Fee-fi-fo-fum explained

"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 deadI'll grind his bonesto 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]

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:

Fee, fau, fum,I smell the blood of an English man,Be alive, or be he dead,I'll grind his bones to make my bread.^[1]

Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum.I smell the blood of an Englishman,Be he living, or be he dead,I’ll grind his bones to mix my bread.^[6]

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 Irish: 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."
• "Somebody's Been Sleeping", a 1969 song by 100 Proof (Aged in Soul) which tells of a man who suspects that another man has been sleeping in his bed. Although the song mimics the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, the man repeatedly says "Fe Fi Fo Fum."
• Ablaut reduplication
• Baba Yaga, in Slavic folklore, also detects human presence by smell.

Notes and References

1. Book: Tatar, Maria . The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales . Maria Tatar . 2002 . W. W. Norton & Co. . New York . 0-393-05163-3 . Jack and the Beanstalk . 131–144 .
2. Book: McCarthy . William Bernard . Oxford . Cheryl . Sobol . Joseph Daniel . 1994 . Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers . illustrated . UNC Press Books . 9780807844434 . xv.
3. Book: Hudson . Henry Norman . 1856 . The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Volume IX . Boston, MA . James Munroe & Company . 510 .
4. News: Fie. November 13, 2008. 2000. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. The Houghton Mifflin Co.. https://web.archive.org/web/20081013033708/http://bartleby.com/61/66/F0106600.html. October 13, 2008. dead.
5. Web site: The Arthuriad . 1 . 25 (PDF 26).
6. Book: History of Jack the Giant Killer . Printed for the booksellers . Glasgow .
7. Book: Mackay. Charles. 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. 1877. Trübner. 160. 25 August 2015.