Jack and the Beanstalk: The 5,000-Year History of the World's Most Ancient Fairy Tale

By Fire Pud the Dragon (Mythical Creature Expert and Part-Time Castle Historian)

Five thousand years ago, the Sumerians were recording some of the world's earliest written texts, the first phase of Stonehenge was being constructed (not the famous stone circles we see today), and much of Europe was still in the late Neolithic period. Around this time, researchers believe story types related to Jack and the Beanstalk may already have been circulating.

Before Jack the Knight and the Beanstalk, Book V in The Good Knight series was written, I was asked to look at some previous versions of this famous story as the author is a little bit lazy, or 'didn't have the time to go to the library to find it out for himself'. Sigh. One version from 1807, which is when the story first appeared in its familiar form in print, and in 1734 which is the earliest written version that goes under the rather magnificent title 'The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean'.

Then I started diving deeper into the history and was utterly gobsmacked to find that versions of the story went back five thousand years. In fact, it made my sizeable blue jaw drop!

That is how old some researchers believe the story type behind Jack and the Beanstalk may be. Older than the Roman Empire. Older than the Greek myths most people assume are humanity's oldest stories. Old enough to predate the languages that English, French, German and Italian all eventually grew from. Mind actually blown.

When your child asks you to read any version of Jack and the Beanstalk tonight, you are participating in a storytelling tradition that may have begun before many of the world's most famous ancient monuments, including the Great Pyramid of Giza, had been built.

Beanstalking Research

In 2016, researchers at Durham University and the Universidade Nova de Lisboa published a study in the Royal Society's open science journal that traced the roots of thirty-five ancient folk tales using a technique borrowed from evolutionary biology.

Rather than looking at written records they treated folk tales like genetic material, comparing the story structures, character types and plot patterns across hundreds of cultures and thousands of years, tracking how they changed and diverged as human populations separated.

Researchers identified Jack and the Beanstalk as a descendant of the folktale type ATU 328, "The Boy Who Stole the Ogre's Treasure." which originated more than five thousand years ago in Proto-Indo-European, the ancient root language from which nearly every European language eventually descended. Incredibly this traces back to a time before Eastern and Western languages split.

Now for those not in the knowledge when it comes to ATU acronyms, it refers to the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Index (yeah I can't believe you haven't heard of that either you saddle-goose!) - it is in its simplest form a catalogue of folktale types used in folktale studies. If that ever comes up in a pub quiz...you are welcome!

An unbroken heritage. Five thousand years of parents telling children the same essential story, small boy, magical object, enormous giant, improbable victory, in different languages, in different lands, around different fires. This could be the oldest bedtime story known to humans, or more accurately it may represent one of the oldest continuously told story traditions known anywhere in the world.

The versions you haven't heard of

The earliest surviving printed version appears in a 1734 publication called Round About Our Coal-Fire: or Christmas Entertainments, where the tale is titled 'The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean.' I would have bought this just to find out what the enchanted bean could do!

Jack Spriggins, yes Jack has a surname in this version, is accompanied by a giant named Gogmagog, the same giant of British and Welsh legend who appears elsewhere in folklore as one of the last giants of ancient Britain, eventually thrown from a cliff by a Trojan warrior in a WWE style wrestling match - the Trojan would surely have won an Olympic medal. The giant of the beanstalk story, in other words, was already deeply rooted in British mythology long before he became associated with the "Fee Fi Fo Fum" line in pantomimes.

The 1734 version is actually more of a skit, a piece of comic writing that pokes fun at supernatural stories. It demonstrates considerable familiarity with a traditional tale its audience already knew very well. The story existed long before anyone wrote it down. The 'Spriggins' version was simply making jokes about a story people already knew by heart.

Then comes Benjamin Tabart's 1807 version, the one that introduced the fully moral Jack, where the giant had murdered Jack's father and the whole adventure was justified revenge rather than opportunistic theft. Later nineteenth-century writers, uncomfortable with the moral ambiguity of a boy simply stealing from a giant without justification, reshaped the story so the giant deserved his fate as he fell from the beanstalk and landed with a thump near Jack's village.

Finally, in 1890, Joseph Jacobs published the version most of us know, stripped of the moralising, closer to the oral tradition, the Jack who is a trickster, a bit of a scamp and an unlikely hero who steals and basically murders a giant.

What did the beanstalk represent?

Some folklorists have suggested that the beanstalk may echo the ancient idea of a world axis - the axis mundi - a concept found throughout Indo-European mythology. Some researchers have even suggested that giants in these ancient tales may preserve echoes of much older mythological traditions, so in the olden, olden days the beanstalk was never just a plant. It was a ladder between the world and the heavens. Sitting somewhere between the ordinary and the supernatural.

Interesting theory, I like it.

What changed for Jack the Knight and the Beanstalk?

My Jack, small, brave and best friends with a dragon, faces a beanstalk, a giant, and a quest he has to complete entirely alone. The book set out to be a playful medieval spin on a familiar fairy tale. A fun adventure that parents and children would recognise and enjoy from a new angle and this model has gone down very well with those who have been kind enough to read and review the manuscripts, the template will be used again!

The castle team had no idea we actually were stepping into a five-thousand-year-old tradition. That the story of the small boy and the impossible giant may preserve elements of one of humanity's oldest surviving storytelling traditions. The more I learn about this, the more I think Jack, the smallest knight in the castle, belongs in it completely. He has always been exactly that kind of hero. Small. Brave. Climbing toward something enormous and doing the right thing. I just wish I was there to have met the Giant too!

But will he cut down the beanstalk?

Join Jack's Shield Wall — the free Good Knight newsletter — at thegoodknightbook.com/shield-wall. Updates on Book 5 and the quest to find Jack a publisher. New members this month receive a free Guide to Medieval Insults. Jack Spriggins, we feel, would have appreciated several of them. ⚔️🏰