Blunderbore

The road between Marazion and St Ives used to bend for no good reason. It bent because a giant had walled his farm across the line the king’s highway should have taken, hauling in boulders that ten ordinary men could not have shifted between them, and west Cornwall was still calling the result the Giant’s Hedges long after nobody believed a giant had built them. Behind that wall he slept through the afternoons. A small bad-tempered cur kept the gate, and when a wagon came rattling over the causeway the dog barked and the giant came out.

The Cornish tellers called him Blunderbuss. The English chapbooks called him Blunderbore, and that is the name that stuck to him. What both agree on is the build: a great ugly unshapely fellow, all head and stomach. No teller ever fixes a height for him in feet, which is odd for a giant and probably deliberate, because the joke of him is bulk rather than scale. He is a wall of appetite with a temper on top.

In the chapbook he arrives already furious. Jack has just killed Cormoran, the giant of St Michael’s Mount, by digging a pit in the dark and braining him with a pickaxe, and word has travelled. Blunderbore keeps an enchanted castle in the middle of a lonely wood, and the floor of one upper room is covered with the bodies, skulls and bones of men and women. That is the room he puts visitors in.

Jack fell asleep by a fountain on the road into Wales, having walked further than was sensible. Blunderbore found him lying there, read the lines stitched into his belt naming him as the man who had killed Cormoran, lifted him without waking him, and carried him home under one arm. Then he went straight out again to fetch his brother, because a Jack is too good a meal to eat by yourself.

That errand is what kills him. Jack, awake in the bone room, found a length of strong cord, tied a slip-knot at each end and made the middle fast to the window bars. When the two giants came up the path below he dropped a noose over each head and hauled until both of them were black in the face, then slid down the rope and stabbed them through the heart. In the chapbook his entire career is finished in about forty words. Jack took the keys off his belt and went through the rooms, and in one of them found three ladies hanging by the hair of their heads, close to starving. Their husbands had already been eaten. The giants had left the women there because they would not eat the flesh of their own dead men. Jack handed over the keys and the castle and everything in it, which was the least he could do, and walked on.

The Cornish version is a different kind of story and a better one. There the giant is killed by a young man called Tom, who drives a brewer’s wagon out of Market-Jew and has drunk three or four gallons of the cargo on the way back from St Ives. Tom decides the highway ought to run straight, opens the great gate, and drives his oxen through the giant’s land. The giant, woken from his nap and roaring, tears up a young elm about twenty feet high and strips the branches off it as he comes up the hill, yawning as though the whole business is beneath him. Tom tips over the wagon, slips off one wheel, pulls out the axle with the other wheel still on it, and announces that the wheel and exe will do him for sword and buckler. Then he stands there whistling, which is what finishes the giant’s self-control.

The fight is short and mostly a matter of footing. The giant swings the elm, misses Tom’s head, clips the edge of the wheel, and goes down flat on his face in wet ground. Tom could have pinned him there and does not, because Tom would rather be killed than not fight fair, so he prods him in the ribs with the axle end and tells him to get up. The giant rises slowly, pretending to be finished, edging for the uphill side. Tom kicks his shins out from under him and holds the axle steady, and the giant falls forward onto it and is spitted through. When Tom drags the axle back out he is half blinded by the blood. The giant rolls on the ground like an empty sack, roaring, while Tom cuts turf to plug the hole.

He dies talking, and it is the only moment in either tradition where he is allowed to be anything but meat for a hero. He tells Tom where the gold and silver and copper and tin are stacked in the vaults, and that two dogs named Catchem and Tearem guard them and will let a man pass if he calls them by name. He gives away the land down to the sea and the cattle on it. All he asks is a decent burial and that nobody abuse him afterwards. Tom asks whether he killed all his wives. No, the giant says, they died natural. The turf plug slips out of the wound and that is the end of him. They buried him in the bottom of the valley and put a block of granite on top to keep him down.

Nothing about him predates the printing press by any distance that can be proved. No text of Jack’s giant-killing survives from before the eighteenth century; the earliest recorded edition was dated 1711 and has since disappeared from the British Library, so the standard scholarly text is a Shrewsbury printing from the 1760s or slightly earlier, which Iona and Peter Opie reprinted in 1974. Pieces of the material are certainly older, since a version of the giant’s rhyme turns up in King Lear in 1605, but the name Blunderbore surfaces with the chapbooks and not before. The Cornish strand was collected much later. Robert Hunt first heard the wheel and exe fight from a miner on the floors of Ding Dong Mine, then found it was a standard story with the St Ives nurses and had it again from a farmer at Lelant, and he noted that it circulated only in the parishes of Lelant, St Ives, Sancreed, Towednack, Morvah and Zennor. The ground under the story is real enough. Ludgvan Lese, where the giant’s hedges stood, was the principal manor of the St Ives district and appears in Domesday.

His powers are all extensions of size. He can uproot a twenty-foot elm and strip it one-handed, roll boundary stones no team of men could move, keep a castle no traveller walks out of, and carry a grown man away without breaking stride. What he owns is worth having: vaults of tin and copper as well as precious metal, which is a very Cornish inventory for a treasure hoard. His weaknesses are just as consistent. He sleeps in the open and sleeps deeply. He cannot hold his temper for the length of one exchange, and the loss of it costs him his footing every time. He goes for help instead of finishing a job himself, and the interval is always long enough for the prisoner to find a rope. He comes at the hero with all his weight behind a single swing and he misses. Every telling kills him with the tools that happen to be lying around: a pit and a pickaxe for his predecessor, a coil of cord for him in the chapbook, a cart axle in Cornwall. He is never once beaten by anything a giant would recognise as a weapon.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Blunderbore?

Blunderbore is a man-eating giant of Cornish and English folklore, best known as the second giant killed by Jack in the chapbook tale of Jack the Giant Killer. He keeps an enchanted castle whose upper room is floored with human bones, and he takes up Jack’s cause after Jack kills the giant Cormoran. Cornish storytellers know the same figure as Blunderbuss, a giant who walled off the highway between Marazion and St Ives.

How was Blunderbore killed?

The two traditions kill him differently. In the chapbook, Jack makes slip-knots in a length of cord, ties it to the window bars, drops a noose over the heads of Blunderbore and his brother as they approach, chokes them both, then slides down and stabs them. In the Cornish version, a wagon driver named Tom runs a cart axle through his body during a fight over right of way, and the giant bleeds to death while Tom is trying to plug the wound with turf.

Where did Blunderbore live?

Cornish tradition places him at Ludgvan Lese in Penwith, a real manor recorded in Domesday, where he enclosed his farm with boulder walls that diverted the road running north to St Ives. Those walls were still known locally as the Giant’s Hedges. The chapbook is vaguer and puts his enchanted castle in the middle of a lonely wood on the road toward Wales.

Is Blunderbore an ancient figure or an invention of the chapbooks?

The name belongs to the printed chapbook tradition of the eighteenth century, not to any earlier record. No text of Jack the Giant Killer survives from before 1711, and the earliest known edition is lost, so scholars work from a Shrewsbury printing of the 1760s. Parts of the wider material are older, since the giant’s rhyme appears in King Lear in 1605, but Blunderbore himself cannot be traced back beyond the chapbooks.

What did Blunderbore leave behind when he died?

In the Cornish telling he gives everything away with his last breath: vaults of gold, silver, copper and tin under his castle, guarded by two dogs called Catchem and Tearem, plus all the land down to the sea and the herds grazing on it. He asks only to be buried decently and not spoken ill of. Tom buried him in the valley bottom under a block of granite.

Related Entries

Cormoran, Jack the Giant Killer, Tom Hickathrift, Gogmagog, Spriggan, Arthur, Giant, Ogre, Ettin, Grendel, Polyphemus, Cyclops, Jötunn