For those with only a marginal interest in Arthurian literature, nothing much happened between Malory and Tennyson. More clued-up buffs may recall Spenser, Purcell and Dryden, Wagner and (rather dubiously) Shakespeare.
But not all Arthurian heroes and villains owe their popular status to these greats of the literary world, for in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Tom, Jack and diverse adversaries were the once-upon-a-time protagonists who dominated The Matter of Britain.
Who were their literary mid-wives? Step forward Richard Johnson, John White, John Cotton and Joshua Eddowes, names which should resonate as much as Nennius, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chrétien de Troyes. Nor should we forget Iona and Peter Opie, who made these tales once again available to the general public in the 20th century.
Tom Thumb
The earliest surviving text of a popular fairy tale in English is The History of Tom Thumbe, printed by Richard Johnson in London in 1621, though earlier editions almost certainly existed (Opie and Opie 1975: 30). The first part of the title runs
The History of Tom Thumbe, the | Little, for his small stature surnamed, |King ARTHVRS Dwarfe…
and capitalised on a traditional character, a nursery bogey, by linking him with King Arthur, perhaps for the first time. The first sentence begins,
“In the old time, when King Arthur ruled this land, the World was in a better frame then it is now: for then old plainnesse and civill society were companions for all companies…”
King Arthur’s time was clearer closer to the egalitarian commonwealth that many hoped would follow the Civil War that was to come. This golden age, however, may not be to present tastes, for then “learning was [scarce], and the chiefest discipline in the world was Martiall activitie.”
One of King Arthur’s councillors was “a plaine Plowman” called Thomas of the Mountaine. His wife being barren (assuming the fault is hers) he decides they should consult the prophet Merlin, who, apparently, is more a devil or spirit than a man. Merlin’s character reference describes him as
“cunning in all Arts and Professions, all sciences, secrets and discoveries, a conjurer, an inchanter, a charmer, hee consorts with Elves and Fayries, a Commaunder of Goblins, and a worker of Night-wonders: hee can shew the secrets of Nature, calculate childrens Birthes…”
Thomas’ wife leaves early next morning and before sunrise comes to old Merlin’s cave, in reality the hollow trunk of a blasted oak all overgrown with withered moss. She finds Merlin with his ebony staff, mumbling incantation spells and making characters in the sand. Merlin delivers an “Ænygma, or mysticall Riddle” which promises her, within three months, a premature “shapelesse child … No bigger then thy Husbands Thumbe” which “shall have life, but substance not”.
Merlin’s oracle comes true, and at the child’s birth the midwife is the Queen of the Fairies, with attendant elves and dryads. In less than four minutes he reaches manhood. An outfit is provided by the Fairy Queen who, as his godmother, gifts him the ability to fast forever without any sustenance, a quality which comes in handy whenever he is bullied by his contemporaries.
There follows a run of adventures: Tom defeats his bullies with a miraculous trick, gets cooked in a black pudding (consequently called ‘Tom Thumbs’ from then on), gets swallowed by his mother’s cow and then evacuated in a cowpat, swallowed again by a giant, vomited into the sea and then swallowed finally by a fish. He eventually sees the light of day after the fish is presented to King Arthur’s Table, whereupon he is promptly made the King’s dwarf.
Tom entertains the court so well that he is given leave to take money home to his parents. All he manages is three-pence, taking two days to travel three-quarters of a mile. After his return to court, his Fairy Godmother bestows on him four enchanted gifts: a hat which allows him to know anything anywhere, a ring of invisibility, a girdle or belt to change shape and shoes to transport him anywhere. These magical objects however do not stop him being affrighted by a lady’s sneeze and becoming “troubled with a great Palsie”, and only the chief physician to Twaddell, King of the Pygmies, is able to cure him.
Away from court he next has a boasting match with the giant Garagantua (Rabelais’ Gargantua) over who can achieve the most extreme feats. When the giant loses his temper at being rated no better than a murderer, Tom paralyses him with an enchantment. Finally, he entertains King Arthur with accounts of his various encounters, though without a “happily ever after” formula the way is left open for further possible exploits.
Apart from its intrinsic interest as an early fairy tale, The History‘s use of an Arthurian setting is noteworthy when the monarch could so easily have been anonymous and the period sometime in the indeterminate past. Perhaps having Arthur’s wizard as a principal character was instrumental in transferring the action to Arthur’s court. Possibly the conceit that this was a historical account meant that including the most famous king in Britain’s mythical history (“myth-story” we could term it, perhaps) was the only option open, whether to Richard Johnson or his source.
Jack the Giant killer
Another character whose story’s beginning utilises King Arthur’s reign as a once-upon-a-time equivalent is Jack, “commonly called the Giant Killer” according to Palgrave (Opie & Opie 1975: 47). The Opies note that the earliest-known appearance of Jack’s tale (which in this form was never recorded in English oral tradition) was in the second of two parts in 1711, printed by John White of Newcastle. The no longer extant first part (the second has now also disappeared) of Jack and the Gyants appeared some time before this date (possibly around 1707 or 1708). Luckily an edition by Joshua Eddowes and John Cotton, printed in Shrewsbury in the mid-18th century, probably preserves the 1711 text in its entirety, to be later re-published by the Opies as The History of Jack and the Giants.
The first part begins with the by now familiar scenario:
“In the Reign of King Arthur, near the Lands-End of England, namely the County of Cornwall, there lived a wealthy Farmer, who had one only Son, commonly known by the Name of JACK the GIANT-KILLER.”
As with Tom, Jack was a generic name for a common fellow (as a glance at any edition of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable will soon make clear), and the first paragraph soon establishes that this Everyman lives by his wit rather than relying on brawn.
A cave in St Michael’s Mount (“the Mount of Cornwall“) was inhabited by a giant, eighteen feet high and three yards around, who terrorised the neighbourhood by feasting on cattle, sheep and pigs. Jack is promised all the giant’s treasure if he destroys the monster.
At dawn he blows on a horn, which not unnaturally causes the enraged giant to rush out, straight into a pit Jack had prepared earlier. After a joke about no longer being the giant’s breakfast, Jack dispatches the monster with a blow of a pickaxe, and the pit becomes a grave.
As well as the treasure, the local magistrates dub him the Giant-Killer and present him with a sword and a belt with, in letters of gold, the legend
Here’s the right valiant Cornish Man, | Who slew the Giant Cormilan.
Somewhere in the West of England, en route to a Wales reputedly infested by giants Jack is captured whilst asleep by the owner of a castle in a lonesome wood. This is a giant called Blunderboar who recognises Jack from his belt. There is some gruesome humour about body parts and monstrous diets before Blunderboar sets off to fetch another giant. Luckily the upper room which is Jack’s prison contains the requisite ropes to throw over and throttle the returning giants, who are then slain with the sword. Three ladies, tied up by their hair, are rescued before Jack continues on his journey.
Welsh giants were renowned, in England at any rate, for their “private and secret Malice”, so the two-headed Welsh ogre Jack next encounters puts on a show of hospitality at his castle. Jack sensibly puts a beam of wood into his bed at night, and from a dark corner of his room witnesses the giant clubbing his presumed guest to death. Next morning Jack claims he felt nothing untoward, but secretly disposes of a breakfast of hasty-pudding in a hidden leather bag. With a large knife he rips open the bag and out tumbles the pudding.
The giant cries out, Cotsplut, hur can do that Trick hurself, with the result that, having ripped open his own belly, “out dropt his Tripes and Trolly-bubs, so that hur fell down dead.”
With these three exploits behind him, Jack now encounters King Arthur’s son, who has foolishly given away his entire riches discharging the debts of a corpse which had been arrested for money owing to creditors. Impressed by such generosity, Jack offers his services to the penniless King’s Son. Jack tricks a three-headed giant into allowing himself to be locked into his own vault by saying that the King’s Son had arrived with an invincible army.
After wining, dining and resting with the King’s Son in the trembling giant’s castle, Jack asks – as a reward for his services to the duped giant – for “the old rusty Sword, Coat and Slippers” at the giant’s bed-head. These, together with a cap, are no doubt related to Tom Thumb’s enchanted gifts: they are a coat of invisibility, a cap of knowledge, a sword of incredible sharpness and shoes of extraordinary swiftness.
Jack is able to use the magic objects to aid the King’s Son in his quest to free a lady of evil spirits, and for his good service he is made one of the Knights of the Round Table at the court of King Arthur.
While all these adventures form Part One of Jack’s history, Part Two is much the same if rather more tedious due to the invincibility of Jack’s magic objects. Lords and ladies are rescued, riches are liberated, giants with wonderful names like Thunderdel and Galigantus are dispatched with much black humour (one has his nose cut off and then, with Jack’s sword up his fundament, complains of the gripes), and their heads cut off and sent to King Arthur.
Finally, Jack is granted a large estate by King Arthur and, having married a duke’s daughter, “he and his Lady lived the Residue of their Days in great Joy and Happiness”.
The material of the second part of The History of Jack and the Giants is markedly different from the first. There is more Rabelaisian humour but also some doubling of incidental details from the first part. The sending of giant’s heads to King Arthur (a feature which does not figure in the first part) suggests familiarity with the conventions of medieval Arthurian literature rather than a remnant of folk re-telling, as does the use of the name Galigantus (Coghlan, without citing his references, tells us Galegantis is the name of Lancelot’s maternal grandfather and also the name of one of Arthur’s knights).
The unsatisfactory employment of magic in the final episode, which lacks the logic of the best-told fairytales, looks forward to the self-conscious and equally clumsy use of the supernatural by Horace Walpole in The Castle of Otranto of 1764 (Bleiler 1966). Acknowledged as the first Gothick novel, The Castle of Otranto‘s atmosphere seems to be prefigured in the description of the events at the Castle of Galigantus, the last giant that Jack vanquishes, with its old conjuror, duke’s daughter transformed into a white hind, and dangerous guardian griffins.
English oral tradition and literature
The History of Tom Thumbe is remarkable for preserving an Arthurian setting which, by the early 17th century, was becoming less fashionable. William Rowley’s play The Birth of Merlin is its exact contemporary (c 1620, though not published till 1662, which leads me to wonder if one influenced the other), yet of their types both stand almost alone in English literature of the time, perhaps reflecting an absence of Arthurian lore in England. Bob Stewart states that, “with one or two rare exceptions, Arthurian and Merlin legends play no part whatsoever in English folk tradition… Arthur and his knights are conspicuously absent from English oral lore, despite (rather than because of) their vast presence in literature” (Stewart 1989: 27).
Things are no better a century later. “The first half of the eighteenth century marks the low ebb of Arthur’s literary fortunes,” notes Richard Barber (1990: 145). “In the period 1700-1750 there is no work of any note whatsoever on the Arthurian legends.” And yet Arthur’s reign can still stand in for olden times, not only in The History of Jack and the Giants but also in the 18th-century chapbook tale The King of Colchester’s Daughters which begins, “Long before Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table…”
However, “When Jack tales were rewritten for refined sensibilities later in the 18th and 19th centuries, the crudity of their gory killings disappeared [and] King Arthur faded away” (Bottigheimer 2000: 267-8). When Arthuriana becomes popular again, the more obviously fantasy elements, like the giants in Tom Thumb and Jack the Giant-Killer, get marginalised. “The Giant [became] a geographically unlocalizable oaf, reachable only by the magic of a bean that grew endlessly heavenward,” Bottigheimer notes, and in William Godwin’s The History of Jack and the Bean-Stalk (1807, republished by the Opies), the tale begins, ominously, “In the days of King Alfred …”
References
• Richard Barber (1990). King Arthur: Hero and Legend (Boydell Press).
• Ruth B Bottigheimer. “Jack Tales” in Jack Zipes ed (2000), The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (Oxford University Press) 266-268.
• Ronan Coghlan (1991). The Encyclopaedia of Arthurian Legends (Element Books).
• E F Bleiler ed (1966). Three Gothic Novels (Dover Publications).
• Iona and Peter Opie (1974). The Classic Fairy Tales (Oxford University Press).
• R J Stewart. “The Birth of Merlin” in William Shakespeare attrib & William Rowley (1989). The Birth of Merlin: or, The Childe hath found his Father (Element Books).
First published in Pendragon, the journal of the Pendragon Society, Vol XXXIII No 1, Autumn 2005: 30-33. The theme for this issue was ‘Heroes & Villains’.
Pendragonry 