"Fee-fi-fo-fum" is the first line of a historical quatrain (or sometimes couplet) famous for its use in the classic English fairy tale " Jack and the Beanstalk". The poem, as given in Joseph Jacobs' 1890 rendition, is as follows:
Fee-fi-fo-fum,
I smell the bones of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead
I'll grind his bones
to make my bread.
[1]
Though the rhyme is tetrametric, it follows no consistent metrical foot; however, the lines correspond roughly to a monosyllabic tetrameter, a dactylic tetrameter, a trochaic tetrameter, and an iambic tetrameter respectively. The poem has historically made use of assonant half rhyme.
Origin
The rhyme appears in the 1596 pamphlet " Haue with You to Saffron-Walden" written by Thomas Nashe, who mentions that the rhyme was already old and its origins obscure: [2]
Fy, Fa and fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman
In William Shakespeare's play King Lear (c. 1605), [2] in Act III, Scene IV, the character Edgar referring to the legend of Childe Rowland exclaims:
Fie, foh, and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man. [3]
The verse in King Lear makes use of the archaic word "fie", used to express disapproval. [4] This word is used repeatedly in Shakespeare's works: King Lear shouts, "Fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!", and in Antony and Cleopatra, Mark Antony exclaims, "O fie, fie, fie!"
The earliest known printed version of the Jack the Giant-Killer tale appears in The history of Jack and the Giants (Newcastle, 1711) and this, [2] [5] and later versions (found in chapbooks), include renditions of the poem, recited by the giant Thunderdell:
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Charles Mackay proposes in The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe that the seemingly meaningless string of syllables "Fa fe fi fo fum" is actually a coherent phrase of ancient Gaelic, and that the complete quatrain covertly expresses the Celts' cultural detestation of the invading Angles and Saxons:
- Fa from faich (fa!) "behold!" or "see!"
- Fe from Fiadh (fee-a) "food";
- Fi from fiú "good to eat"
- Fo from fogh (fó) "sufficient" and
- Fum from feum "hunger".
Thus "Fa fe fi fo fum!" becomes "Behold food, good to eat, sufficient for my hunger!" [7]
See also
- Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum, and Phooey, five mice who traveled to and circled the Moon on Apollo 17 in 1972, four nicknamed after the poem
- " Devil's Gun", a 1977 disco song by C.J. & Company that repeatedly uses the phrase "Fee Fi! Fo Fum! (You're) lookin' down the barrel of the devil's gun."
- Ablaut reduplication
- Baba Yaga, in Slavic folklore, also detects human presence by smell.
References
- ^ a b Tatar, Maria (2002). "Jack and the Beanstalk". The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. pp. 131–144. ISBN 0-393-05163-3.
- ^ a b c McCarthy, William Bernard; Oxford, Cheryl; Sobol, Joseph Daniel, eds. (1994). Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers (illustrated ed.). UNC Press Books. p. xv. ISBN 9780807844434.
- ^ Hudson, Henry Norman, ed. (1856). The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Volume IX. Boston, MA: James Munroe & Company. p. 510.
- ^ "Fie". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. The Houghton Mifflin Co. 2000. Archived from the original on 13 October 2008. Retrieved 13 November 2008.
- ^ "The Arthuriad" (PDF). p. 25 (PDF 26).
- ^ History of Jack the Giant Killer. Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers.
- ^ Mackay, Charles (1877). The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe: And More Especially of the English and Lowland Scotch, and Their Slang, Cant, and Colloquial Dialects. Trübner. p. 160. Retrieved 25 August 2015.