Yet “Jack and His Stepdame” testifies that Jack’s name has figured in off-color adventures for nearly six centuries, and Appalachian tales just now finding their way into print (including the tales of Ray Hicks and Marshall Ward in this book) affirm that the Jack of oral tradition is sometimes a character shared by adults but off-limits to children, enjoyed among men but largely concealed from women. Because so many recent editors have attempted to sell Jack exclusively to children, obscene and scatological elements of his tradition have long been suppressed. With these gifts Jack punishes the stepmother as well as a friar whom she has recruited to beat him (Furrow 1985, 67-156 Bolte and Polivka 1913-32, 2:491). He shares food with an old beggar, who grants him three magic wishes: a bow and arrows that never miss their mark, a pipe whose music compels all that hear it to dance, and a spell that forces his stepmother to fart explosively whenever she looks angrily at Jack. The oldest known version of the international tale type, “The Dance among Thorns” (AT 592), is an early fifteenth-century English poem titled “Jack and His Stepdame,” in which Jack is an only child abused by his stepmother. Later tales, printed in prose and priced for a popular audience, were known as chapbooks. The earliest written versions of the fantasy tales that scholars call märchen were most often rendered in rhyme and hand-copied on manuscripts. But a handful of texts provide essential, if fragmentary, clues about the nature of the stories told by long-dead raconteurs.
Yet the relation between the earlier Jacks and the most recent is difficult to trace, since no oral Jack Tales have survived from distant centuries. From the fifteenth century, when “Jack and His Step-Dame” was set down in rhyme in England, to the present, when Ray Hick’s rendition of “Jack and the Three Steers” dominates the National Storytelling Festival, one name above all others has been associated with magic tales in the British-American tradition. Before turning to individual stories and storytellers, we might well ask, Who is this boy Jack? In what forms has he existed before-and beyond-the work of Richard Chase? How and in what ways has British Jack became American? And how has one particular strand of English-speaking oral tradition been elevated to folk self-image for an entire nation? The Name: Fragments from Far-Flung TraditionsĪs far back as English-language folktales can be traced, there are stories about Jack. In the last fifty years, Jack Tales have come to occupy a privileged position for scholarly analysts of folklore, for popular purveyors of folklore, and even for folk themselves. Excerpted from Carl Lindahl, “Jacks: The Name, The Tales, The American Traditions” in Jack In Two Worlds, edited by William Bernard McCarthy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), pp.
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