Fairy Tales: Jack and the Beanstalk

“All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green. ”— Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Jack is one of the most infamous characters in both British and North American folklore: Jack Frost, Jack Sparrow, Jack the Giant Slayer, Jack the Ripper, Jack Russell, Jack of all trades, Jack-in-the-box, Jack-o’-lantern, Jack of Hearts, Jack Bauer, Jack Ryan, Jack Reacher, Jack Black, Blackjack, Jack is a name that punches you in the gut or thrusts a cutlass into your bowels. Jack, Jack, Jack. Jack’s got spunk.

There is even a famous nursery rhyme with Jack as the main character that goes like this:

“Jack and Jill went up the hill

To fetch a pail of water.

Jack fell down and broke his crown,

And Jill came tumbling after.

Up Jack got, and home did trot,

As fast as he could caper,

He went to bed to mend his head,

With vinegar and brown paper.”

The well-known story of Jack and the Beanstalk goes like this:

Once upon a time, a poor widow had an only son named Jack. They lived in a small house and they had a cow called Milky-White. They live on the money they make from the milk the cow gives every morning, which they carry to the market and sell. But then, on one fateful morning, Milky-White gives no more milk.

They decide to sell Milky-White to get money to start a shop.

Jack goes off to the market, where he meets a strange-looking old man who somehow knows his name. The man offers Jack five beans in exchange for Milky-White. He says they are magical beans that will grow to the sky overnight if Jack plants them. Jack is skeptical, but the man offers to give Milky-White back if this doesn’t come true.

When Jack comes home, his mother is furious at his seemingly poor trade. She berates Jack and throws the beans out of the window. Then she sends Jack to his room without food, and once he is gone, she cries. Jack is upset, but he finally falls asleep. When he wakes up, he is surprised to see that the beans have grown into a big beanstalk, which goes up all the way and disappears into the clouds.

Bravely, Jack climbs up along the beanstalk into the sky, through the clouds, where he finds a long, broad road. He walks along the road until he meets an extremely tall woman. Realizing that he is hungry, he asks her for breakfast. The woman warns him to go away, since her husband is an ogre. Jack, however, begs some more, like Oliver Twist, and the ogre’s wife finally concedes and lets him in to her kitchen where she feeds him some freshly baked bread and soft cheese.

While he is gulping the food down, the ogre returns and says:

“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.”

Terrified, Jack hides in the oven, while the ogre’s wife tells her husband he must be mistaken. The ogre leaves the kitchen and Jack is about to jump out of the oven and run away when the woman warns him:

“Wait till he’s asleep — he always has a doze after breakfast.”

After the ogre finishes his breakfast, he sits down and counts his bags of gold until he falls asleep. Presumably he had a long night. Jack creeps out of the oven, takes one of the bags of gold, and sneaks out with it. When he reaches the beanstalk, he tosses it down to his mother’s garden, a long way down. Then he climbs down carefully, gripping the beanstalk tightly and making sure that his body is connected to it at three points at all times, the safest way to make such a hazardous climb.

Jack and his mother live on the bag of gold for some time, because they don’t need much, but eventually the gold runs out. Jack tries his luck again and climbs up the beanstalk. He charms his way into the woman’s house again. She tells him a bag of gold went missing the last time he was there. Jack promises to help her look, but only after she gives him something to eat. Before he could finish his meal, the ogre returns. Jack hides in a large copper kettle.

The ogre smells him and looks for him everywhere except in the kettle. Eventually the ogre brings out a hen, puts her down on the table and he tells her to lay an egg. Lo and behold, she does as she is told, and what is more, the egg is golden. The ogre does this several times, until he falls asleep. Again, Jack sneaks out, grabs the hen, and climbs down with it back to earth.

Back home he shows his mother the magical hen, which lays a golden egg every time Jack says “Lay.” Now their money woes were gone, but Jack is not just a thief, he is an adventurous type, so he climbs up the beanstalk again to see what he can find. By now, the giants are on to him, so Jack sneaks into their house and hides from them.

This time, he tries to steal a golden harp that sings on command, from the ogre.

Once the ogre falls asleep, Jack creeps closer, takes hold of the golden harp, and runs as fast as he can with it towards the door. However, the harp calls out:

“Master! Master!”

The big, bad, lunk of an ogre wakes up and he sees Jack running away with his harp.

Jack climbs down as fast as he could. The ogre follows Jack down the beanstalk. However, Jack has a sufficient lead on the big fella, and when Jack gets near the bottom he calls for his mother to bring him an axe. She does, Jack takes hold of it firmly, and chops at the beanstalk with all his might.

The axe bites into the beanstalk, shredding its stalk. The ogre feels the beanstalk shaking and quivering, so he stops climbing to see what is wrong. Finally, Jack chops the beanstalk in two, and it begins to topple over.

The mighty ogre falls down hard, causing the earth to shudder, and he breaks his neck. The beanstalk topples down after him.

Exulting in his escape, Jack shows his mother his golden harp. By selling the golden eggs, and using the harp to entertain people, Jack and his mother become very rich. As his fame spreads, he meets and finally marries a great princess, and they live happy ever after. Well done Jacky boy.

So what is the takeaway? I guess in this case it is that crime pays. Are we teaching our children it is okay to steal? Perhaps it is okay to steal from a giant, man-eating ogre. Or is it that with a bit of wit and cunning we can wrestle with giants and win the treasure?

Adventures in folk and fairy tales often follow a pattern known as the Hero’s Journey. The hero or heroine starts out in the place he or she has known and been used to all their lives, when suddenly something happens that separates them from the world they’d always known, forcing them to head out into the unknown.

They go to a new place, where almost everything is strange and foreign to them, and for there to be any good story, they encounter challenges and danger. By confronting their fears and learning to overcome these dangers, the hero or heroine changes in some profound way. Once they have defeated the evil, with the wave of a wand or the fit of a shoe, they return to the ordinary world, but they are not the same person as when they left. Similarly, Jack leaves his familiar world as a poor boy, climbs into heaven, confronts the ogres, and eventually he returns with unlimited wealth, a rags-to-riches tale.

These adventures can also be called rites of passage. In Star Wars, Luke Skywalker has to learn how to use “the force” and when he confronts the evil Darth Vader, the dark lord of the Sith cuts off his hand, forcing Luke to train more and come back stronger so that he can finally triumph over evil and become a great Jedi Knight. Less cinematically, but equally real, you have most likely also been through several rites of passage in your own life, like when you had to go to a new school, or had a growth spurt, or started a new job. Perhaps you’ve had to confront evil every bit as malicious as the Sith.

I just hope you came out on top like Jack with his beanstalk.

Many scholars, those deep thinkers and wise men and women who study folklore, believe that the beanstalk in this story refers to the Tree of Life, which is an archetypal image that is found in many places all over the world and has the same meaning from one culture to another. In Hinduism, for example, the tree of life is known as the “eternal Banyan tree, the Akshaya Vata. According to their myth, it alone reached above the water during the great flood, another archetype that pops up in many parts of the planet, and the Hindu god Krishna supposedly sheltered in its branches. In Christianity and Islam, the Tree of Life is the one tree in the Garden of Eden that God forbids Adam and Eve to eat from. Christianity extends this imagery when Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is nailed to a cross, which resembles a tree, leading to Him dying and conquering death and granting those who follow him eternal life. Be that as it may, the next story of the Tree of Life is the Norse version.

It is called:

“Yggdrasil the World Tree”

In Norse mythology, our world, the world of humans, which is called Midgarth, is only one of nine different worlds which also include Asgard, home of the Aisir gods, Jotunheim, the land of the monstrous giants known as the j?tunn, Niflheim the world of frost, Muspelheim, the world of fire, Helheim, the resting place of the dead, Alfheim, the home of the elves, Svartalfheim, the land of evil dwarfs, and Vanaheim, the world of the Vanir gods. A massive tree, the world tree, called Yggdrasil, which is the Norse Tree of Life, joins all these different worlds together.

Yggdrasil grew up out of the center of Midgarth, our world. It grows out of earth, which was formed from the flesh of a giant called Ymir.

Long ago, the god Odin and his brothers fought with Ymir, and killed him. Ymir’s body bled out and his blood became the seas. Odin stretched Ymir’s skin out across the expanse, and it became the ground, and out of that ground grew Yggdrasil.

Around the great tree, the bones of Ymir became mountains, his teeth and jawbone became stones and rocks on the ground, and his big fat skull became the dome of the sky. Odin, being wise, set a little man at each end of the dome of the sky.

Yggdrasil’s branches grew so tall that it scraped the dome of the sky. The great tree grew thirsty and it sent out three roots, three roots which each found three different worlds. The first root reached the holy well of Urdr, the well of the gods. Three women sat together at this well, spinning the threads of the past together. The first woman was round and hearty and called Urdr, which means mother earth. She was the oldest of the three women. In the old high Germanic language she is known as Wort, which became the world Wyrd in Anglo-Saxon, and Weird in English. In Shakespeare’s time the word Weird meant Fate. Weird, weird, I know, but true nonetheless. Urdr and the other two women with her are “the Fates” who wove together the destiny of all people and all the gods. Their threads bind together life and death. Urdr represents the past, and Verdanthi, a young and pretty woman, took those threads and determined the present. When the time was right, she handed those threads to Skuld, an old crone who cut the threads of life, ending it. It is from Skuld, a woman with the power to curse, that we get the word scold. These three women are the fates who wove the destinies of people.

Yggdrasil drank the water from that well, but the tree was still thirsty, and so it sent out a second root. This root found another well called Mimisbrunnr, or Mimir’s well, the well of knowledge and of wisdom. The root drank deeply from this well and gained a lot of wisdom, but the tree was still thirsty.

Yggdrasil sent down a third root. It searched until it felt the cold mist covering Niflheim, the oldest of all the worlds. There the root found the third well, called Hvergelmir. Its water was ice cold. As Yggdrasil drank from this well, Nidhoggr a dragon, and several serpents, began to gnaw at the root.

Yggdrasil felt a sting in its root, and it began to writhe from above, because creatures from the world of man started to dwell in the leaves and branches and limbs of the great tree.

A stag and three of his brothers walked among the branches, and they began to tear at Yggdrasil’s juicy, green, and tender leaves and to strip its bark. The three fates climbed up the tree, bringing water and magical white clay mud, which they poured down its trunk to heal Yggdrasil for a day. But during the night, the stags kept eating.

A great eagle that sits at the very top of Yggdrasil, pitied the tree and hated to see it suffer. Ratatoskr the squirrel heard the eagle crying. It carried those words down the trunk until it reached the dragon Nidhoggr in the world of the dead.

Nidhoggr snapped at the squirrel, but the squirrel whispered to Nidhoggr what the eagle said, and Nidhoggr got angry and snapped again and griped. Then Ratatoskr climbed back up to the eagle to tell him what the dragon said.

All day long, Yggdrasil felt the squirrel running up and down, it heard the eagle’s lament, it felt the dragon’s bite, and the stag’s tearing, overwhelmed by the sensory overload. Mercifully, the tree also felt the cool healing of the fates’ gift as they poured their mud over its aching branches, day after day.

Their mud was holy and it turned anything that touched the water as white as the film inside an eggshell. This mud made the world tree look like it was flocked with tender snow. The tree glowed white and it grew tall and wide, and binding all the worlds together. The tree was good.

Many scholars now think that since we find the image of a big magical tree in folklore in several places around the world, from Yggdrasil in the Nordic countries, to Jack’s beanstalk in the Anglo-Saxon world, to the Tree of Life in Judeo-Christian stories, and even in the Hindu myths of India, that such archetypes are universal and present, if only subconsciously, in all humans.

Scholars, including Joseph Campbell, best known for writing the book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” which famously inspired the filmmaker George Lucas when he wrote the movie Star Wars, which became the highest grossing film yet, until the film E.T. the Extra-terrestrial beat it at the box office, believe that the presence of these archetypes is partly what makes some classic, traditional stories touch us so deeply. They think that when we encounter these images in a story, they stir up ancient memories that lay dormant inside us, and it is as if we are reading or watching a story that already lives deep within us.

May you also, like Jack, find unlimited wealth, marry a princess or a prince, and live happily ever after.

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Bibliography

Fictional Characters Named Jack. [Online] Available from: https://www.ranker.com/list/fictional-characters-named-jack/reference [Accessed 13 February 2024].

Harvey, H.B. (2017). A Children’s Guide to Folklore and Wonder Tales. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.

Jack and Jill. [Online] Available from: https://wordsforlife.org.uk/activities/sing-jack-and-jill-your-child/ [Accessed 13 February 2024].

Lindow, J. (2001). Handbook of Norse Mythology. ABC-CLIO, Inc. Santa Barbara