The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales

• The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales
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fractured fairy tales

fractured fairy tales
are traditional fairy tales, rearranged to create new plots with fundamentally different meanings or messages. Fractured fairy tales are closely related to fairy‐tale parodies, but the two serve different purposes: parodies mock individual tales and the genre as a whole; fractured fairy tales, with a reforming intent, seek to impart updated social and moral messages.

Changes made to the English tales about Jack and the giants offer a case in point. In its original chapbook versions, a plucky hero killed a series of (usually cannibalistic) giants, and afterwards enriched himself with their treasures. In the modern reformulation ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, Jack's thievery proceeds piecemeal, first the giant's gold, then his golden egg‐laying hen, and finally his magical golden harp. Like earlier man‐eating giants, the Beanstalk giant also relishes human flesh:

Fee, Fi, Fo, Fum,
I...

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