Tom Thumb

The batter closed over him without a sound. It was Christmas, the puddings were being mixed, and the boy no bigger than a thumb had climbed the bowl to watch. What came out of the pot an hour later was a good heavy suet pudding, steaming, faintly sweet, with a small furious knight somewhere inside it. His mother gave that particular pudding to a tinker who came begging at the door, and the tinker carried it off down the lane, and the pudding began to talk to him.

Tom’s father was old Thomas of the Mountain, a ploughman who sat on King Arthur’s council and wanted a son so badly he said he would take one no bigger than his thumb. His wife went to Merlin with the request. Three months later the child arrived, exactly to specification, and the Queene of Fayres came with her attendants to act as midwife. She was the one who dressed him. Everything he wore came out of a hedgerow: a hat cut from an oak leaf, a shirt spun of cobweb, a doublet of thistledown, stockings made from apple rind, shoes of mouse skin. He was not a spirit and not a changeling. He was a small boy with a small boy’s appetite for trouble, and the trouble scaled up rather than down.

He cheated at games. The other boys stopped playing with him, so he hung his mother’s pots and drinking glasses from a sunbeam to show them what he could do, and when they tried it their own pots came down on the flags and shattered. After that he was kept at home under his mother’s eye, which is how he ended up in the pudding.

The disasters that followed have the rhythm of a man falling down a very long staircase. He went with his mother to the milking, sat under a thistle, and a red cow ate him along with the thistle. He was recovered by dosing the cow. He went with his father to the sowing, riding in the horse’s ear, and was set down at the edge of the field to work as a scarecrow, and a raven took him instead. The raven dropped him on the roof of a giant’s castle. The giant swallowed him whole, the way a man swallows a pill, and Tom kicked and thrashed in the dark warm space until the giant was sick over the side of a cliff and Tom went into the sea. A fish ate him there. The fish was a good one, so it was caught and sent to King Arthur’s kitchen.

The cook had the knife in the belly when the little man stood up in the gut cavity and looked around. There is no record of what the cook said. Tom was carried in to the king, told his story, and stayed on as King Arthur’s Dwarf, which turned out to be a career. He jousted. He danced in the cupped palm of a Maid of Honour. He rode out in a coach made from a walnut shell. Once he was given leave to visit his parents and took as much money from the royal treasury as he could carry, which came to a silver threepence, and the journey home took him two days and two nights.

He was a folk figure long before anyone wrote him down properly. William Fulke mentions him in 1579. Reginald Scot lists him in the Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584 among the witches, dwarfs, elves, fairies and giants that servant maids used to terrify children. Thomas Nashe has him in Pierce Penilesse in 1592, and by 1611 Coryat’s Crudities can joke that Tom Thumbe is dumb until the pudding creeps, expecting every reader to get it. The version everyone now knows was printed in London for Thomas Langley in 1621 as The History of Tom Thumbe, the Little, for his small stature surnamed, King Arthur’s Dwarfe, a forty-page booklet almost certainly written by the Londoner Richard Johnson, whose initials sit on the last page. One copy survives, in the Morgan Library in New York. It is the first fairy tale printed in English, and Johnson himself says in his preface that old and young, bachelors and maids, shepherd and plough boy all knew the story already. The woodblock on his title page was worn out before he used it.

After that the tale never stopped. A metrical version came in 1630, two more parts were bolted on around 1700, and Henry Fielding turned the whole thing into a stage burlesque in 1730 and again in 1731 as The Tragedy of Tragedies, in which Tom is a giant-killing warrior desired by every woman at court and the corpses pile up at the curtain. By the middle of the nineteenth century he had been demoted to the nursery. Charlotte Mary Yonge scrubbed him clean in 1856 and had him renounce Fairyland and die a Christian during Mordred’s rebellion. Dinah Mulock, in 1863, declined to tidy him at all.

His real powers arrived while he slept. The Queene of Fayres found him lying on a rose and left him four gifts: a hat that gave him knowledge of anything he wished to know, a ring that made him invisible, a girdle that changed his shape at will, and shoes that carried him anywhere in a moment. With those he could out-argue and out-vanish anything in Britain, and when the giant Garagantua threatened him after a long exchange of boasts, Tom left an enchantment behind and was home before the giant finished speaking.

None of it addressed the actual problem, which was that he was three inches tall in a world built for people who were not. He nearly died once when a lady blew her nose near him and had to be treated by the physician of King Twaddell of the Pygmies. Every animal he met regarded him as food. In the later tellings a cat mauls him during a hunt, a miller thinks he is a demon and throws him in a river, a salmon takes him, and he spends years recovering in Fairyland between disasters. What finally killed him was a spider. He was buried under a rosebush with a marble monument and an epitaph that says he rode at tilt and tournament and went hunting on a mouse, and that his death gave sorrow birth. Tattershall in Lincolnshire shows visitors a sixteen-inch grave slab in Holy Trinity Church reading T. THUMB, Aged 101, Died 1620. James Orchard Halliwell, writing in 1846, recorded that popular tradition put Tom’s monument under a small blue flagstone in Lincoln Cathedral instead, which makes the Tattershall stone a later piece of work. It is a joke that outlived its joker.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Tom Thumb?

Tom Thumb is a hero of English folklore who stands no taller than his father’s thumb and serves as King Arthur’s dwarf. He was born to a ploughman and his wife after Merlin granted their wish for a son of any size, and the Queen of Fairies attended his birth. His story is the first fairy tale ever printed in English.

How did Tom Thumb get his powers?

The Queen of Fairies found Tom asleep on a rose and left him four gifts: a hat of knowledge, a ring of invisibility, a girdle that changed his shape, and shoes that carried him anywhere instantly. He used them chiefly to escape the giant Garagantua. His clothes were also fairy-made, cut from an oak leaf, cobweb, thistledown, apple rind and mouse skin.

What happens to Tom Thumb in the story?

Tom is boiled into a Christmas pudding, swallowed by a red cow, carried off by a raven, eaten by a giant and vomited into the sea, then eaten by a fish that is caught for King Arthur’s table. The cook finds him alive inside it, and Tom becomes a favourite at court. In the later versions he dies from a spider’s bite and is buried beneath a rosebush.

When was the story of Tom Thumb first written down?

The earliest surviving text is a forty-page booklet printed in London for Thomas Langley in 1621, almost certainly written by Richard Johnson. Tom was already a well-known folk figure by then, appearing in William Fulke’s work in 1579, Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft in 1584 and Thomas Nashe’s Pierce Penilesse in 1592. Only one copy of the 1621 booklet survives, in the Morgan Library in New York.

Is Tom Thumb’s grave real?

Holy Trinity Church in Tattershall, Lincolnshire displays a sixteen-inch grave slab inscribed T. THUMB, Aged 101, Died 1620. It is almost certainly a later fabrication, because James Orchard Halliwell recorded in 1846 that popular tradition placed Tom’s monument under a blue flagstone in Lincoln Cathedral, not at Tattershall. No evidence connects Tom Thumb to a historical person.

Related Entries

Arthur, Merlin, Morgan le Fay, Questing Beast, Green Knight, Fairy, Puck, Atomy, Pixie, Spriggan, Bugbear, Ettin, Jack-In-Irons, Alux, Menehune