Folklore and Fairy Tales: Tom Thumb and Thumbelina: Little People with Big Hearts
Many fairy tales, probably because they are for children, who are small, have been about small people venturing out into the great big world, encountering big challenges and sometimes literal giants. Hansel and Gretel were left in the big forest to die; Jack climbed up a giant beanstalk to steal from a giant, there is a story of a little boy who came up against a powerful magician, and bested him. Here are two very different stories about two tiny people.
Tom Thumb
A couple who lived on a farm had trouble getting pregnant. Desperate, the farmer goes to see Merlin the magician. He asks Merlin for a son so that he can have an heir, even if the child was no bigger than his thumb.
Smiling, Merlin obliges him, and his wife gets pregnant with Tom Thumb, a boy who is merely the size of his father’s thumb. Clearly you have to be very careful with what you say to magicians. The queen of the fairies comes and blesses the boy and she gives him a hat made of an oak leaf and a shirt made out of a spider’s web. The fairies, who were also small, know how to dress a little fellah like Tom.
One Christmas, Tom’s mother makes a pudding from a pig. That sounds horrible, but we must remember that this is in Britain, and the British are notorious for their bad cuisine. Poor Tom Thumb tries to look at the pudding and he falls into the batter. His mom, busy in the kitchen, does not notice. She put Tom with the pudding into the pudding kettle.
Feeling the heat, Tom thrashes about and rocks the kettle. His mom, being a religious lady, thinks that a demon must possess the kettle. Just then there is a knock on the door. The woman opens the door and she sees a man who asks her for some food.
Glad to be rid of it, she gives him the pudding. That’s not very nice of her, giving a poor beggar a possessed pudding without telling him about it so that he might prepare himself for a possible poltergeist. The man walks off, talking to himself, making jokes. The jokes must have been good, because Tom hears them and laughs out loud. The man hears the kettle laughing, which scares the bejeezus out of him. After all, the kettle might be possessed by a demon. He throws the pudding behind a hedge and runs away.
The pudding plunks down, and Tom is finally free from the pig pudding. He tries to go home, but since he does not know where he is, he keeps getting lost. He sees a cow and tries to ask her for directions, but she eats him whole, and he comes out the other end. After a series of misfortunes, he finally makes it back home.
When he is a little older, his father takes him out to the fields to help him plow. While Tom is plowing, a crow swoops down and grabs him. The crow carries him to a large castle and drops a terrified Tom into the lap of a giant who owns the castle. The giant tries to eat Tom, but Tom fights back with his fists and feet, with all his might, until the giant finally spits him out.
The giant spits him so far that Tom lands in a lake. As he tries to swim to the surface, a fish swallows him. Luckily for Tom, the king’s chef ordered the royal fishermen to catch a tasty fish for the king Arthur’s supper that night. They catch the fish that swallowed poor Tom. The chef cooks the fish and puts the steaming fish dish in front of the mighty king.
King Arthur cuts open the fish and, to his great surprise, Tom hops out. How he survived the cooking, we cannot say. The king talks to Tom and he is so impressed by the little guy that he, the king, gives Tom his signet ring, his seal of honor, which Tom wears as a mighty belt. Dressed for success, Tom travels with the king on his travails from then on.
Tom, now a knight, experiences many marvelous adventures. He rides a butterfly, he duels with a giant, and he escapes from a cat’s claws. In the end, however, he gets stuck in a spider’s web, a spider that eventually eats poor Tom Thumb. Yet, his legend lives on.
“Tom Thumb,” was passed on orally until it was written down in the 1600s.
Tom might have been a teeny, tiny, little man, but he influenced King Arthur, a great king who is a giant of British folklore. Tom managed fit fully into the life at the court of King Arthur and he mingled with the Knights of the Round Table, those legendary warriors who would set off to find the Holy Grail, as an equal. Tom found a home in the world of big people.
The early versions of this story were passed on between ordinary people in the form of songs. Those minstrels and story tellers, who passed it on, used poetry and meter to help them remember the tale and to tell it in a memorable way.
However, there are other stories that we consider to be folktales that did not develop out of the oral tales. The story of Thumbelina sounds just like a folktale, but instead of being passed on through the centuries by ordinary folks, this story comes out of the mind of a Danish writer of children books, Hans Christian Andersen.
It goes like this:
Thumbelina
There was once a woman who wished with all her heart to have a little child. She tried various folk ways, but nothing worked, so finally, she goes to a fairy. The fairy gives her a barleycorn to put in a flower pot. To her surprise, the barleycorn grows into a small girl who she names Thumbelina. They call the girl Tiny for short. This girl is hardly half as long as a thumb and she has a sublime singing voice.
One day, a toad hears her sing. The toad thinks the little girl will make a great wife for his son, so late one night he breaks into her chamber and steals her. The toad leaves her on a lily leaf. Luckily a fish gnaws through its stem and she floating far downstream, getting away from her toad husband-to-be. A bug plucks her off the leaf and puts her in the forest. However, she is lost and far, far away from home. She wanders around, trying to find her way back. Eventually it becomes winter. Cold and hungry, she comes to the home of a field mouse.
The mouse, being a friendly fellow, welcomes her in. The mouse has a neighbor, a mole that visits them. The mouse asks Tiny to sing for them and her voice is so beautiful, so bewitching, that the mole, poor fellow, falls in love with her. The mole dug a long passage under the earth, which leads from the hole of the field-mouse to that of the mole. One day, tiny and the mouse walked in the passage and in one room they find a dead swallow, lit by sun from a hole in the ceiling, probably where the bird fell through.
The mole just pushes the dead bird aside, but that night, Thumbelina comes back to the bird and puts a carpet of hay over it. Perhaps because she is also a singer, she hugs the bird and thanks it for his beautiful songs. Suddenly she opens her eyes. She feels a thumping, lub-dub-lub-dub-lub-dub, in the bird’s chest. A thought flashes through her mind:
“The bird is still alive.”
The bird was only benumbed from the cold. Her warmth restored him to life.
The swallow is much larger than Thumbelina and it frightens her a little. When it comes to, the bird thanks her. Thumbelina nurses him back to health throughout the winter. Finally spring comes and the earth warms. The swallow says:
“Farewell, then, pretty little maiden.”
Then it flies off into the great blue yonder.
Tiny stares after him and her eyes begin to tear. She liked the bird very much, but the mouse was pressuring her to marry the mole.
Tiny cried and declared determinedly that she will never marry the abominable mole. However, the mouse, showing his true colors, threatens to bite her if she does not agree. Poor Tiny agrees and they fix a wedding day. That day the mole will fetch her and take her away to live with him deep under the earth. She might never see the sun and experience its sweet warm glow again.
On the fateful day, Tiny stretches out her arm towards the sun and says:
“Farewell bright sun.”
She sees a small spot in the sky and as it comes closer, she sees it is the swallow. He offers to fly her away from there. She says:
“You and me, baby, it’s us against the world, fly or die.” (Not really, but that’s just my imagination adding some spice to the story).
She jumps on his back and they fly off, soaring over the forests, the sea, and high above the mountains — “Free Bird, baby.”
Eventually they come to a blue lake, where a beautiful palace, built long ago out of white marble, stands in the deep shade of green trees, next to the water.
The swallow flies down and drops Tiny on one of the lovely flowers there. In the middle of the flower she finds a tiny little white man, a white man as transparent as if he was made of crystal.
The weird little white man has a crown made of gold on his head and delicate wings at his shoulders. He is not much larger than Tiny herself. She learns that he is the angel of the flower. According to the story, there lives a tiny little man and a tiny little woman in every flower. He, however, is the king of them all. At first he is afraid of the swallow, but when he sees Tiny, he is delighted.
He takes the gold crown from his head and places it on hers. She smiles and he asks her name. She introduces herself and, clearly smitten, he asks if she will be his wife, and become queen of all the flowers. Even though he is a little pale, she says yes.
All the flowers open, and out of each one walk a teeny, tiny, little lady or a teeny, tiny, little lord. They all bring Tiny a present. The best gift is a pair of beautiful wings, which belonged to a large white fly. They fastened the wings to Tiny’s shoulders so that she can fly from flower to flower with them.
The spirit of the flowers says:
“You must not be called Tiny anymore. It is an ugly name, and you are so very pretty. We will call you Maia.”
The swallow says farewell and flies back to Denmark. There, he has a nest over the window of a house in which the writer of this fairy tale lives. The swallow sings his song:
“Tweet, tweet, tweet.”
He sings the whole story and the writer takes it down, and that is how we know what happened to Thumbelina, the queen of the flowers.
The End
The lesson I learn from this story is that we should be kind to others, because if we treat them well, they might help us in turn. However, you should not be kind to others just to see if you will get something from it. Be kind anyway.
According to Hans Christian Andersen, who wrote this and many other classic stories, the swallow told him the tale. Luckily for us the writer understood what the bird said in his song. However he came to it, there is a difference between Anderson’s stories and the folktales that, for example, the Grimm Brothers wrote down. Andersen took the motifs of common fairy tales and created his own stories. His stories are not folktales, because they came from the mind of one writer, and a terrific writer at that, rather than coming from a long tradition of oral and folk tales told from generation to generation.
Whereas Tom Thumb is an active protagonist, that is main character, Thumbelina is always shown as a fragile girl, a girl who is forced into difficult circumstances where other creatures try to take advantage of her. The toad and the mouse and the mole did not respect her wishes. Yet, through her kindness she makes some friends who help her. She must have been very beautiful, because the toad, the mole, and the little flower king want to marry her or marry her off without first getting to know her. Despite being a delicate and dainty dame, the little people give Tiny the name Maia, which is the Roman earth goddess of spring, a powerful female figure.
Goddesses are powerful, so perhaps Thumbelina also become more powerful, with her wings and her prince, after the story as we know it ends.
Both the little heroes in these yarns find a place where they fit in. However, they find very different places. Tom Thumb becomes a knight and finds a home between the bigger people. In contrast, Thumbelina finds her place among people who are as small as she. Her prince is just the right size for her.
We too sometimes feel like we don’t fit in the world around us. The problems we encounter might also seem humungous, just like giants. Sometimes we can feel very small, like David facing the giant Goliath in the classic Biblical tale, where David, a young shepherd boy, kills Goliath, the great Philistine warrior, by flinging a stone from his sling right between the behemoth’s eyes, killing him cold. When we come up against big problems and challenging situations, it is good to remember stories like Tom Thumb and Thumbelina, stories that remind us that little people can do mighty deeds in this great big world that we live in. These stories also remind us that sometimes when the heroes get stuck, there are often helpers who can look out for them and aid them in their plight. .
I, however, have encountered problems where there was nobody to help me. Sometimes those who are supposed to love and help us, let us down, and there are sometimes nobody who is willing to help us, sometimes there is no cavalry coming to save the day. At times like that, you can only turn to God and ask for His help. At times like that it is a good idea to have a good relationship with God, so that you are in a better condition to face adversity, take it on, and triumph.
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Bibliography
Harvey, H.B. (2017). A Children’s Guide to Folklore and Wonder Tales. The Teaching Company. Chantilly.
