Writing in Margins
  • Home
  • The Thumbling Project
    • Type 700 Tales
    • Thumblings
    • Motifs
    • Timeline >
      • Tom Thumb Timeline
    • Film
    • Theater
    • Tom Thumb Weddings
    • Resources
  • The Snowwhite Project
    • As White As Snow
    • Type 709 Tales
  • Lists of Fairies
    • The Little Folk
    • Mermaids
    • The Denham Tracts
    • Individual Fairies
    • Faerie Feast
    • Faerie Fashion
  • Story CSI
    • Ruth Tongue
    • Andrew Lang
  • About and Contact

The Wives of Tom Thumb

9/18/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
"Tiny Tom," Fractured Fairytales.
A fair amount of thumbling tales mention marriage. However, I had thought that Tom Thumb was doomed to die young and childless. Most renditions of his story end this way, which is honestly a bit of a downer. However, it turns out a few authors have seen fit to set Tom up with a lady friend.

Princess Huncamunca in the play Tom Thumb by Henry Fielding (1730). The play would later be edited and expanded as The Tragedy of Tragedies, but the central idea was the satire and a huge, tangled love dodecahedron. Like most of the cast, Tom has multiple love interests; in his case, these are King Arthur’s wife Dollalolla, Arthur’s daughter Huncamunca, and the giantess queen Glumdalca. In 1733, it was re-adapted as The Opera of Operas; or Tom Thumb the Great, by Eliza Haywood and William Hatchett. This focused more on parodying opera tropes, so the the ridiculously tragic deaths are reversed and Tom marries Huncamunca.
Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca were the names of Beatrix Potter’s pet mice and the stars of The Tale of Two Bad Mice.

Grumbo’s daughter, in “Tom Thumb's folio, or, A new penny play-thing for little giants,” printed in 1791. This version dispensed plenty of details. Tom’s father was Theophilus Thumb and the family was from Northumberland (ha.ha.ha.). Tom was born in 1618 on the day of a solar eclipse (July 21?). In this story Tom defeats Grumbo, king of the giants, and becomes a major political force in the kingdom. (This is very different from the typical story where he functions solely as a knight and a sort of clown whose duties seem to boil down to performing for the king - he doesn't actually do much other than make a good appearance.) He marries Grumbo’s daughter, an unnamed giantess. They have twin boys named Gog and Magog, “nine hundred times” as big as Tom.

Princess Poppet in “Harlequin and Tom Thumb, or Gog and Magog and Mother Goose’s Golden Goslings,” a pantomime performed in 1853. Here, Tom rescues King Arthur’s daughter Princess Poppet from the giant Grumbo. Arthur is reluctant to bless the marriage, but Mother Goose shows up and there’s a harlequinade and Tom and Poppet get married. Apparently the pantomime was fun, if somewhat incomprehensible to some critics.

An unnamed bride in Extraordinary Nursery Rhymes and Tales: New Yet Old (1876) features retellings of fairy tales and nursery rhymes in verse. Here, with help from King Arthur and the fairies, Tom Thumb begins looking for a proper wife. At first he can’t find a girl of proper size, and then he meets twenty little fairylike beauties and can’t choose between them. However, he eventually ends up with one and is perfectly happy (the other girls serve as bridesmaids). His new wife has six babies per year, alternating between daughters and sons, and they need help from Arthur and Guinevere to feed them all.

Queen Smilinda in The Lilliputian Magazine; or, Children's Repository (1770s) contains a story called "The Lilliputian History," detailing the life of a King Tom Thumb of Lilliputia. The story is original, but begins with King Thumb visiting the court of King Arthur in a clear nod to the British tale. Smilinda is the princess of a country called Yarthonia. They have a son, born in 1514, whose name is not given.

The most common names in Tom Thumb weddings were Lillie Putian (with many variations) and Jennie June.
0 Comments

Native American Thumblings

9/14/2015

0 Comments

 
Picture
Since the amount of thumbling tales available from Europe and even Africa and Asia has been so overwhelming, I’ve been looking into American Indian tales, which are more sparse in the tiny hero department. I actually have found a thumbling tale type there, which I think is from the Ojibwa people or other nearby nations. There’s Boy-Man or the Little Spirit and the similar character Dais-Imid. Then there’s a whole wealth of suncatcher tales. Here the tiny character may show up as Chakabech (Wyandot), Chapewee (Dogrib) or Tcikabis (Cree or Innu). He lives with his sister, gets mad at the Sun for shrinking his coat and traps the Sun as a result, and then some variety of mouse frees it, shrinking down to its current size as a result.

(This connection between tiny characters and the sun also shows up in the Burmese “How Master Thumb Conquered the Sun.” Also, in Tom Thumb’s Folio, published circa 1825, Tom’s small size is attributed to an eclipse. The connection to solar myth is something I’d like to look into further.)

However – and this is important – in the Native American tales, the tiny character isn’t really thumb-sized. He’s almost always described as the size of a baby. This means a story based within the realm of possibility – i.e., the story’s less fantastical and the hero could conceivably be a real person with dwarfism.

Boy-Man is the one American Indian story most often connected to Tom Thumb. I tracked it back to Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, famous as one of the first female Native American writers. However, the first version I read was by Mary Hazelton Wade. Schoolcraft’s ending feels abrupt, but then so do many oral folktales; Wade’s version, which came later, is almost identical but then provides a moralistic happy ending which feels out of place. I was really confused for a little while there.

This is why my most recent find is something I’m a little wary of. I found a Dakota version of the suncatcher tale called “The Little First Man and the Little First Woman,” retold by William M. Cary, which gives me a new Thumbelina character. Here, unlike all the other American Indian stories I’ve found of the same tale type, the characters are tiny.

There’s a significant amount of text devoted to describing just how tiny they are. They feast on tiny berries, hunt grasshoppers, etc. It’s imaginative and fanciful, in the style of European (particularly English) thumbling and fairy literature. It just doesn’t feel that much like the typical baby-sized hero of the suncatcher tale, whose size sometimes becomes an afterthought. So on the one hand, I may  have finally found an American Indian Thumbelina; on the other hand, I have to track down this story’s history.

Also posted on tumblr.

0 Comments

    About

    Researching folktales and fairies, with a focus on common tale types.

    ​The Thumbling Project is a collection of different versions of Tom Thumb and Thumbelina from around the world.
    The Snow White Project ​is a similar list.


    ​​
    Text © Writing in Margins

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    October 2022
    September 2022
    August 2022
    July 2022
    June 2022
    May 2022
    April 2022
    March 2022
    February 2022
    January 2022
    December 2021
    November 2021
    October 2021
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    April 2021
    March 2021
    February 2021
    January 2021
    December 2020
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015

    Categories

    All
    Africa
    America
    Analysis
    Arabian Nights
    Astronomy
    Beauty And The Beast
    Boy Man
    Boy-Man
    Changelings
    Christmas
    Cinderella
    Dwarves
    Fairies
    Fairy Debunking
    Flood Myth
    General Tom Thumb
    Hans Christian Andersen
    History
    Hop O' My Thumb
    Issunboshi
    King Arthur
    Kirikou
    Little Red Riding Hood
    Mermaids
    Miniature Wedding
    Nang Ut
    Nursery Rhymes
    Perrault
    Peter Pan
    Pinocchio
    Puss In Boots
    Queen Mab
    Rapunzel
    Research
    Review
    Rumpelstiltskin
    Sleeping Beauty
    Snow White
    Tam Lin
    Tatterhood
    The Schools Collection
    The Three Little Pigs
    The Thumbling Project
    Thumbelina
    Tom Thumb
    Werewolves

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • The Thumbling Project
    • Type 700 Tales
    • Thumblings
    • Motifs
    • Timeline >
      • Tom Thumb Timeline
    • Film
    • Theater
    • Tom Thumb Weddings
    • Resources
  • The Snowwhite Project
    • As White As Snow
    • Type 709 Tales
  • Lists of Fairies
    • The Little Folk
    • Mermaids
    • The Denham Tracts
    • Individual Fairies
    • Faerie Feast
    • Faerie Fashion
  • Story CSI
    • Ruth Tongue
    • Andrew Lang
  • About and Contact