Page:English Fairy Tales.djvu/282

 256 also in the curious play of Peele's The Old Wives' Tale, in which one of the characters is the Ghost of Jack. Fielding refers to Jack the Giant-Killer in the beginning of Joseph Andrews. Practically the same story as this part of Jack the Giant-Killer occurs in Kennedy, Fictions of the Irish Celts, p. 32, "Jack the Master and Jack the Servant"; and Kennedy adds (p. 38), "In some versions Jack the Servant is the spirit of the buried man."

This incident of the Faithful Dead was also the subject of a Middle English verse romance, entitled Sir Amadace, an edition of which was produced by the late Prof. George Stephens of Copenhagen in the year 1854, with an introduction which gives some of the folk-lore parallels. The necessity of burial for "laying" the spirit of a dead man runs throughout all primitive thought, and is at the root of most burial customs. It forms the central motif of the Antigone of Sophocles, and has not been without its influence on Christian theology.

Jack's invisibility recalls the Invisible Helmet which enabled Perseus to fulfil the tasks laid upon him. Upon this see Köhler in Jahrbuch, vii., 146, and in Kreutzwald, Estnische Mährchen, 359; also, Steele and Temple's Wide Awake Stories, 423. These gifts of magic armour cannot be regarded as primitive; they must at least be posterior to the Neolithic Age.

The "Fee-fi-fo-fum" formula is common to all English stories of giants and ogres; it also occurs in Peele's play and in King Lear (see notes on Childe Rowland). Messrs. Jones and Kropf have some remarks on it in their Magyar Tales, pp. 340-1; so has Mr. Lang in his "Perrault," p. Ixiii., where he traces it to the Furies in Æschylus' Eumenides.

XX. HENNY-PENNY

Source.—I give this as it was told to me in Australia in 1860. The fun consists in the avoidance of all pronouns, which results in jawbreaking sentences almost equal to the