The true story of Jack and the Beanstalk!
January 6th 2023
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In our last blogpost, way back in the year 2022, we gave you the benefit of our vast knowledge on the topic of British pantomimes. From there we wandered onto the story of Jack and the Beanstalk. The version of this story on display in pantomimes, or indeed in children’s books, is a very pale imitation of the original tale.
The origin of the story goes way back in history, but the version we know now was first written in 1734. It is the tale of a simple country lad named Jack Spriggins who is sent to market by his mom to sell their only cow. Jack’s family is very poor and they needed money to buy food.
The most unbelievable part of the story is not the humongous, slavering giant that appears later on. No! Readers are usually more amazed by how incredibly dumb Jack appears to be. He ends up selling the cow for five beans! Five! I think I could have got at least seven. You wonder why his mom sent him out on such an important job. I know that most parents think of their precious little twinkle-star children as being a lot smarter than they actually are. Even so, Jack seems like the type of kid who would get a high five for leaving the house with his shirt and pants on. I definitely would not want to read his second grade report card. I imagine he scraped an ‘F’ in cow selling.
So genius Jack comes home with his five beans, and mom is not very impressed. She throws the beans out of the window. This seems wasteful to me as there is actually something called a ‘five bean salad’ which might have fed them for a couple of days.
Of course, this is a fairy tale, so an amazing magical scene greets Jack when he wakes up in the morning. The beans have grown into a gigantic beanstalk that reaches up into the clouds above their little house. Instead of taking a few selfies with the beanstalk and posting them online, Jack shows remarkably poor thinking again by climbing up the beanstalk. To his credit, Jack may not have been the brainiest kid on the farm but he did have really good upper body strength. Personally, I could never get halfway up the climbing wall in gym class.
As soon as Jack scrambles to the top of the enormous stalk, he hops off and looks around. He immediately notices a gigantic table, a huge chair, an immense stove, a massive cabinet, a colossal kettle, a vast sugar bowl, a jumbo-sized teacup, a tremendous cereal bowl… Can you tell I am running out of synonyms for big? This is a problem as there are still seven plates, fourteen spoons, eleven forks, nine knives and a pile of at least five empty pizza boxes left. However, being a resourceful and talented writer, I have come up with two options:
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I can tell you that on the way up the beanstalk, Jack got poked in the right eye by a particularly sharp leaf. He was temporarily unable to see out of that eye. All the items above that I was unable to describe, happened to be on his right side when he jumped off the beanstalk.
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I could use every writer’s favorite descriptive word; ‘really’. This is such a great word as it allows you to take an old adjective and give it fresh life. Think back to when you last wrote a story in school. It would have been one of those assignments such as ‘What did you do over summer vacation?’ Your teacher would have already told you that unacceptable answers included: ‘Nothing’, 'Played video games’ and ‘None of your business’. You probably ended up writing something painfully average like: ‘We went to the park. It was fun.’ Your teacher probably sighed and told you to make your description more interesting by adding extra detail. If you were a smart and creative student, you would have asked to go to the restroom or sharpen your pencil. Hopefully this would have solved the problem as your teacher would have been distracted by the kids in the back row throwing erasers at each other. If she did remind you about that sentence, you could have fixed the situation with this brilliant addition: ‘We went to the park. It was really fun.’ For a touch of poetic genius, you might add three exclamation marks. Your teacher would go home to her glass of wine that night with the satisfaction of knowing she may just have discovered the next Shakespeare. So, I could fix my own writing problem by saying that the plates were really massive, the spoons were really colossal, the knives were really immense and so on.
Revising writing is not my strongpoint, so I suggest you choose either the ‘injured eye’ or the ‘really’ solution and rewrite the whole thing yourself. You could do both, of course. That would be really, really great!!!
Meanwhile, let’s return to Jack. Our dimwitted hero has been waiting patiently, looking around this really gigantic room. Or looking around half of it, at least. Suddenly, the door opens (it’s a really tremendous door, by the way.) Through the door stomps a really, really gigantic woman.
We may have been a little mean about Jack earlier, when we described him as ‘incredibly dumb’ and ‘dimwitted’. He certainly was both those things, but he was also pretty darn brave. You or I, would have leapt back onto that beanstalk and scooted down to the farm at record speed. Courageous Jack simply looked up at this impressive giantess with his good eye and asked for some breakfast! It may be, as Jack was so used to his mom doing everything for him, that as soon as he saw a woman, even though she was 35 feet high, he just assumed she was there to feed him. Girls, if you walk into a room and any male there asks you for breakfast, you should feel justified in immediately throwing any really massive sugar bowls or teacups you can lay your hands on directly at his head.
Surprisingly, the large lady does not do this. Instead, showing a nice sense of humor, she warns Jack that he will be breakfast himself if her husband sees him. Apparently, his favorite meal is boys on toast. I believe there is a good joke to be made here involving the phrase ‘human beans’, but I’ll leave you to figure out the details.
Jack decides he should find somewhere to hide. I hate to go back to the subject of Jack’s intelligence, but I am afraid he chooses to hide in the oven! That’s a great place to hide from an enormously hungry giant who loves to cook boys.
While Jack is chuckling away to himself about his clever hiding spot, the giant himself thunders into the room. Although he is undoubtedly a large and ugly looking fellow, the giant shows he has the sensitive heart of a poet. He shouts out these famous lines:
“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!”
There are several things that I find interesting about this little ditty. As an Englishman myself, I had no idea our blood smelled differently. It is a bit embarrassing really. I may have to try a new brand of aftershave. I was also puzzled by the phrase ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum!’ I decided to do some research and visited a number of websites created by professional language experts. They all described it as ‘a nonsense phrase’. Thanks ‘experts’! I’m pretty sure I could have worked that out for myself. I suppose the giant used it so it would rhyme with the next line. On closer examination, though, ‘fum’ does not rhyme too well with ‘man’. I think I can improve our giant’s little poem. Here are some suggestions:
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Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I smell the blood of an English bum!
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Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I can’t rhyme because I’m dumb!
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Fee-fi-fo-fum,
Poems are hard so I’m just going to hum!
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Fee-fi-fo-fum,
Be careful climbing that beanstalk because of the sharp leaves, it’s best to wait until they fall off in the Autumn!
Admittedly, that last one is a bit clumsy but it is good advice.
As a very weird side story to all this, in 1972, NASA sent five mice up in a rocket that circled the Moon 75 times. The mice were named Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum and… Phooey. This is the kind of real-life, crazy nonsense that you just cannot make up.
One last point about the giant’s poem. It is pleasing to see that he is planning to make his own bread rather than ask his wife for it. Jack could learn a thing or two there, I think.
Having taken a liking to Jack, for some reason, the female giant tells her husband that he must be smelling the remains of the little boy he had for dinner the night before. By the way, Jack and the Beanstalk is supposed to be a children’s story. Children must have been made of tougher stuff back then. You can imagine them giggling and asking daddy to read them the bit about the leftover boy pieces again.
The giant agrees he must have been smelling the unspeakable horror of last night’s dinner and decides to spend the morning counting his money. He pulls out a wooden box, and from this box he removes several brown sacks. Jack watches through a crack in the oven door as the giant begins to empty the sacks and count out piles of gold coins!
I have read that these old fairy tales were written in order to teach children the correct way to behave. By seeing what happened to the characters who were rude, greedy, dishonest or disrespectful, the kids would learn the proper way to act. I feel like Jack and the Beanstalk must have missed the editing stage and gone straight to the publisher. You would think any well behaved child would have realized that he was an uninvited guest in someone else’s home and left quietly with a politely whispered ‘thank you’ to the giantess. Well, you would be partly right. He does leave, but on his way, he grabs one of the bags of gold, throws it down the hole around the beanstalk, and then scurries back down to his farm before the giant can even say ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum!’ I believe this is what we would call ‘stealing’. Maybe, being English, Jack is following the grand British tradition of stealing treasure from other lands. We are famous for ‘looking after’ precious foreign artifacts in our galleries and museums. You are welcome, rest of the world!
Back down on the farm, Jack is glad to see that the huge bag of gold did not crush his mom to death. He, of course, cannot resist saying “I told you so!” about the beans. Before his mom can come up with a stinging comeback, they hear a tremendous noise, as the angry giant hurtles down the beanstalk to reclaim his gold. Jack’s mom rushes off and fetches their axe. Luckily she had persuaded Jack not to swap it for some ‘magic pasta’ the week before. Jack, using that impressive upper body strength that we had mentioned before, chops down the beanstalk and the poor old giant is sent crashing to his death.
We are told at the end of the story that Jack and his mom live happily ever after. However, I can only imagine the explaining they would have to do when the local police ask them about the humongous dead body sprawled all over their property. The original story also states that Jack marries a ‘great princess’. Let’s hope that by that time he has removed the body and learned how to make his own breakfast.
This is very informative as recently, two rather high ranking British politicians based their whole approach to economic policy on: sell the cow for the magic beans. It didn't work out too well but we still have the beans and we have rid ourselves of the blame for the methane produced by our cow.