Jack and the Beanstalk

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!"

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.

The story is older than these accounts. Researchers at Durham University and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, using statistical research that compared the evolution of languages and stories, connected the tale type (AT 328, The Boy Steals Ogre's Treasure) (to which the Jack story belongs) to prototypical Western Indo-European languages from more than 5000 years ago, when Eastern and Western Indo-European languages split.

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), 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

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.

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 retribution (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.

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.

Adaptations

Film and TV

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. 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.

Pantomime

The story is often performed a traditional British Christmas pantomime, wherein the Giant has a henchman, traditionally named Fleshcreep, the pantomime villain, Jack's mother is the Dame, and Jack is the Principal boy. Fleshcreep is the enemy of a fairy who helps Jack in his quest and Jack has a love interest, usually the daughter of a King, Queen, Baron or Squire, who gets kidnapped by Fleshcreep.

Literature

Jack of Jack and the Beanstalk is the protagonist of the comic book Jack of Fables, a spin-off of Fables, which also features other elements from the story, such as giant beanstalks and giants living in the clouds. The Cloud Kingdoms first appear in issue #50 and is shown to exist in their own inter-dimensional way, being a world of their own but at the same time existing over all of the other worlds.

Roald Dahl rewrote the story in a more modern and gruesome way in his book Revolting Rhymes (1982), where Jack initially refuses to climb the beanstalk and his mother is thus eaten when she ascends to pick the golden leaves at the top, with Jack recovering the leaves himself after having a thorough wash so that the giant cannot smell him. The story of Jack and the Beanstalk is also referenced in Dahl's The BFG, in which the evil giants are all afraid of the "giant-killer" Jack, who is said to kill giants with his fearsome beanstalk (although none of the giants appear to know how Jack uses it against them, the context of a nightmare that one of the giants has about Jack suggesting that they think that he wields the beanstalk as a weapon).

James Still published Jack and the Wonder Beans (1977, republished 1996) an Appalachian variation on the Jack and the Beanstalk tale. Jack trades his old cow to a gypsy for three beans that are guaranteed to feed him for his entire life. It has been adapted as a play for performance by children.

A children's book, What Jill Did While Jack Climbed the Beanstalk, was published in 2020 by Edward Zlotkowski. It takes place at the same time as Jack's adventure, but it tells the story of what his sister encounters when she ventures out to help the family and neighbors.

Video games

An arcade video game, Jack the Giantkiller, was released by Cinematronics in 1982 and is based on the story. Players control Jack, and must retrieve a series of treasures – a harp, a sack of gold coins, a golden goose and a princess – and eventually defeat the giant by chopping down the beanstalk.

Jumpin' Kid: Jack to Mame no Ki Monogatari was released 1990 in Japan for the Family Computer. A North American release was planned but ultimately scrapped. The game was known in Poland, Russia, and other non-NES countries via Famiclones.

Bart Simpson plays the role of the main character in a Simpsons video game: The Simpsons: Bart & the Beanstalk.

Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster and the Beanstalk is the only Tiny Toon Adventures-related video game released for MS-DOS and various other systems. It was developed and published by Terraglyph Interactive Studios in 1996.

Tiny Toon Adventures: The Great Beanstalk (also known as Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster and the Beanstalk in Europe) is the first Tiny Toon Adventures game released on the PlayStation. It was developed by Terraglyph Interactive Studios and published by NewKidCo on October 27, 1998.

Music

Stephen Sondheim's 1986 musical Into the Woods features Jack, originally portrayed by Ben Wright, along with several other fairy tale characters. In the second half of the musical, the giant's wife climbs down a second (inadvertently planted) beanstalk to exact revenge for her husband's death, furious at Jack's betrayal of her hospitality. The Giantess then causes the deaths of Jack's mother and other important characters before being finally killed by Jack.