Hop-o'-My-Thumb

Hop-o'-My-Thumb is one of the tales Charles Perrault collected in 1697 in the volume that became known as Tales of Mother Goose. The book was written in Louis XIV's France to be read in fashionable salons, but it grew out of stories passed around among peasants, told by the fire on winter nights. Perrault polished the language, added irony, and ended the tales with a moral, but he kept the people's fears: hunger, abandonment, and the monster that eats children.

The story that follows is easy to summarize and hard to forget. Seven brothers are taken into the forest by their own parents and find their way back thanks to the smallest, who impresses no one with his size but thinks faster than everyone else. That boy is Hop-o'-My-Thumb, and this fairy tale is, at heart, the story of how cunning defeats strength. There isn't a single fairy in the plot, just an ogre, a forest, and plenty of hunger, but the genre has carried that name since those days.

Once upon a time, a woodcutter and his wife had seven sons. The oldest was ten, and the youngest was seven. The boys had been born practically one after another, and the household was always stretched thin: many mouths, little food, the day's earnings spent before nightfall. Any family that has ever divided a plate of rice among many siblings will recognize the scene.

The youngest came into the world tiny, no bigger than a thumb, which earned him the nickname that gives the story its title. He rarely spoke, so his family decided he was foolish. They were wrong. He listened to everything and remembered it all, and his reputation as a fool would become a disguise. Nobody suspects someone who seems to understand nothing.

Then came a year of poor harvests and hunger throughout the region. The woodcutter and his wife could no longer feed their children, and at night, after the boys went to bed, they discussed what seemed unthinkable: taking them into the forest and leaving them there, so they wouldn't have to watch their children die before their eyes.

Hop-o'-My-Thumb wasn't asleep. Hidden beneath his father's little stool, he heard the whole conversation and spent the rest of the night thinking. The story doesn't have the boy cry or beg. He calculates. That quality sets him apart from other child heroes and lays the groundwork for everything that follows.