to Barbara McDermitt that what most people call Jack’s “luck” is really his ability to make something from whatever situation he’s in, more resourcefulness than chance:
“Now they call it “luck.” They call it…it looks like in life some people is luckier than otherns. But I think it’s just their wit, that they know more how to go at it. That it ain’t no luck or nothin. It’s just the way they watch an how they go at it.”
.Ray’s telling of “The Heifer Hide,” which we heard in our last post, is one example of this. Ray’s version of “Jack and the Three Steers” is another. When Jack is ordered by a gang of vicious thieves to steal three steers, on pain of death, he looks around for tools to help him in his task. His luck goes only so far; all he finds are a short hank of rope and an abandoned slipper. While he’s arguably lucky to have found them, the real fun of the tale is in his cleverness; listeners thrill to hear how the ingenious Jack uses these seemingly useless items to trick a farmer into abandoning his cattle; in this case, luck plus cleverness makes for success. You can hear the story in this licensed YouTube video, and for help with Ray’s dialect, you can read along in this pdf.
Of course, this feature of luck, too, is shared by old-world heroes. You can’t help recognizing Lucky Jack in the protagonists of folktales “The Little Tailor” from France, “Hans in Luck” from Germany, “Three Golden Hairs” from the Czech Republic, “Mother’s Darling Jack” from Romania, “The Three Brothers” from Hungary, or “How the Poorest Became the Richest” from Austria. There are hundreds more of these Jack (or Jack-like) tales from across Europe, which may have contributed to the English and American Jack tale traditions.
The Blood of an Englishman: English-Language Jack
As we’ve seen, English-language Jack is just one facet of a wider European tradition. Jack is a diminutive of John, and folktale Jack thus shares his name with German Hans or Hansel (derived from “Johannes,” German for John) and French Ti Jean, literally “petit Jean,” or “little John.” Both of these are common folktale protagonists. The connections among international versions of Jack have always been understood by ordinary folks who happen to speak several languages; the bilingual Franco-American writer Jean-Louis Kerouac, for example, was nicknamed “Ti Jean” in French, but “Jack” in English.
Similarly, Spanish tales about Juan and Russian stories about Ivan share roots with Jack. Even a unique, iconic character like Pinocchio has some European Jack in him; Folklorist Jack Zipes tells us that Carlo Collodi’s 1882 novel, which introduced the famous puppet, was written after Collodi completed a number of books about “Giannettino,” or “little John,” and was consciously based on his reading of Jack Tales.
However, in other ways, Jack is especially English, and deeply embedded in the psyche of English-speakers. The very name “Jack,” for example, is English. It’s not, as some think, derived from French “Jacques,” or even Latin “Jacobus.” According to the Dictionary of Medieval Names from European Sources, “Jack” instead comes from the Middle English “Jankyn,” a diminutive form of “John.” The Scots language grew from the same Germanic roots as English, so Jack exists in Scotland too, sometimes as Jock or Jeck.
Jack isn’t only a name for a folktale character. Jack Horner, Jack-Be-Nimble, Jack Sprat, and Jack and Jill are all common nursery rhymes. The name has taken many other forms and meanings in English and Scots, coming to mean a man in general (“man-jack,” “jack-of-all-trades”), a worker (lumberjack, Jack Tar), a useful tool (jackknife, hydraulic jack), and a fool (jackanapes, jackass). It often denotes smallness, so the small ball in a bowling set and the small flag on a ship are both the “jack.” It’s also interesting that although the current flag of Great Britain is only a “jack” when used as a ship’s colors, most people still prefer the name “Union Jack” to its more official name, the “Union Flag.”
In short, as a diminutive of one of the most often used English names, Jack suggests commonness and humility, versatility and ubiquity, as well as English heritage. After all, as we’ll see, Jack’s most famous opponent, the giant, smells the blood not of an Everyman, but of an Englishman.
Still, it’s important to note that Jack is “English” in more a linguistic sense than a national one. No one can doubt that Scots Jacks and Irish Jacks were crucial to the American tradition. The very first known collection of Irish folktales in English, The Royal Hibernian Tales, probably made in the late 18th century, contains several Jack tales familiar to Appalachian tellers, including “The Heifer Hide” (“Donald and His Neighbors”), “Jack and the Three Steers” (“The Apprentice Thief”), and “Unlucky Jack and Lucky Jack” (“The Farmer and his Servant”). Ireland’s National Folklore Collection contains hundreds of orally collected Jack tales, primarily in manuscript form, while the online archive of the School of Scottish Studies contains dozens of Jack tales in audio form.
The First Jack? Off-Color Tales and Fabliaux
Jack’s tradition goes back surprisingly far; the earliest known Jack tale is genuinely medieval, and was written down in the fifteenth century. This story, known originally as “Jack and His Stepdame,” and later as “The Friar and the Boy,” was a popular staple of chapbook literature for about 300 years from the late 15th century to the early 19th. Jack is a farmer’s son whose stepmother underfeeds him, and wants to send him into indentured servitude. Jack’s father compromises by sending him to a far pasture to watch the cattle. There Jack meets a hungry beggar, with whom he shares his meager lunch. In return, the beggar offers him three gifts. Jack asks for a bow and arrows; the beggar gives him a magical bow and arrows, which never miss their mark. Jack asks for a pipe, so that he might have music and be merry. The beggar gives him a magical pipe, which compels all who hear it to dance. Jack says that these two gifts are enough, but the beggar insists on a third. Jack remembers the look of hatred that comes to his stepmother’s face whenever she sees him eat; he wishes that, every time she looks at him that way, she will become so flatulent that everyone will hear her. The beggar promises to grant his wish, and departs.
Using the pipe, which causes his father’s cattle to dance along behind him, Jack easily herds the cattle back to their pens, and heads home for supper.
Jack’s father invites him to eat, whereupon the stepmother glares at him:
She stared hym in the face
With that she let go a blaste
That they in the hall were agaste
It range ouer all the place
All they laughed and had good game
The wyfe waxed reed for shame
She wolde that she had ben gone
Quod the boye well I wote
That gonne was well shote
As it had ben a stone
Soon, Jack’s stepmother retires for the night, humiliated.
The next day, a mendicant friar arrives. Jack’s stepmother complains about Jack, and the friar seeks him out in the fields and threatens to beat him. Jack promises that to make amends he will shoot a bird for the friar’s dinner. Using his magic bow, he shoots a bird and causes it to fall in a briar thicket. When the friar enters the thicket, Jack begins playing the pipe. This causes the friar to leap and dance, so that he is horribly scratched by the thorns. Jack eventually stops playing and lets the friar go.
The friar returns to Jack’s father and stepmother. He reports what Jack has done, and the father demands to hear the pipe. The friar, fearing the music, begs to be tied up, and is tied to a post. Jack begins playing, the whole household begins to dance, and Jack carefully leads them all outside. Soon, all the townspeople are dancing. Everyone has a good time, except the friar, who further injures himself by banging his head against the post, and the stepmother, who cannot help glaring at Jack, and suffering the consequences. At the end of the dance, the father is amused, the stepmother is chastened, the friar is bruised, and Jack lives happily ever after.
It may be surprising to many people to encounter fart jokes in Jack tales; most such tales have been cleaned up for publication. But the oral tradition leaves no doubt that Jack could be both scatological and sexual; Vance Randolph, for example, found bawdy versions of Jack tales alive and well in Missouri and Arkansas in the 1940s. These off-color touches speak to a long tradition of bawdy Jack tales that folklorist Joseph Sobol calls “Fabliau Jack,” after a genre of medieval bawdry favored by Chaucer and Boccaccio. In fact, there are three bawdy characters named “Jankyn” (the medieval form of “Jack”) in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, suggesting that the great poet might himself have been familiar with early Jack tales!
“Fabliau Jack” survives in American Folklife Center collections, too. In our last post we heard a story from Samuel Harmon, which despite having no bawdy content bore the title “Stiff Dick.” There are fabliau elements in “Unlucky Jack and Lucky Jack,” which we also heard last time; when Ray Hicks has the farmer insist that his wife kiss jack, other narrators (including Samuel Harmon, who called it “The Mad King”) suggest their liaison went further than kissing. Let’s hear Harmon tell “The Marriage of the King’s Daughter,” in which Jack and another man both have to spend three nights alone in bed with the king’s daughter before she decides to marry one of them; Jack uses a pet dung-beetle (which he calls a tumblebug) to spread dung in the princess’s bed, so she thinks Jack’s rival is fouling her bed overnight!
Of course, the fabliau is only one part of the background of “Jack and His Stepdame;” the story is also a fairytale, or what folklorists sometimes call a wonder tale or magic tale, and these magical elements reveal some of Jack’s deeper meaning. Jack’s act of kindness in sharing his food results in three gifts from a magical donor—a typical fairytale beginning. The gifts include a magical bow, which is a limitless source of food, and a magical musical instrument, which is a limitless source of art. Jack thus returns home with both physical and spiritual nourishment for his community. After the supper and dance, Jack’s father says he has not had a better time in seven years, and throughout the community, “every man was of good cheer.” Jack can keep his community not only fed, but happy.
The importance of this seems to be understood by the characters in the story. For example, since physical nourishment and happiness are enough for anyone, Jack initially refuses the third gift, but the beggar presses him. Interestingly, it is this third gift, the one Jack initially doesn’t want or need, that has comic effects, transforming the tale from a pure fairytale into a farcical fabliau.
It’s also interesting that this tale survives in oral tradition, but often without the flatulence. The Scottish Traveller Duncan Williamson’s version, which you can hear at this link, has a gun in place of the bow, a fiddle in place of the pipe, a moneylender in place of the friar, and no evil stepmother at all. But it’s still recognizably the same tale, about 500 years after its first known appearance.
Fy Fa Fum: When Jack Met the Giants
The next stage in Jack’s development brings him further into the realms of Faerie. The first full tale of Jack’s encounters with giants was printed before 1708. But long before that, we find playwrights repeating a familiar rhyme:
“Fee, fa, fum, here is the Englishman, …”.
– George Peele, The Old Wives Tale, 1595
O tis a precious apothegmaticall Pedant, who will finde matter inough to dilate a whole daye of the first inuention of Fy, fa, fum, I smell the bloud of an English-man
Thomas Nashe, Have With You to Saffron-Walden, 1596
His word was still, Fie, foh, and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man.”
William Shakespeare, King Lear, 1605
This rhyme, of course, is typically spoken by a giant in Jack’s giant-killing exploits, generally known as “Jack the Giant-Killer” and “”Jack and the Beanstalk.” The Nashe passage is especially interesting in that it suggests that “first invention” of the rhyme, and the story it came from, was lost in the mists of time even then.
“Jack the Giant-Killer,” sometimes also called “The History of Jack and the Giants,” is an episodic tale in which Jack travels around, often in Cornwall and Wales, killing giants. Some he dispatches with mere violence, for example, by digging a pit trap and then taking a pickaxe to the giant’s head. Others, he defeats with clever trickery, as when he fools a hapless giant by apparently cutting open his stomach; the giant attempts to compete and, in the words of another chapbook version, “ripped up his own belly, from the bottom to the top, and out dropped his tripes and his troly bags, so that hur fell down for dead.” (Note, too, that in a previous post we heard a version of this very episode, recorded over 200 years later from Nora Hicks.)
In early books, The History of Jack and the Giants is set “in the reign of King Arthur.” This has prompted several scholars, including Thomas Green, to point out similarities between Jack’s exploits and those of the mythical king. In ancient Cornish and Welsh mythology, Arthur slew Britain’s last remaining giants, but in the eighteenth Century, Jack replaced him as giant-killer. Jack’s giant-slaying exploits are strikingly similar to Arthur’s, too, prompting Carl Lindahl to ask: “Has the legendary British king traded his crown for a hoe and become a working-class hero?” It’s a hard question to answer, but the connection seems to have been deliberate on the part of the chapbook’s author.
At around the same time as The History of Jack and the Giants, another tale was making the rounds in the English oral tradition. The 1734 edition of Round About Our Coal-Fire: or Christmas Entertainments contains the whimsical tale of “Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean,” the first known version of “Jack and the Beanstalk.” Interestingly, “Jack and the Beanstalk” continues to be a “Christmas Entertainment” to this day, being performed as a Christmas pantomime all over Britain and beyond. “Jack Spriggins” doesn’t have most of the elements we think of as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” but those were part of the story by the early 19th century, and appear in an 1807 chapbook version that you can see here. The first orally-collected version was published by the Australian/ English folklorist Joseph Jacobs in 1890; Jacobs wrote that he was publishing it as he had heard it told in Australia in about 1860, so we should keep in mind that he was remembering it 30 years later and probably used the chapbooks to refresh his memory.
If “The History of Jack and the Giants” places Jack in a mythical time of Arthur, “Jack and the Beanstalk” is a full-blown tale of faerie, where Jack leaves the ordinary England for an enchanted land in the clouds, in which he slays a giant, and from which he brings back magic gifts. It’s a classic tale that most people know: Jack, who is believed to be a silly and impractical boy, trades his family’s cow for some magic beans. His mother believes he has been cheated, and throws the beans out the window. During the night, a giant beanstalk grows up to the sky. Jack climbs the beanstalk three times, each time raiding a giant’s castle; he steals a bag of gold, a goose or hen that lays golden eggs, and a harp that plays by itself. On Jack’s first two raids, the giant’s wife saves him, but on the third, he is pursued by the giant. He chops down the beanstalk, the giant is killed, and Jack and his mother live happily ever after.
Various psychoanalytical interpretations of “Jack and the Beanstalk” have suggested that the tale is essentially about differentiation from one’s parents. The giant is an evil father-figure who has destroyed and replaced Jack’s true father—a typical Oedipal fantasy. The giant’s wife is a fantasy aspect of Jack’s mother, which explains why she helps him to escape her evil husband. In the end, Jack conquers the evil aspects of his father, and in so doing transforms his mother from a woman who must reject his magic by throwing out the beans, into one who can partake of the gifts he brings back. (I probably don’t need to tell you what the beanstalk symbolizes in this scenario!)
But Jack also has deeper mythical meanings that resonate beyond the psychological. In this tale and the ones that preceded it, Jack’s mythical nature is that of the explorer of other realms, and the slayer of ogres, not just for his own sake but for his community’s. As Charles T. Davis has recognized, Jack is in some senses an “archetypal hero.” Like Prometheus stealing fire from Zeus, Jack finds a magical giant in the sky and brings back his treasures. The first time, he brings back only a finite bag of gold, but on his subsequent raids he carries off apparently limitless resources: a goose that lays golden eggs and a harp that sings beautiful music. These gifts, like the bow and the pipe of “Jack and His Stepdame,” clearly represent limitless physical and spiritual nourishment. When he returns with them, in Flora Annie Steel’s 1918 telling of the tale, “every one was quite happy,” and Jack himself “became quite a useful person.”
In these three early Jack tales, then, we have the germ of Jack’s mythical persona. In “Jack and his Stepdame,” he is a trickster figure who brings back physical and spiritual sustenance for himself and his community. In “Jack and the Beanstalk,” this same theme is made more explicit, since the tale begins with poverty for the family, and ends with abundance. And in “Jack the Giant-Killer,” Jack makes the land safe for his community and civilization, destroying the monsters of the encroaching otherworld who seek “the blood of an Englishman.” Jack is the provider, protector and defender, using luck and cleverness, kindness and trickery, to improve his own life and the lives of his people.
Jack’s exploits with the giants weren’t the only Jack tales published in Britain and Ireland in the 19th century. Joseph Jacobs printed a total of 17 Jack tales in his collections of English and “Celtic” tales; in “Celtic” he included Scots and Anglo-Irish tales. There are Jack Tales in J.F. Campbell’s 1860 Popular Tales of the West Highlands (though Highlander Jack is called Iain), in Patrick Kennedy’s 1866 Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts, in Yeats’s 1888 Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, and in many other British and Irish collections of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s also true that many of the British Jack tales published in that era were examples of international tale types with versions all over Europe. And of course, by then Jack was traveling around the world as well.
On Land and Water: Jack Seeks His Fortune
As we’ve seen, Joseph Jacobs was the first author we know of to publish a version of “Jack and the Beanstalk” based on an oral telling, which he heard not in England but in Australia. Like Jack himself, Jack Tales went out to seek their fortune, traveling to the places where English-speakers settled. When Anglophones crossed the ocean, Jack Tales went with them.
Precisely when Jack Tales came to America will never be determined for sure. Since at least some Jack Tales existed as early as the fifteenth century, they could have made the journey with the earliest English colonists, and since the Hicks family started coming over in the seventeenth, it would be reasonable to assume they brought some tales with them. But concrete evidence for Jack tales doesn’t appear in the American historical record until the eighteenth century; Dr. Joseph Doddridge (1769-1826) wrote that, before 1783, Jack Tales were known in what was then western Virginia:
“Dramatic narrations, chiefly concerning Jack and the giant, furnished our young people with another source of amusement during their leisure hours. Many of these tales were lengthy, and embraced a considerable range of incident. Jack, always the hero of the story, after encountering many difficulties, and performing many great achievements, came off conqueror of the giant. Many of these stories…were so arranged, as to the different incidents of the narration, that they were easily committed to memory. They certainly have been handed down from generation to generation, from time immemorial. Civilization has, indeed, banished the use of those ancient tales of romantic heroism ; but what then? It has substituted in their place the novel and romance.”
Of course, folklorists have sometimes shared Doddridge’s fear that modern sensibilities might kill off all the folklore, but we’ve learned that this rarely happens. Jack Tales are no exception; more than two hundred years after their supposed “banishment,” Jack tales are still being told. Moreover, Doddridge suggests a whole variety of stories featuring Jack and giants, not just the two popular chapbook tales. And indeed, as storyteller Donald Davis put it: “There was not one story of Jack killing giants. Rather, there was a whole set of stories.” James Taylor Adams of the WPA Virginia Writers’ Project collected two very different giant tales, while the Beech Mountain community in North Carolina had at least three giant tales including “Jack and old Fire Dragon.” This last tale is kind of a reverse “Jack and the Beanstalk” where instead of a cloud castle reached by a magic tree, Jack finds the giant in a deep hole in the ground accessed by a long bark rope and a basket. In this tale, the giant’s stolen treasures are three young women, who marry Jack and his brothers! Hear Ray Hicks tell it below–and find a transcript of another Ray Hicks telling of the same tale in the pdf at the link.
Even back in the 18th century, the heartland of American Jack Tales seems to have been the southern Appalachian Mountains, but the tales are found wherever the settlers went, including New York, North Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, West Virginia, Arkansas, Tennessee, Maryland, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. As Doddridge noted, they contain a wide range of incidents, with Jack sailing in a land-and-water ship, seducing king’s daughters, stealing money and cattle, faking his own death, and meeting and defeating giants, ghosts, robbers, unicorns, wild boar, and even Death and the Devil.
Scholars have tried to determine what makes American Jack different from his British and Irish counterparts. After all, in America the British Jack tradition met other European folktale traditions head-on: no doubt the Harmons and others brought German tales with them, which could explain some of the similarities of American Jack tales to the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm. Then, too, in America Jack would have met traditions of Native peoples, and other tale elements brought from Africa. This would tend to reinforce Jack’s role as a clever trickster through contact with characters like Coyote, Anansi, and Brer Rabbit. In a future post we’ll hear a Bahamian Jack tale which clearly suggests this influence.
The German-born, Scottish-trained, international folklorist W.F.H. Nicolaisen believed that British Jack traditions were broad enough that no significant aspects of American Jack are original to America. American folklorist Carl Lindahl, on the other hand, discovers differences in emphasis: American Jack is far less likely to use magic, for example, and relies instead more on cleverness and his wits. He also finds that, while English Jack is often a poor agricultural laborer who is hostile to the wealthier classes, American Jack accepts his place in the social order and often works for and with the wealthy, hoping, of course, to become wealthy himself. Meanwhile, Julie Henigan discovers that in America, Jack is likely to end the tale completely independent of his original household, living in a new place with a family of his own. Irish Jack, on the other hand, returns to his homeplace. These differences reflect the various norms within each community where Jack is found.
Given that Jack reflects the community’s norms and its ideals, it’s interesting that he’s often perceived to be the quintessential member the community, whatever that community may be. Among the Travellers of Scotland, who traditionally lived a nomadic life, Jack is a figure to be idealized and emulated. In a 1979 interview with Barbara McDermitt in Tocher Magazine, Duncan Williamson, a great Traveller storyteller, explained, “Jack was the great man. They looked up tae him. […] They visualized themsels as Jack.” In much the same way, on the island of Newfoundland, whose strong Jack tale tradition you can read about in this open access pdf, Jack is seen as a perfect Newfoundlander. “We always felt Jack is a quintessential Newfoundland guy,” storyteller and theater director Andy Jones told the Memorial University Gazette in 2009. “He always seems to be a fairly kindhearted guy […], a guy who can do anything. He has great survival instincts and at the end he does well because he kind of figures out the lay of the land.”
For traditional Appalachian farming-folk, too, Jack is an empowering example. As Richard Chase noted:
“Through the ‘little feller’ Jack…we participate in the dreams, desires, ambitions and experiences of a whole people. His fantastic adventures arise often enough among the commonplaces of existence, and he always returns to the everyday life of these farm people of whom he is one. There is nothing fantastic about Jack himself, even though he is many times aided by forces as mysterious as those with which he contends. In the series of these tales he meets and conquers, in his way, all the varied, real, and imaginary enemies of a highly spiritual folk, never heroic, but always ready and willing in a modest, dryly gay fashion.”
As if to demonstrate Chase’s points, the late, great Jack Tale teller Ray Hicks, of Beech Mountain, North Carolina, once told Barbara McDermitt in the same “dryly gay” terms:
“Everybody can be Jack. Jack ain’t dead. He’s a-livin. Jack can be in anybody… like I tell em sometimes, I’m Jack. I’ve been Jack. I mean in different ways. Now I ain’t done everything Jack has done in the tales, but still I’ve been Jack in a lot of ways. It takes Jack to live. ”