ABSTRACT
Jack and the Beanstalk is one of the most popular and widely known British fairy tales, with scores of versions currently in print, as single volumes and as part of more general anthologies1. Its origin in folklore is thought to be ancient but is very unclear. As Peter and Iona Opie point out, a beanstalk reaching to the heavens is reminiscent of Jacob’s ladder in the Old Testament and of the World-tree Yggdrasil in the Norse Prose Edda (1974, p. 163). Despite this, the earliest known printed version is Benjamin Tabart’s History of Jack and the Beanstalk, Printed from the Original Manuscript, Never Before Published, which appeared in a sixpenny booklet in 18072. The Opies see this as the source of all subsequent retellings, and this claim is supported by Neil Philip (1992) with one important exception. Joseph Jacobs’ version, published in 1890, was claimed by the author to originate from an oral narration which he had heard some thirty years earlier in Australia. Having compared it with other oral versions from North America, Philip concludes that it is ‘a lively, funny, supple telling’, much closer to the spirit of the original, oral tradition than is Tabart’s and ‘the stiff, chapbook texts’ which emulated it (1992, p. 8). This claim is significant as stories within the oral tradition tend to carry very different moral meanings from their literary counterparts.
