Jack the Giant-Killer
A Cornish farmer's son who beat every giant in the west with his wits
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At the far western end of England, where the green fields run out and drop into the sea, lies Cornwall — a country of cliffs and gulls and small stone farms. In the old days, when the roads were tracks and the moors were wild, giants lived up on the hills there. The biggest of them was Cormoran, who was four times the height of a man and twice as lazy. He never grew anything and he never built anything. Every few weeks he simply came down off his hill, walked into somebody's field, picked up six oxen under one arm and a dozen sheep under the other, and walked away again, and nobody in the whole county could think of a single thing to do about it. On one of those mornings a farmer's son named Jack stood at the cliff edge watching him go. Jack was small and he was eighteen years old and he had nothing in the world but a spade, a rope and a very quick mind. He stood there a long time, thinking.
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Jack dug all night. He dug a pit across the giant's own path, as wide as a cottage and far deeper than a giant is tall, and he laid long sticks and straw across it and scattered earth on top until it looked exactly like the rest of the hill. Then, at first light, he stood on the far side of it, put his horn to his lips and blew the loudest blast ever heard in Cornwall. Cormoran came out of his cave in a terrible temper to see who was making that noise so early. He saw a small young man standing on his hill, shouting cheerful insults up at him. He came down the path at a run — and the sticks broke, and the straw went up in a cloud, and Cormoran dropped straight into Jack's pit and sat down at the bottom of it with a bump that shook every window in the county. He was not hurt in the slightest. He was extremely annoyed.
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The people of Cornwall filled in the pit with Cormoran safely grumbling at the bottom of it, which is how he came to be shut up under the hill where he could not steal anybody's cattle again, and where he slept for a hundred years and rather enjoyed it. And they gave Jack a belt stitched with gold thread, with words on it that everybody in England came to know: here is the valiant Cornishman who beat the giant Cormoran. When the King heard about it he sent for Jack at once. The King was round and merry and easily impressed, and he laughed out loud at the story of the pit and made Jack sit at his own table. The whole court began calling him Jack the Giant-Killer — which he never liked much, because he had not killed anybody and never did in the whole of his life. He had only out-thought them. But a name, once people start using it, is very hard to give back.
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Jack did not stay at court long. He had heard there were other giants making other people miserable, further east, and off he went to find them. One hot afternoon he lay down by a spring in a deep oak wood and fell fast asleep in the shade with his coat folded under his head. Now the owner of that wood was a giant called Blunderbore, who was tall and thin and extremely vain, and who had been waiting years to meet the famous Jack who had beaten Cormoran. He came through the trees, read the gold words on the sleeping stranger's belt, and could not believe his luck. He picked Jack up as gently as you would pick up a sleeping cat, tucked him under one arm, and carried him home to his castle, humming. Jack woke halfway there, upside down, with the ground swinging by far below him, and decided that this was probably the most interesting thing that had happened to him all week.
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Blunderbore locked Jack into a high tower room and went off downstairs, whistling, to fetch his brother so that the two of them could decide what to do with such a famous prisoner. That was his mistake. Jack climbed up on the windowsill and looked out, and saw the two giants crossing the courtyard far below. Then he looked at the two strong ropes coiled in the corner, and at the heavy iron hooks at the end of them, and he began, very quickly, to work. By the time the giants came back to the tower, Jack had both ropes out of the window with a noose on each, hanging exactly where two tall heads would pass. He heard them on the stairs. He braced his boots against the stone and took a good grip, and he waited, and when the two of them came out into the courtyard below to see where he had got to, he pulled.
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The two giants got themselves untangled in the end, and they were so ashamed of being caught by one small Cornishman with two bits of rope that they packed up their castle and went away north, and they never bothered anybody in that part of the country again. Jack unlocked the gate with Blunderbore's own keys and let out everyone the giants had shut up in the cellars, and sent them home to their villages. Then he walked on. He crossed the river at dusk on a long stone bridge, with the water going red and gold underneath it and the first bats out over the reeds, and he thought about how strange his life had become. He was still a farmer's son. He still owned a spade. But there was a name following him around the country now, and wherever he went, people were going to expect something of him. He found he did not mind that at all.
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In Wales, Jack came at nightfall to a house in the mountains where a giant lived with two heads on one pair of shoulders. The giant made him very welcome indeed — too welcome — and gave him a bed and a great bowl of hasty pudding for his supper, while the two heads muttered to one another about what they would do with their guest in the morning. Jack heard every word. He had already slipped a big empty leather bag inside his coat, and now, while the giant was busy at the fire, he quietly tipped the whole enormous bowl of pudding into the bag instead of eating it. Then he patted his coat, looking well fed, and said what a splendid pudding it was, and that in Cornwall a man could eat ten of those and then do a trick besides. The two heads turned round at once. They did not like to be beaten at anything, especially by a guest.
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Out they went into the moonlit yard, and Jack said the trick was this: a Cornishman could eat a whole pudding and then let it out again without taking the smallest harm. He took out his knife and slit the leather bag under his coat, and the whole supper came pouring out onto the cobbles — and Jack stood there grinning, perfectly well. Both of the giant's heads stared. Then they looked at one another and agreed, for the first time in forty years, that they were not going to be outdone by a little Cornishman in front of the mountains. And the two-headed giant took up his own enormous supper bowl, and ate the lot, and tried the trick himself. It did not work. It was the loudest noise in Wales that night, and he sat down very suddenly in the middle of his own yard, groaning, and from that hour he never once tried to beat anybody at anything again, which made him a much better neighbour.
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On his way home through the mountains Jack found a cave that the giants had used as a storeroom, and in it, laid on a stone shelf under a hundred years of dust, were four things that had been made long before anybody could remember. There was a coat that made the man who wore it impossible to see. There was a cap that told him anything he wanted to know. There were shoes that went as fast as the wind. And there was a sword in a plain scabbard that would cut through anything at all. Jack took the coat and the cap and the shoes, and he lifted the sword out, looked at it for a while, and put it carefully back on the shelf, because he had beaten four giants already with a spade, two ropes and a leather bag, and he could not think of one single thing he would do with a sword that he could not do better with his head.
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So Jack came home to Cornwall at midsummer, and the King gave a fair on the green for him, with music and ribbons and a great deal of food, and the whole county came. The King gave him a house and lands at the end of it, and he married and settled there and lived a long quiet life afterwards, which is what he had wanted all along. And the giants were never heard of in the west again. Cormoran stayed shut under his own hill. The two tall brothers went away north out of the country and nobody there ever saw them more, and the two-headed giant kept to his own mountain in Wales and troubled no traveller after that night. And the people still called Jack the Giant-Killer, all his life, and all his life he still said, patiently, that he had only ever used his head.
About this story
- Audience: kids (ages 6–12)
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