Marvelous Tales

In the introduction to Jack in Two Worlds, a definitive look at the development of the trickster hero, scholar Carl Lindahl writes that the Jack character first appears in a fifteenth-century English poem called “Jack and His Stepdame.”  In the poem, Jack is granted three wishes by a beggar with whom Jack has shared some food.   Jack uses the three wishes to exact revenge on his abusive stepmother and a friar who has been helping her.  Though the character probably existed in oral lore long before this, Lindahl said in an interview that the poem “is as early as we are likely to find” a written reference to Jack.

Yet by the eighteenth century, Lindahl notes, Jack had become widely popular.  This came about in part because of the broad distribution of chapbooks, collections of ballads, poems, and tales that Lindahl calls “the prototype for comic books.” In one chapbook story, “Jack and the Giants,” the hero saves Cornwall by defeating a slew of giants, including one monster he tricks into cutting open its stomach.

It is this character, combined with German (Hans), Irish (Jack), and Scottish (Jock or Jake) versions, that immigrants brought to America, particularly the Appalachian Mountains.  “There is evidence available to document the existence of a long-lived and once fairly extensive Jack tale tradition in the United States, dating back to the Revolutionary War,” writes Charles Perdue in Outwitting the Devil, a collection of Jack tales from Wise County in southwestern Virginia.

Perdue cites the notes of a Reverend Dr. Joseph Doddridge, who lived on the county’s western frontier on the Pennsylvania-Virginia border in the mid-to-late 1700s.  Wrote Doddridge, “Dramatic narrations, chiefly concerning Jack and the Giant, furnished our young people with another source of amusement during their leisure hours.”  While taking on an Appalachian flavor, Jack retained the easygoing, unpretentious trickster personality that made him so popular.

Curiously, despite the ever-growing American population hailing from the British Isles and the unabated European popularity of Jack tales in written and oral form, there are few nineteenth-century references to American Jack tales in the historical record.  Nevertheless, it is believed the tales were widely told not just in the southern Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee but in such geographically disparate areas as Mississippi and Pennsylvania as well.