Jack the Giant Killer

The ground on the Mount looked solid enough in the half dark. Jack had spent a whole winter night on it with a shovel and a pickaxe, throwing wet earth over his shoulder until the pit was twenty-two feet deep and nearly as wide, and then he had laid long sticks across the mouth of it, straw over the sticks, and a scattering of loose mould over the straw. At first light he set a horn to his lips and blew. The noise went up the side of the hill and into the cave where the giant slept.

Cornwall had been feeding that giant for years. He kept the Mount, he was eighteen feet tall in the versions the Opies printed and twenty-seven in a Falkirk chapbook of 1787, and he measured about three yards round the waist. When he wanted food he waded over to the mainland and helped himself, carrying half a dozen oxen away on his back at a time and tying sheep and hogs round his middle like a bunch of bandoliers. Villages emptied at the sight of him. The magistrates had been sitting in the town hall arguing about the problem for a long while when a farmer’s boy walked in and asked what the reward would be.

The giant came out roaring about broiling Jack for his breakfast, and got three or four words further before the ground gave way. The fall shook the foundations of the Mount. Jack stood on the far lip and asked him, pleasantly, how the breakfast plan was coming along, kept him there a while for the pleasure of it, then leaned over and hit him on the crown of the head with the pickaxe. He filled the pit in on top of him and went to look for the treasure in the cave. The magistrates gave him a sword and an embroidered belt with two lines worked in gold thread, naming him the right valiant Cornish man who slew the giant Cormoran. The giant’s name is not stable across the printings. He is Cormelian in the lost 1711 text, Cormilan and Cormilion in the chapbooks of the 1760s and 1780s, and only later does he settle into the Cormoran everybody knows.

That belt is the thing that almost kills him. Four months on, walking towards Wales, Jack fell asleep beside a fountain and a giant called Blunderbore came down for water, read the gold letters, and carried him home over one shoulder. Jack woke to the sound of branches dragging past his face. The castle floor was strewn with bones, there were quartered bodies in the parlour, and a further room held nothing but hearts and livers, which his host said he liked best with pepper and vinegar. Then Blunderbore locked him upstairs and went to fetch his brother, so there would be two of them for the meal. There were strong cords in the room. Jack made a noose in each, dropped them over both heads as the giants worked the iron gate, hauled the ropes across a beam, and hanged them from their own doorway. Behind the locked doors he found three women tied up by the hair of their heads and nearly starved.

The Welsh giant he met next had two heads and better manners, which turned out to be worse. Jack heard him in the next room promising to dash his brains out with a club, so he put a log in the bed and slept in the corner, and thanked his host warmly in the morning for a comfortable night, mentioning only a rat that had slapped him with its tail once or twice. At breakfast he was given four gallons of hasty pudding and slid the lot into a leather bag under his coat, then slit the bag open to show what a Cornishman could do. The giant, refusing to be outdone, opened his own belly and fell down dead.

Everything after that runs on stolen equipment. A three-headed giant whom Jack tricked into hiding in his own cellar paid him off with an old coat, cap, sword and slippers, which turned out to be a coat that made him invisible, a cap that told him whatever he needed to know, a sword that cut through anything and shoes that outran anything. With them he served King Arthur’s son, followed an enchanted lady to Lucifer at midnight, stole the Devil’s handkerchief and eventually his head, and was made a Knight of the Round Table for it. Then he asked Arthur’s leave to go and finish off the giants of Britain, and sent the heads back to court one at a time as receipts.

The eighteenth-century text is considerably nastier than the nursery version. Jack swings at one giant’s head, misses, takes off his nose instead, then runs him through from behind and stands laughing while the creature dies. Thunderdell, a two-headed giant who came down from the northern dales for revenge, is drowned in a moat after Jack has men saw most of the way through the drawbridge, and Thunderdell is the one who speaks the rhyme about grinding an Englishman’s bones to make his bread. The rhyme is older than Jack. A version of it is already in the mouth of Edgar in King Lear in 1605. The last giant, Galligantua, keeps a mountain castle with a conjurer for a partner, two fiery griffins on the gate, a duke’s daughter turned into a white hind, and a golden trumpet hanging on a silver chain whose inscription gives away exactly how to break the spell. Jack blows it, cuts off the giant’s head, and the whole castle goes up in a cloud of smoke.

Here is the awkward part. Jack was invented. There is no trace of him anywhere before 1708, when The Weekly Comedy mentions the tale in January of that year; the earliest chapbook is dated 1711 and has since vanished from the British Library, surviving only in a transcription James Orchard Halliwell made in 1849 and tidied up as he went. Jack is absent from Thackeray’s catalogue of chapbooks in production around 1689, absent from the lists of petty books of the early eighteenth century, and absent from the repertoire of Robert Powel, the Covent Garden puppet showman who worked through all the other folk heroes. Robert Hunt, who spent decades collecting Cornish drolls, could not find a single Cornish story about him. What is old is the shape he was poured into: Arthur is the giant-killer of Welsh and Cornish tradition, the one who finally cleared the land, and he does it by exactly Jack’s methods, killing Cribwr’s three sisters by cunning because no one could take them together, trapping the giant Dillus in a concealed pit, and laughing out loud over the body of the giant of Mont-Saint-Michel before ordering the head cut off for display. Somebody in the first years of the eighteenth century took that tradition, gave it a farm boy, and set it near Land’s End.

Which leaves Jack with no powers at all, strictly speaking. He owns a pit, a length of rope, a leather bag and a good ear for what a giant will believe, and everything else he carries was handed to him by a giant he had already frightened. His limits show whenever he tries to do it the honest way: he swings at a head and hits a nose. The coat only hides him while he keeps it on, the cap only answers what he thinks to ask, and the belt he was proudest of is the one thing in the story that nearly got him eaten.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Jack the Giant Killer?

Jack the Giant Killer is a hero of English chapbook legend, a Cornish farmer’s son who kills giants during the reign of King Arthur. He fights entirely by trickery and engineering rather than strength, and Arthur eventually makes him a Knight of the Round Table and sets him to clearing the last giants out of Britain.

Which giants does Jack kill?

Jack’s first kill is the giant of the Mount of Cornwall, named Cormoran in later chapbooks and Cormelian in the lost 1711 text. He goes on to hang Blunderbore and his brother with ropes over a beam, trick a two-headed Welsh giant into cutting open his own belly, drown the two-headed Thunderdell in a moat, and behead Galligantua to break the enchantment on a mountain castle.

What magic items does Jack the Giant Killer use?

Jack wins four items from a three-headed giant he has tricked into hiding in his own cellar: a coat that makes him invisible, a cap that tells him whatever he needs to know, a sword that cuts through anything, and shoes of extraordinary swiftness. He does not own any of them at the start of the story, and none of them makes him strong.

Where does “Fee, fi, fo, fum” come from?

In Jack’s story the rhyme belongs to Thunderdell, the two-headed giant who comes down from the northern dales to avenge his kinsmen. The rhyme is considerably older than Jack himself; a version of it is already spoken in Shakespeare’s King Lear in 1605, a century before Jack appears in print.

How old is the story of Jack the Giant Killer?

The tale cannot be traced before 1708, when The Weekly Comedy refers to it in January of that year, and the earliest known chapbook was printed in 1711. Jack is missing from the chapbook catalogues of 1689 and the early eighteenth-century lists of cheap print, and Robert Hunt could find no Cornish folk tale about him at all, which points to a literary invention built on the much older tradition of Arthur as the killer of Britain’s giants.

Related Entries

Arthur, Merlin, Morgan le Fay, Green Knight, Jack-In-Irons, Bucca, Knocker, Spriggan, Grendel, Beowulf, Ettin, Giant, Ogre, Bendigeidfran, Polyphemus