Jack and the Beanstalk

7-9 min read
16 pages

Jack and the beanstalk, the English folk tale to read aloud. He sells the cow for five beans, and by morning one of them has gone up.

Jack and his mother had nothing left but a cow, and the cow had stopped giving milk. «Take her to market,» said his mother, «and mind you get a fair price.»

On the road Jack met a man who looked at the cow and then at Jack. «I'll give you five beans for her,» he said. «They're not ordinary beans.»

Jack came home with the beans. What his mother said took some time, and it ended with the beans out of the window and Jack up the stairs without any supper.

In the morning the light in his room was green. He went to the window, and where the beans had fallen there was a stalk as thick as a tree going straight up out of sight.

So he climbed it. He climbed until the ground below was a small green thing, and then until he could not see it at all, and at the top there was a road.

The road went to a house so large that the step came up to his chest. A woman as tall as the doorway was standing in it.

«My husband eats boys,» she said. «Come in and have some bread, and get under that pot when you hear him.»

The floor began to shake, and the giant came in, and Jack got under the pot. «Fee-fi-fo-fum,» said the giant. «I smell a boy.» «You smell the sheep you had yesterday,» said his wife, and put his breakfast down.

After eating he fetched two bags of gold and counted them until he fell asleep in the chair. Jack came out from under the pot, took one bag, and went down the stalk with it.

The gold lasted a long while. When it ran out, Jack climbed again.

The second time the giant brought in a hen and said «lay», and the hen laid an egg of solid gold. When he was asleep Jack took the hen and climbed down, and that hen kept them both for a year.

The third time Jack knew he was pushing his luck, and he went anyway. He hid in the copper by the fire. That day the giant brought in a golden harp, and said «play», and the harp played until he slept.

Jack took the harp. But a harp that plays by itself can also call out, and it called: «Master! Master!»

The giant came after him. Jack went down that stalk faster than he had ever gone down anything, with the harp under one arm and the giant's weight coming down above him, and the whole stalk swaying.

«The axe!» he shouted at the bottom. «Mother — the axe!» And he cut through the stalk with four strokes while she held the ladder of it steady.

The beanstalk came down across the field, and the giant with it, and that was the end of him. Jack and his mother lived well after that, and the harp played in the evenings without anyone touching it, and nobody in that house ever bought another cow.

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Text source: Folk plot in the public domain (English folk tale, written down in the nineteenth century). The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

Jack and the Beanstalk characters

Jack: Sells the family cow for five beans and is not, by any ordinary reading, in the right. The story rewards him anyway, which is worth arguing about.
The mother: Throws the beans out of the window in despair. Everything that follows grows out of that.
The giant: Smells blood at the top of the beanstalk and says so in the most famous four lines in English folklore.
The giant's wife: Hides Jack three times and feeds him. Nobody in the tale explains why, and nobody thanks her.
The hen and the harp: The hen lays golden eggs; the harp plays by itself and calls for its master. It is the harp, not the hen, that nearly gets Jack caught.

Where «Jack and the Beanstalk» comes from and who wrote it down

Jack and the Beanstalk

Jack and the Beanstalk characters

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