“Babes in the Woods” exists both as a ballad and as a folktale. The ballad seems to be the earliest published version, but the tale tells quite a different story than the original ballad, bearing a resemblance to the classic fairy tale “Hansel and Gretel.”
This scene from Babes in the Wood dates from 1878. Drawn originally from English sources which bear striking similarities to Hansel and Gretel, the American versions of the abandoned children motif found fertile soil in Appalachia and the Ozarks. Folklorists collected various versions in the mid-twentieth century, and popular renditions of the tale have included a silent film, a Disney version, and a play. (Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)
The ballad “Children in the Wood” was first published as an anonymous broadside in Norwich, England, in 1595. It tells the story of two children who are left in the care of their uncle. The uncle hires two men to kill the children so he can have the children’s inheritance. One of the men is merciful and spares the children, but he later abandons them in the forest. There they die, and robins cover them with leaves. This song eventually made its way to North America, where it appears in Appalachia, the Ozarks, and several other areas of the United States, sometimes titled “Babes in the Wood” or “The Two Lost Babes.”
The North American folktale, while it shares the theme of abandoned children, tells a different and much more complex story, and several different versions exist. The earliest, collected by James Taylor Adams in 1940, is about a widower with two children, a boy and a girl. The widower remarries, and his new wife does not care for the children and decides to get rid of them. To justify this, she begins to hide all of the food in the house so that the family is soon starving. She persuades her husband that it is better to leave the children in the forest, where someone might find them and care for them, than for the whole family to starve. Her husband is reluctant but finally agrees. The family starts out into the forest on the pretext of gathering ginseng, taking along some parched corn to eat. The young boy, however, is suspicious, and drops his corn along the way to mark their path. When the children’s father and his wife finally leave them, saying they are going farther to find food, the children follow the corn and return home.
The next day the family again goes into the woods in search of ginseng. This time they carry a small amount of bread to eat. The boy marks the path once again, but birds eat the breadcrumbs, and the children lose the path when their father deserts them. They wander until they find a small hut, occupied by a witch who invites them in. She puts them in a cage and gives them food. The children discover that she is fattening them up for her to eat them, and that she is checking how plump they are by feeling their fingers when they put them out of the cage, since she is almost blind and cannot see the children. The resourceful boy begins to offer her small sticks instead of his fingers. His sister, however, is soon deemed plump enough to roast. The witch asks her to climb into the oven to see if it is hot enough. Although it is hot, the girl reports that it is not ready. After doing this several times, the girl asks the witch herself to climb in to test the oven. When she does, the girl slams the door on her and releases her brother. They run into the woods, where they meet their father. His wife had brought out all the hidden food, making him send her away, so he could look for his children. They return home, where there is plenty to eat, and they never see their wicked stepmother again.
In 1942, James M. Hylton collected a similar version, “The Little Babes in the Woods.” In this story, the abandoned twins are actually saved by an old woman, who then separates them and gives them to strangers to rear. Their father is never able to find them. In “The Two Lost Babes,” published in Richard Chase’s Grandfather Tales in 1948, the family actually is starving. The children, named Buck and Bess, are taken into the forest. The first day, Buck drops pebbles to mark the trail, and they find their way home. The second day, however, he drops corn, which the birds eat. They come to an old woman’s house, where a boy named Cocklepea tells them that the woman is a witch. She keeps Cocklepea with her to do her chores, but she kills other travelers. She attempts to stab the children in their beds, but they escape to a nearby cave. She finds them, but they push her into a briar patch and get away when Cocklepea dons her “clip-boots” (which go a mile at a clip) and carries Buck and Bess to the sheriff in a nearby village. Since the sheriff needs proof, the children take him to a meeting of witches where the witch confesses. She is arrested and hanged, and the children live happily ever after. In none of the American versions is the old woman’s hut made of gingerbread and other delicious things to eat, as it is in “Hansel and Gretel.”
Other North American folktales that are similar to “The Babes in the Wood” are “The Deserted Children,” “The Grumbling Old Woman,” and “Johnnie and Grizzle.” There have been several film adaptations of the story. In 1917, Chester and Sidney Franklin produced a silent film called The Babes in the Woods, which combined the Appalachian tale with “Hansel and Gretel.” In 1932, Walt Disney produced a short film with the same title as part of Disney’s Silly Symphonies. Tom Davenport produced Hansel and Gretel: An Appalachian Version, in 1975. There is also a play by R. Rex Stephenson, Two Lost Babes, based on both James Taylor Adams’s and Richard Chase’s versions of the tale.
Nancy Snell Griffith
See also Ashpet; Bunch of Laurel Blooms for a Present; Folklore and Folktales; Storytelling
Further Reading
Botkin, B. A. 1949. A Treasury of Southern Folklore. New York: Crown.
Chase, Richard. 1948. Grandfather Tales: American-English Folk Tales. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Goldberg, Christine. 2007. “Hansel and Gretel.” In Greenwood Encyclopedia of Folktales and Fairy Tales, edited by Donald Haase. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.
Jones, Loyal. Appalachian Folk Tales. Ashland, KY: Jesse Stuart Foundation.
Rivers, Micheal. 2012. Appalachia Mountain Folklore. Atglen, PA: Schiffer.