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By Tina L. Hanlon |
Jan 1, 2008
So-called Jack tales from Celtic and English oral traditions typically narrate an ordinary young man's fantastic adventures. Traveling away from home, with varying combinations of luck, magical help, trickery, and resourcefulness, Jack completes arduous tasks or defeats giants or witches to obtain riches, rescue girls, and sometimes marry a princess. “Jack and the Beanstalk” and “Jack and the Giants” are his best-known tales, but Jack appears in many familiar tale types. “Jack and the Varmints” is like the Grimms' “Brave Little Tailor.” “Jack and the Robbers” or “How Jack Sought his Fortune” resembles “The Bremen Town Musicians” with a human leading the animals. Although some storytellers immersed in Jack tales try to give Jack consistency, they inevitably acknowledge that his personality and circumstances change from tale to tale. He may be an only child, often a poor widow's son, but sometimes two brothers attempt similar quests and hinder his progress. Jack can be a clever, boastful, greedy trickster, or more virtuous like the heroes in European fairy tales. Or he plays the fool, succeeding through dumb luck. In “Lazy Jack,” probably the third most popular Jack tale, Jack idiotically misapplies parental advice about carrying things, and gets to marry a rich girl because she laughs at him carrying a donkey. Berlie
Doherty's The Famous Adventures of Jack (2000) plays with these variations in a metafictional English frame story interwoven with tales of different legendary Jacks from the same family. As in nursery rhymes and folk expressions (Little Jack Horner, Jack Frost, Jack-o-lantern), Jack is a generic name. A similar everyman is called boy, man, John, Jock, Jake, Hans, or Jean in different cultures. Boys named Nippy and Merrywise have adventures parallel to Jack's, as do giant-killing girls named Molly (Whuppie) and Mutsmag. Jack tales spread around the English-speaking world, appearing in writing in a 15th-century English poem and in chapbooks, performances, and literary allusions of later centuries. In the 1890s, the Australian Joseph
Jacobs published some in his influential Anglo-Celtic folk tale collections. Book editors as well as private and public storytellers expunged details considered too vulgar for child audiences. Adults still enjoy bawdy Irish Jack tales, and “Hardy Hardhead,” which includes a head-busting contest with a witch, is recalled fondly as “Hardy Hard-Ass” in North Carolina. In the 1920s, folklorists discovered an especially rich oral tradition of European-American Jack tales among old mountain families in southern Appalachia, leading to many scholarly and popular publications—most famously Richard
Chase's eighteen retellings in The Jack Tales (1943). Like the Grimms' tales, Chase's versions influenced subsequent oral and written variants. Storytellers Ray
Hicks, Orville Hicks, Donald
Davis, and Jackie
Torrence; filmmaker Tom
Davenport; and dramatist R.
Rex
Stephenson have all retold many Appalachian Jack tales in performances, recordings, and writings in recent decades. Stephenson's touring Jack Tale Players in Virginia have performed story theater adaptations every year since 1975, for audiences of all ages. Artists Gail
Haley and Paul Brett
Johnson illustrated their own Jack tale books. Most of these retellers were influenced by their own storytelling families or librarians and teachers who read Jack tales regularly. See also Fairy Tales and Folk Tales; Jack and the Beanstalk; Jack the Giant-Killer; Nursery Rhymes; and biographies of figures mentioned in this article.
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© Oxford University Press 2006
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