chapbook Jack, ‘brisk and of a level wit’, could irreverently best a clergyman as well as
cunningly defeat a giant. He used the common tools of a Cornish miner—horn, shovel
and pickaxe—to dig a pit and decoy the giant Cormilan into it, and after killing him, he
gained the giant’s treasure. Amazing adventures follow hard upon one another—Jack
kills several more giants, releases maidens from captivity, succours a virtuous prince and
gains magical objects, including a coat that confers invisibility, a cap that furnishes
knowledge, a sword that splits whatever it strikes and seven-league boots. With these,
Jack overcomes the Devil himself and is made a knight of the Round Table. A second
part recounts more encounters with English giants, all of whom Jack gorily vanquishes,
their heads being sent to King Arthur as announcement and proof of his valour. Jack
himself ends his days married to a duke’s daughter and rewarded ‘with a very plentiful
Estate’ where they ‘lived the Residue of their Days in great Joy and Happiness’ (Opie
1974:51–65).
Jack, Robin, and the two Toms are true folk heroes who rise from penury to esteem,
and whose stories bear many close resemblances to fairy tales. Each of these tales
became ‘folk-tales’ by virtue of their wide chapbook circulation among the ‘folk’; and
numerous English memoirs—Boswell’s, Johnson’s, William Cowper’s—mention them as
beloved, even inspiring, childhood reading. Some, adapted for nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century children, have been reprinted.
The term ‘folk-tale’ suggests an intimate relationship with the folk, and nineteenth-
century scholars therefore defined all of these minor genres as belonging peculiarly to
unlettered country dwellers. Either as an example of cultural infancy or an artefact of
individual maturation, fairy and folk-tales’ association with children remained
unchallenged until J.R.R.Tolkien disputed the belief that children understood fairy tales
better than adults do (Tolkien 1947/ 1986:31–62). Unlike fairy tales, nearly all folk-tales
enjoy a truly ancient literary lineage. Some folk-tales appear in the Indian Panchatantra
or in the Bible. Other animal tales derive from classic collections like Aesop’s Tales, and
many burlesques and jokes appear in the text or in the margins of medieval
manuscripts.
Children must have overheard folk-tales when they were told in small groups or were
alluded to in theatrical productions, but they first made formal contact with children
when Latin translations of Aesop’s Tales were adapted as classics by monastic schools
and used as textbooks, a function they continued to serve well into the early modern
period.
Animal tales also circulated as part of court literature from the Carolingian period into
the high middle ages, when they flowered in Reynard cycles in England, Germany and
France. From the thirteenth century onward, preachers integrated Aesopic fables into
sermons. It is reasonable to assume that children came into contact with fables in both
of these milieus, even though court and church literary traditions would have affected
different segments of the population. In the sixteenth century Steinhöwel, Luther,
Erasmus and Waldis all prepared fable collections whose contents eventually found
their way into school readers, and in the seventeenth century, La Fontaine’s humorous
and psychologically subtle reworking of Aesopic material became foundational for
European children’s literature; German writers, like Hagedorn, Gleim, Herder and
Lessing, embraced the genre enthusiastically in the eighteenth century, and produced
158 FAIRY TALES AND FOLK-TALES