Jack and his Comrades
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Jack and his Comrades is an Irish fairy tale collected by Joseph Jacobs, listing as his source Patrick Kennedy's Legendary Fictions of the Irish Celts.
[edit] Synopsis
Jack tells his mother he will seek his fortune. His mother offers him half a hen and half a cake with her blessing, or the whole of both without; he asks for the halves and is given the whole of both, with her blessing. On his way, he meets a donkey in a bog and helps it out. A dog runs up to him for protection, with a pot tied to its tail and a crowd hunting it; the donkey bellows and scares them off and Jack unties the pot. He shares his meal with the dog, while the donkey eats thistles; a half-starved cat comes by, and Jack gives it a bone with meat. In the evening, they rescue a rooster from a fox.
They go to sleep in the woods. The rooster crows, claiming to see dawn, and Jack realizes that it's a candle in a house. They go to it, and realize it is a robbers' den. Jack has all the animals make noise at once and himself shouts orders to destroy them all, frightening off the robbers. Jack and the animals eat and go to sleep. The captain of the robbers, realizing what they had left behind, try to sneak back, but the animals attack him, and the other robbers are frightened off by his story.
The lord they had robbed drives by the next day. Jack greets him and tells him the porter let the robbers in. The porter, in denying it, lets slip that he knew how many there were. Jack says he has his gold and silver. The lord makes him his steward, and Jack brings his mother to the castle to live.
[edit] Commentary
The big and the little cakes are a common motif, although Jack is unusual in having no older brothers; preferring the smaller cake is often the distinguishing mark of the youngest child, as in The King Of Lochlin's Three Daughters, The Adventures of Covan the Brown-haired, and The Girl and the Dead Man.
Jacobs cited this as a parallel of the Town Musicians of Bremen.
