Rowland, the 'Fie, fie, foh' formula is, writes Jacobs, 'common to all English stories of giants and ogres.'[1] The formula's comparative aspect has been remarked upon in at least a few works,[2] but I think nothing has surpassed the interest of Andrew Lang's remarks[3] on the significance of the lines quoted above. He traces the formula to something analogous said by the Furies in the Eumenides of Aeschylus;[4] but Aeschylus is modern in comparison to the stage of actual anthropophagy which is reflected in the root idea of the lines. "The great prevalence of cannibalism in European Märchen seems a survival from the savage condition."[5] It may thus be taken as possible that an ogre discovering a man by the smell of human flesh is a primitive trait. The widespread occurrence of the idea alone justifies such an hypothesis; for example, in Le Petit Poucet the ogre says: "Je sens la chair fraîche, te dis-je encore une fois, reprit l'Ogre, en regardant sa femme de travers";[6] and as an Irish instance may be useful to quote, I find in the story of The King of Ireland's Son the following: "The giant came out, and he said, 'I feel the smell of the melodious lying Irishman under (i.e. in) my little sod of country.'"[7] Mr. Jacobs' remarks as to the ethnological, archaeological, as well as traditional and folklore value of the lines in relation to the Child Rowland folk-tale[8] tend to support the belief that we have in the lines quoted by Edgar the detritus of a conception that is primitive, and that is widely diffused throughout European Märchen. It is such tales Othello told to Desdemona:
Of antres vast, and deserts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven,
········
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.[9]
- ↑ Jacobs, English Fairy Tales, p. 237.
- ↑ Jones and Kropf, The Folk-Tales of the Magyars.
- ↑ A. Lang, Perrault's Tales, pp. civ.-cxi.
- ↑ Ib. p. cvii.
- ↑ Ib. p. cviii.
- ↑ Ib. p. 66.
- ↑ Hyde, Beside the Fire, p. 27.
- ↑ Jacobs, English Fairy Tales, pp. 238-245; Folk-Lore, vol. ii. pp. 182-197.
- ↑ Hart, Othello (Arden Shakespeare), Act 1. iii. 140-145.
