Fee-fi-fo-fum
"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 dead
I'll grind his bones
And get his dough.
[1]
Though the rhyme is
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]
Fy, Fa and fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman
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
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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 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
- "Fe Fi Fo Fum" is a 7" single by The Eccentics, Pye Records 7N.15850, May 1965
- "Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum" is a composition by jazz saxophonist Wayne Shorter from his 1966 album Speak No Evil
- "Fee Fi Fo" is a song by the Irish band The Cranberries, from their 1999 album Bury the Hatchet.
- "Fee Fi Fo Fum" is a song by Jack Parow, off his 2014 album Nag Van Die Pette.
- "Fee Fi Fo Fum" is a song from the 1947 Disney movie Fun and Fancy Free.
- "A fe and a fi and a fo and a fum, yo he ho and a bottle of rum", sung by Barnacle Bill in the Popeye the Sailor cartoon "Beware of Barnacle Bill" (1935)
- Ablaut reduplication
- Baba Yaga, in Slavic folklore, also detects human presence by smell.
References
- ^ ISBN 0-393-05163-3.
- ^ ISBN 9780807844434.
- ^ Hudson, Henry Norman, ed. (1856). The Complete Works of William Shakespeare: Volume IX. Boston, MA: James Munroe & Company. p. 510.
- ^ "Fie". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. The Houghton Mifflin Co. 2000. Archived from the original on 13 October 2008. Retrieved 13 November 2008.
- ^ "The Arthuriad" (PDF). p. 25 (PDF 26).
- ^ History of Jack the Giant Killer. Glasgow: Printed for the booksellers.
- ^ Mackay, Charles (1877). 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. Trübner. p. 160. Retrieved 25 August 2015.