"Jack and the Beanstalk" is an English fairy tale with ancient origins. It appeared as "The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean" in 1734 4th edition On Commons and as Benjamin Tabart's moralized "The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk" in 1807.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 20201–24). Henry Cole, publishing under pen name Felix Summerly, popularized the tale in The Home Treasury (1845),In 1842 and 1844 Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake, reviewed children's books for the Quarterly "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). and Joseph Jacobs rewrote it in English Fairy Tales (1890). Jacobs' version is most commonly reprinted today, and is believed to be closer to the oral versions than Tabart's because it lacks the moralizing.Tatar, Maria. The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, p. 132. The antagonist is an ogre in some versions, including Jacob's, and is a giant in others.
"Jack and the Beanstalk" is the best known of the "Jack tales", a series of stories featuring the archetypal English hero and stock character Jack.
According to researchers at Durham University and Universidade Nova de Lisboa, the story originated more than five millennia ago in Proto-Indo-European, based on a widespread archaic story form which is now classified by folklorists as ATU 328 The Boy Who Stole Ogre's Treasure.
Story
Jack, a poor country boy, trades the family cow for a handful of magic beans, much to the dismay of his widowed mother. The beans grow into a massive beanstalk reaching up into the clouds. Jack climbs the beanstalk and arrives on a land above the clouds. From the beanstalk, Jack finds a road that leads to a big house, with a great big tall woman standing outside. He asks for breakfast and she gives him some bread, cheese, and milk, but warns that he might become breakfast himself if he is not careful, since "My man is an ogre and there's nothing he likes better than boys broiled on toast." While he is eating, the ogre comes home, with the woman telling Jack to quickly hide in the oven.
Sensing the boy's presence, the ogre cries, "Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he alive, or be he dead, I'll have his bones to grind my bread!" The wife suggests that he is smelling "the scraps of the little boy you liked so much for yesterday's dinner". So the ogre eats his breakfast, three broiled calves. Afterwards he takes out some bags of gold. Counting the gold, he falls asleep. Jack creeps out of his hiding place, takes one of the bags, and climbs down the beanstalk. He gives the gold to his mother, who is very happy. They live well for some time, until it is almost used up.
Jack decides to try his luck once more and climbs up the beanstalk. Again he meets the woman at the doorstep and asks her for breakfast. While he is eating, the ogre returns and Jack quickly hides in the oven. Again the ogre suspects that somebody is there, but then sits down for his breakfast – three broiled oxen. Afterwards he asks his wife for "the hen that lays the golden eggs". He says "Lay!" and the hen lays an egg of pure gold. The ogre falls asleep, and Jack takes the hen and climbs down the beanstalk.
Though Jack and his mother now have an inexhaustible source of golden eggs, Jack is "not content" and climbs the beanstalk for the third time. He avoids the ogre's wife, slipping into the house unseen when she goes to get some water, and hiding in the copper. When the ogre comes home, he once more cries out "Fee-fi-fo-fum", suspecting someone is there. His wife suggests that the "little rogue that stole your gold and the hen" may be hiding in the oven. But when they find the oven empty, she concludes he is smelling the boy she has just broiled for his breakfast. The ogre eats his breakfast, then asks his wife to bring him his golden harp, which sings beautifully when he orders it to "Sing!"
Once the ogre has fallen asleep, Jack takes the harp and wants to leave, but the harp calls out "Master! Master!" The ogre wakes up, seeing Jack running away. Pursued by the ogre, he quickly climbs down the beanstalk, then asks his mother to bring an axe. He chops down the beanstalk and the ogre falls to his death. Jack and his mother are now very rich and live happily ever after, with Jack marrying a princess.
Origins
"The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean" was published in London by J. Roberts in the 1734 second edition of Round About Our Coal-Fire. In 1807, English writer Benjamin Tabart published The History of Jack and the Bean Stalk, possibly actually edited by William and/or Mary Jane Godwin.Anon., The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk, at The Hockliffe Project.
The story is older than these accounts. According to researchers at Durham University and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, the tale type (AT 328, The Boy Steals Ogre's Treasure) to which the Jack story belongs may have had a Proto-Indo-European language (PIE) origin (the same tale also has Proto-Indo-Iranian variants), and so some think that the story would have originated millennia ago (4500 BC to 2500 BC).
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 tale "Jack the Giant Killer"). In "The Story of Jack Spriggins" the giant is named Gogmagog.
The giant's catchphrase "Fee-fi-fo-fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman" appears in William Shakespeare's King Lear (c. 1606) in the form "Fie, foh, and fum, I smell the blood of a British man" (Act 3, Scene 4),Tatar, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, p. 136. 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 typesAshliman, D. L., ed. "Jack and the Bensalk: eight versions of an English fairy tale (Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 328)". 2002–2010. Folklore and Mythology: Electronic Texts. University of Pittsburgh. 1996–2013.
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.Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. "Devil with the Three Golden Hairs, The". Grimm's Household Tales: Annotated Tale at SurLaLune Fairy Tales.
Iona and Peter Opie (The Classic Fairy Tales 1974 p.163) saw instead parallel's with the Grimm's tale 'The Flail from Heaven'.
Moral perspectives
The original story portrays a "hero" gaining the sympathy of a man's wife, hiding in his house, robbing him, and finally killing him. In Tabart's moralized version, a fairy woman explains to Jack that the giant had robbed and murdered his father justifying Jack's actions as retributionTatar, Off with Their Heads! p. 198. (Andrew Lang follows this version in the Red Fairy Book of 1890). The story published by Jacobs gives no explicit justification because there was none in the version he had heard as a child, but it has a subtle retributive tone by mentioning the giant's previous meals of stolen oxen and young children.Annotations to "Jack & the Beanstalk: Annotated Tale" at SurLaLune Fairy Tales.
Many modern interpretations have followed Tabart and made the giant a villain, terrorizing smaller folk and stealing from them, so that Jack becomes a legitimate protagonist. For example, in 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 Henson's disgust at Jack's unscrupulous actions.Nazzaro, Joe (February 2002). "Back to the Beanstalk", Starlog Fantasy Worlds, pp. 56–59.
Adaptations
Film and TV Live-action theatrical films
The first film adaptation was made in 1902 by Edwin S. Porter for the Edison Manufacturing Company. Abbott and Costello starred in a 1952 comic retelling of the fairy tale, produced by Costello and distributed by Warner Bros. Michael Davis directed a 1994 adaptation, titled Beanstalk, starring J. D. Daniels as Jack and Stuart Pankin as the giant. The film was released by Moonbeam Entertainment, the children's video division of Full Moon Entertainment. Avalon Family Entertainment's 2009 Jack and the Beanstalk is a low-budget live-action adaptation starring Christopher Lloyd, Chevy Chase, James Earl Jones, Gilbert Gottfried, Katey Sagal, Wallace Shawn and Chloë Grace Moretz. Jack is played by Colin Ford. A Warner Bros. film directed by Bryan Singer and starring Nicholas Hoult as Jack is titled Jack the Giant Slayer and was released in March 2013."Jack the Giant Slayer (2013)". IMDb. Retrieved 18 November 2020 In this tale, which is amalgamated with "Jack the Giant Killer", Jack climbs the beanstalk to the land of Gantua to save a princess and thwart an attempted coup using a magic crown that would allow humans to control the giants. Jack the Giant Killer is a 2013 low-budget film adaptation from The Asylum. In the 2014 film Into the Woods, and the musical of the same name, one of the main characters, Jack (Daniel Huttlestone) climbs a beanstalk, much like in the original version. He acquires a golden harp, a hen that lays golden eggs, and several gold pieces. The story goes on as it does in the original fairy tale, but continues on past the "happily ever after". In this adaptation, the giant's vengeful widow (Frances de la Tour) attacks the kingdom to find and kill Jack as revenge for him murdering her husband, where some characters were killed during her rampage. The giant's wife is eventually killed by the surviving characters in the story. In the musical, she was blinded by Cinderella's bird friends and clubbed in the head by the baker and Jack. In the film, she falls to her death upon stepping in the tar pit, getting struck by birds and rocks, and tripping where she gets crushed by a tree.
Live-action television films and series Gilligan's Island did in 1965 an adaptation/dream sequence in the second-season episode V' for Vitamins" in which Gilligan as Jack tries to take oranges from the giant Skipper and fails. The part of the little Gilligan chased by the giant was played by Bob Denver's 7-year-old son Patrick Denver. In 1973, the story was adapted as The Goodies and the Beanstalk, in the BBC television comedy series The Goodies. In season 2, episode 4, aired September 8, 1983, [Shelley Duvall's] Faerie Tale Theatre made an adaptation of the story titled "Jack and the Beanstalk." It starred Dennis Christopher as Jack, Elliott Gould as the Giant, Jean Stapleton as the Giantess, Katherine Helmond as Jack's Mother, and Mark Blankfield as the Strange Little Man. It was written by Rod Ash and Mark Curtiss and directed by Lamont Johnson.