Jack and The Beanstalk - Variants

Variants

It is Aarne-Thompson type 328, though some scholars, such as Goldberg argue that the Aarne Thompson system is inadequate to the tale, a possible reference to the genre anomaly. Other tales of this type include the Italian Thirteenth and the French How the Dragon was Tricked.

The Brothers Grimm drew analogy between this tale and the German The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs, where the devil's mother or grandmother acted much like the wife in this tale: a female figure protecting the child from the evil male figure.

The tale is unusual in that the hero, although grown, does not marry at the end of it but returns to his mother; this is found in few other tales, although some, such as some variants of Vasilisa the Beautiful, do feature it.

The beanstalk is reminiscent of the ancient Northern European belief in a world tree connecting Earth to heaven. A late addition to the medieval catalog of Aesop's Fables of putative Persian origins The Gourd and the Palm-tree uses the emblematic trope of a fast-growing gourd vine sprouted from seed that outgrows an older mature tree yet perishes in the frost to instruct on the folly of intemperance.

The biblical tale of Jonah closes rather abruptly with the hero resting under a fast growing gourd, Hebrew קיקיון (qiyqayown), the only time in Scripture so mentioned. While scholars place the historical events in the 8th century BCE they were not recorded by Hebrew scribes until some centuries later. In his Latin Vulgate, St. Jerome refers to the Old Testament prophet's encounter with the fast growing vine as "hedera" (in English, ivy) a choice St. Augustine rejected, preferring the commonly known vegetable known as cucurbita in Latin from which the English cucumber is derived. During the Renaissance, the humanist artist Albrecht Dürer memorialized Jerome's courage to dissent in his famous woodcut Saint Jerome in His Study featuring a dried gourd hanging from the rafters. Possible confusion with the didactic of fable may have motivated use of clearer analogy for the type of Christ "I am the Vine you are the branches" already contained in the miraculous whale tale. The escatological admonition to Nineva contained in the Book of Jonah bears certain resemblances to the moral of the demise of the ogre (not explicitly justified as evil in the original text, see Controversies below, but simply overweaningly powerful and ugly). However the tale's profane dualism is reversed in sacred scripture's salvation of the errant inhabitants of Ninevah, opening a present beset by difficulties to the transcendent hope in Divine Providence.