“Hardy Hardhead” is an Appalachian tale about a boy, who with the help of some supernatural companions and a flying boat, out-tricks a witch and lifts the witch’s curse from a king’s daughter. Prominent in the Appalachian regions of North Carolina and Virginia, “Hardy Hardhead” is considered one of the “Jack tales,” a group of stories featuring the famed Jack from the European fairy tale Jack and the Beanstalk.
American folklorist Richard Chase reveals in The Jack Tales, first published in 1943, that for the settlers of the Appalachian region, and particularly the Beech Mountain community where he conducted the bulk of his research, the Jack tales served the practical purpose of keeping children busy at certain tasks that were a necessary part of life on a farm. Tasks like “stringing” and “threading” beans were communal jobs, and a group of children would gather for the work around at least one adult storyteller. This custom entertained the children and made them more productive.
Chase also contends that there is a difference between the English and American characterizations of Jack, the English one being confident and adventurous and the American one being casual and unaffected. As a folklorist, though, Chase is particularly interested in how the Jack tales represent the mountain society: “Most notable about the Jack tales is their cycle form: It is always through the ‘little feller’ Jack that we participate in the dreams, desires, ambitions, and experiences of a whole people” (Chase 1943, xi).
The “Hardy Hardhead” story itself is not about Hardy Hardhead, but Jack. In fact, Hardy Hardhead does not figure that prominently in the tale. He is one among many superhuman characters that Jack meets on his journey to save the king’s daughter. The story seems to be a combination of the European folktales “How Six Men Got On in the World” and “The Land and Water Ship,” which are tale types 513A and 513B, respectively, from the Aarne-Thompson folklore classification system. Versions of the story can be seen in Europe but also in the Cajun and Creole regions of the United States as well as the coastal Atlantic regions of Canada. According to Stith Thompson, the “six men” story and the “land and water ship” story can be found as a single tale in Welsh literature as early as the eleventh century and had been adapted by Italian authors Giovanni Sercambi in the fourteenth century and Giambattista Basile in the seventeenth, as well as by French author Madame d’Aulnoy in the late seventeenth century. Thompson also says there are clues to suggest the story came to Europe through India, it having appeared in Buddhist writings and Indian folklore collections (Thompson 1977, 54).
In the version recorded in Chase’s The Jack Tales, Jack never meets the king’s daughter and seems far more motivated by the challenge of “out-tricking” the witch. When he and his brothers Tom and Will (ongoing characters in many of the Jack tales) hear that the girl has been “enchanted” and that the king is offering her hand in marriage to any man who can break the enchantment, each of them try to break the spell. Both Tom and Will meet an old man along their journeys who asks each of them to share their food. Both of them are unwilling to share, and then both are also unsuccessful when they later try to defeat the witch.
When Jack goes on his journey to conquer the witch, he also meets the old man on the road, but Jack offers to share his food right away. Jack is rewarded when his food and drink are transformed in both quantity and quality. The stranger then gives him a thousand dollars in gold and a magic boat that can travel on land. The old man also offers Jack advice: he should take every man he meets on his journey into his boat because he will need all the help he can get to overcome the witch.
The first man Jack meets after his encounter with the old man is the title character, Hardy Hardhead, who can bust boulders with his head. The successive men he meets, Eatwell, Drinkwell, Runwell, Harkwell, Seewell, and Shootwell, have the abilities to do each of the skills that their names suggest, but they are able to do them at a superhuman level. They all get inside Jack’s boat, and when they reach the witch, they manage to beat her in every challenge she puts before them. Both the witch and Jack must lay down a thousand dollars with each challenge, but the winner of each challenge receives all the money, so Jack also accumulates gold each time. The game ends when Runwell wins the last challenge by outrunning the witch and kicking her into the middle of the ocean.
The curse is lifted from the king’s daughter, but the narrator confesses that he doesn’t know whether or not Jack marries the daughter. Jack does return to the place where he met the old man and pays back the gold the old man lent him. In the end, Jack wins both because of his sense of adventure and because of his kindness, as the only one among his brothers who was willing to share his meager food with a stranger.
Kelly D. Whiddon
See also European Sources; Folklore and Folktales; Jack Tales
Further Reading
Chase, Richard. 1943. The Jack Tales. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Haley, Grace. 1992. Mountain Jack Tales. New York: Dutton Juvenile.
McCarthy, William Bernard, Cheryl Oxford, and Joseph Daniel Sobol. 1994. Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Perdue, Charles, ed. 1987. Outwitting the Devil: Jack Tales from Wise County Virginia. Santa Fe, NM: Ancient City Press.
Thompson, Stith. 1977. The Folktale. Berkeley: University of California Press.