Jack And His Comrades

Jack and His Comrades — A Wexford Tale of Animal Companions and Roadside Robbers

“Jack and his Comrades” is one of the best-loved animal-companion folktales in the Anglo-Irish repertoire. Patrick Kennedy first preserved the story for print in his foundational collection Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (London & Dublin: Macmillan, 1866), where it opens the Munster section. Kennedy heard the tale orally in County Wexford during the 1830s and 1840s from peasant tradition-bearers around New Ross, his birthplace, and recorded it in the warm vernacular of his informants — the lilt and rhythm of Hiberno-English as it was actually spoken on hearths in the post-Famine south-east. A generation later Joseph Jacobs reprinted the story, with light Anglicising touches but with Kennedy’s narrative voice essentially intact, in Celtic Fairy Tales (London: David Nutt, 1892), giving it global circulation. In the international tale-type system established by Antti Aarne, expanded by Stith Thompson, and revised by Hans-Jörg Uther in The Types of International Folktales (FFC 284, Helsinki, 2004), this is a textbook example of ATU 130, “The Animals in Night Quarters” — the same tale-type that produced the Brothers Grimm’s celebrated Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten (KHM 27, 1819) and dozens of cognates from Norway to Sicily to Korea.

What makes the Irish version distinctive is its frame: this is not a story about cast-off, world-weary domestic animals fleeing the slaughterhouse, as in the German Bremen Town Musicians. It is a story about a young Irish lad named Jack who leaves a hungry widow’s cottage in the lean season “till the new potatoes would be fit for eating,” chooses his mother’s blessing over her curse, and gathers four wandering animal souls along the road — each rescued from a particular distress — into a kind of mutual-aid fellowship. Read against the historical backdrop of the 1840s Great Hunger and its aftermath, the tale’s preoccupations with hunger, leaving, providence, and the kindness one stranger shows another acquire a sober ethical weight that is largely absent in the Continental versions.

Provenance, Manuscript History, and Comparative Apparatus

Patrick Kennedy (1801–1873), a New Ross schoolmaster turned Dublin bookseller, was the first systematic field-collector of Wexford folklore. His Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts (1866), The Banks of the Boro (1867), and Evenings in the Duffrey (1869) preserved the largest body of Hiberno-English folk narrative recorded in the nineteenth century outside the Gaeltacht. The 1866 first edition prints “Jack and his Comrades” as the opening tale of the “Household Stories” section (pp. 5–11), with no critical apparatus, since Kennedy presented his work for a popular reading public rather than scholarly philologists. Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916), the Australian-born Anglo-Jewish folklorist who would later edit Folk-Lore and the Jewish Encyclopedia, reprinted the tale as Tale XII of Celtic Fairy Tales (1892) with a brief headnote acknowledging Kennedy’s collection and pointing readers toward the broader European parallels.

The comparative apparatus is unusually rich. The most famous cognate is, of course, Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten, KHM 27 in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1819 ed., having been added to the second edition from a Paderborn-area informant). Norwegian readers will recognize Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe’s De syv folene (“The Seven Foals”) and the closely related Sauen og bjørnen; Russian collections preserve “Зимовье зверей” (“The Animals’ Winter Quarters”), recorded by Alexander Afanasyev in Russian Fairy Tales (1855–1863); Italian tradition has the Sicilian Lu zù Lupu e li ‘mmigghi. Antti Aarne, in his original 1910 monograph, proposed an Asian origin for ATU 130 because Tibetan, Mongolian, and Korean variants — including the early-modern Korean 호랑이와 곶감 (“The Tiger and the Dried Persimmon”) — preserve elements that look more archaic than the European forms. Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (rev. ed. Indiana University Press, 1955–1958) catalogues the relevant motifs as K1161 (Animals hidden in various parts of the house attack the owner), N776 (Light seen from tree-top at night), and B296 (Animals go a-journeying). Tom Peete Cross’s Motif-Index of Early Irish Literature (Indiana UP, 1952) lists the Irish onomastic and motivic peculiarities — the bog-rescue, the blessing-versus-curse choice, the nighttime ambush by Whiteboy-style robbers — as Irish elaborations of the international type.

The Mother’s Choice, the Bog, and the Beginning of the Road

The tale opens with the formulaic Irish opening — “Once there was a poor widow, as often there has been” — that Kennedy heard around the hearths of southern Wexford and that Yeats, Lady Gregory, and Synge would later imitate. The widow has one son, the summer is “scarce,” and the family will not survive until the new potato crop is fit for eating. Jack therefore asks his mother to bake his cake and kill his hen so that he can leave to seek his fortune. The first ethical pivot of the tale follows immediately: Jack’s mother offers him a choice between half the cake and half the hen with her blessing, or the whole of them with her curse. Jack answers, in the famous Wexford idiom Kennedy preserves, “O musha, mother, why do you ax me that question? sure you know I wouldn’t have your curse and Damer’s estate along with it.” (Damer was a proverbially rich Tipperary money-lender of the eighteenth century; the phrase “Damer’s estate” appears across south-Leinster proverb-lore as a benchmark for absolute wealth.) The mother gives him the whole portion plus her thousand blessings, and stands on the yard fence to bless him as far as her eyes can see.

The choice between blessing and curse, framed as a binary that the dutiful son must make under conditions of hunger, is one of the deep narrative architectures of the Indo-European fairy tale. Reidar Th. Christiansen’s The Migratory Legends (FFC 175, Helsinki, 1958) records the “mother’s blessing” motif (M412.1) across Norwegian, Swedish, Scottish-Gaelic, and Irish corpora. In the Irish tradition specifically, the choice carries the weight of the dúchas — the inheritance of right relation between parent and child that the Brehon Law tracts (Senchas Már, c. eighth century) treat as a foundational social bond. Jack’s choice of half-with-blessing over whole-with-curse is, structurally, the moral act that earns him every subsequent piece of luck.

On the road Jack passes a peat bog where a poor ass has sunk to his shoulders trying to reach a tuft of grass. “Ah, then, Jack asthore” — Hiberno-English from Irish a stór, “my treasure” — “help me out or I’ll be drowned.” Jack pitches in stones and sods until the ass stands on solid ground; the ass thanks him and asks to come along. The pattern is set: each animal Jack rescues becomes a comrade. Next comes a hound being driven away with stones because his teeth are too old to hunt; then a half-starved tom-cat; then a lordly red rooster who has just escaped a pot. Each animal joins the company on the explicit terms of mutual benefit — “who knows what luck we may have!”

The Robbers’ House and the Storm of Animal Cries

Caught in nightfall, the company sees a light deep in a forest and approaches it. The classic ATU 130 ambush sequence then unfolds, but with distinctively Irish details: the donkey looks in through the window and sees four robbers counting out their gold on a table, weapons hanging from the rafters. The four animals stack themselves vertically — donkey at the bottom, hound on his back, cat on the hound’s back, rooster on the cat’s head — and at Jack’s signal they bray, bay, mew, and crow in unison through the window. The robbers, taking the racket for an army of supernatural creatures or the Sídhe themselves come to claim the house, flee into the wood, leaving the gold, the weapons, and the supper on the table.

The robbers in Kennedy’s text are not simply generic European bandits. They speak in Wexford rural English, swear “by the powers” and “musha,” and behave like the agrarian secret-societies — Whiteboys, Rockites, Ribbonmen — that haunted the rural roads of pre-Famine Ireland. Patrick Kennedy was writing only twenty years after the Tithe War and the first Whiteboy outbreaks of the 1820s and 1830s; his readers would have read the four robbers as folkloric refractions of a very real social anxiety. The tale gives the lawful traveller and his beasts a satisfying triumph over the lawless “boys” who terrorised the country lanes — a small comedic vindication of an Ireland trying to put the violent decades behind it.

One robber returns at night to scout the house. In the dark he reaches into the fireplace for the embers; the cat scratches him; he stumbles backward into the dog who bites his leg; he falls into the donkey who kicks him into the yard; and the rooster crows “cock-a-doodle-do” from the rafters. The robber returns to his fellows in the forest and tells them the house is full of demons: a witch with claws, a shoemaker with a hot awl, a smith with a hammer, and a little man on the roof who keeps shouting “Throw him up to me-do! Throw him up to me-do!” The robbers flee for good, and Jack and his comrades own the house and the gold. The pattern of the four-animal stack and the misidentified attacks is the international ATU 130 sequence as catalogued by Uther 2004 (vol. I, pp. 84–86), but the cock’s onomatopoeic “throw him up to me-do” — punning on the rural Hiberno-English imperative — is a distinctively Irish flourish absent in Grimm.

Home, the Mother, and the Closing Frame

Jack divides the gold, sends some home to his widowed mother by a passing tinker, and in the spring returns to her cottage with his comrades and the rest of the treasure. The widow’s house is mended, the new potatoes are dug, the hen is replaced ten times over, and the four animals live out their days as honoured pensioners of the household. The closing formula — “and they all lived happy and died happy, and never drank out of a dry cappy” — is the Wexford conclusio Kennedy heard at multiple firesides, “cappy” being a small drinking-cup. Joseph Jacobs in 1892 retains the closing intact, recognising it as a signature of the Hiberno-English tradition.

The tale’s ethical architecture is now complete. Jack’s small original mercies on the road — to a stuck donkey, a beaten hound, a starving cat, a doomed rooster — return to him, by the operation of folk-tale providence, as physical safety, material wealth, and restored family. His mother’s blessing covers him as far as she can see; beyond that, it is his own kindness to suffering creatures that carries him. In the Irish moral imagination this is not coincidence but cinneamhain, the just unfolding of the world for those who choose blessing over curse and mercy over indifference.

Moral and Closing Reflection

“An té a bhíonn carthanach lena chomharsain, beidh an chomharsanacht carthanach leis.”
— Old Irish proverb (translation: “He who is kind to his neighbour, the neighbourhood will be kind to him.”)

The moral the storyteller leaves with the listener is plain: the small kindness paid forward to the helpless creature on the side of the road becomes, in time, the great kindness that comes back to you when you most need it. Jack does not set out to be heroic. He simply refuses to walk past a drowning donkey, a beaten dog, a hungry cat, a frightened bird. Those four small refusals to walk past — what the philosopher Iris Murdoch would later call “the fabric of being” — assemble themselves into the fellowship that defeats the robbers, fills the empty cottage, and brings the lean year to a close.

Why This Tale Has Lasted

“Jack and his Comrades” has lasted nearly two centuries in oral and printed Irish tradition, and many centuries beyond that as ATU 130, because it solves three problems at once that older narrative cultures had to solve. It explains, in narrative form, why kindness to animals is good; it dramatizes, in comic form, the triumph of the lawful poor over the lawless armed; and it offers, in the figure of the four mismatched comrades, a working model of mutual aid — a fellowship of beings none of whom could have prospered alone. The story belongs equally to the schoolroom and to the hearth. Children love the noise of the four-animal stack and the rout of the robbers; adults recognise, beneath the comedy, a small moral grammar of how a decent life is actually lived. The widow’s son who chooses blessing over curse, and who pulls a stranger out of a bog because no one else will, is one of the durable folk-figures of the Irish moral imagination — the secular cousin of the saints whose lives Kennedy and his contemporaries also collected. He survives because the choices he embodies are still the choices that matter.