Tom Thumb
Once upon a time, there was a great king named Arthur. He is one of the greatest of the great English heroes, and legend says that he was very good at pulling swords out of stones, and not so good at communicating effectively with his wife Guinevere and good friend Sir Lancelot. But this story is not about them. This story is about Thomas, and it may contain a great amount of violence that could potentially not be appropriate for those over the age of one hundred.
A man - not Thomas - lived in the country in the fifth century; that is to say, during Arthurian times when the Saxons were trying to invade, and long before the 17th century’s arrival of the Enlightenment, which has no relevance to this story, but is important to know about nonetheless. This man, Phil, lived with his wife Maude, and they were not happy.
Their cottage was cozy. Their bellies were full of rich food and fine drink. But they were not happy. They had no baby. Some people get unhappy after they have a baby because sometimes some babies are horrible and refuse to do their chores or treat people nice. But they didn’t have a bad baby. They simply had no baby.
Maude went off to work every day at the mill. Phil stayed home and did a few chores, and then wept. He was very sad about not having a child, and got bored easily, as he did little else besides chores, crying, and having his wife play with his hair on long summer evenings.
Upon a certain non-summer day in which Maude was working a double shift, a fairy was flying by and chanced upon the weeping man. She was a kind-hearted fairy, as fairies in that particular part of Britain often were at that time, and she was also a Queen, and she, for some particular reason, knew that Phil and Maude were good folk and that they would make good parents, and she took pity as she listened to Phil crying:
“I just want kids...maybe three or four, but I’d be happy with even one. Just one. And he doesn’t even have to be big. He could be a little guy...even if he were no bigger than my thumb.”
Now Phil had plenty of time to think and weep and so he was sort of just saying these things out loud, but the fairy processed this idea and decided to grant this wish.
A lot of stories and films spend loads of rubbish time on necessary details and we won’t do that here, so skipping ahead a few hours, what we have is Maude walking through the front door after a long day of work, and what does she find?
Phil. She finds Phil, who leaning against their kitchen table with a wry smile on his face; a wry smile of total contentment and happiness.
“What’s going on honey?” she says as she steps through the threshhold; the threshhold being something that ordinary folks do literally and heroes do figuratively.
“NO!!!” he screams as her foot is poised in the air. “Look out!”
She is so surprised that she lurches forward and falls, twisting her hip terribly and hitting her left leg so hard that a small hairline fracture opens up on her tibia; a fact she is not aware of until later, at which point she ends up missing a great deal of work, which is not paid time off.
Phil rushes forward to help…
...and rushes right past her. Toward something on the ground. Right inside the thresh hold. It’s a nut. A walnut. He picks it up carefully and cradles it.
“What is going on, Phil?” she winces as she assesses her body’s damage.
“I wanted to surprise you,” he grins. “No big deal...Except we have us a kid now. I thought we could name him either Pupa or Thomas. Do you have a preference?”
So excited, she forgets her pain and gets up, and then immediately collapses because it turns she sprained her right ankle moments before. Tears of painful joy, and joyful pain, engulf her face and drip their way onto the stone floor, joining the pool of blood from the gash on her forehead which was previously unnoticed.
“I...I’m so happy,” she murmurs before fainting, partially from happiness, but mostly from blood loss; which is what happens when a femoral artery is severed, which was another side effect of the spill she took. Phil, at that point, faints as well, partially from happiness, and mostly from the smell of blood, which he does not handle well.
We’ll skip ahead a bit more, because there is some recovery involved, and obviously considering the state of medicine during the Middle Ages, the chances of Maude recovering from her injuries is scant. But she does recover well enough to have a party. They invite their friends to meet their son, whom they’ve named Thomas. Thomas Thumb, because he’s the size of a human thumb. Thomas, because his dad’s middle name is ‘Theophilus,’ which also starts with a ‘T.’
Thomas grew up to be quite a big boy, but of course he was still very small. And mischievous. Oh, was he mischievous. His mum loved to bake after work, and you might be wondering if his dad loved to bake, and the answer is we don’t know, the history books don’t mention his dad baking.
So once upon a day, Maude is baking, and making plum pudding, and Thomas being the mischievous lad he is, he’s climbing around and falls in. He gets all mixed up in it, and through an interesting chain of events, manages to not suffocate, get eaten, or get crushed. He does, however, end up in the hands of a tinker, which is someone in olden times who tried to make money fixing things, and the tinker is walking home with this delicious plum pudding, and Thomas somehow pops up loose out of the pudding and scares the tinker a quarter to death; the tinker (Alfred) drops him in a field with fright, and that’s the end of that episode. Thomas finds his way home, and...it’s rather anticlimactic. Except the tinker has no dessert for his poor children; something he had been promising them all month. Two of his children were so disappointed and angry with their father that they didn’t speak to him for a decade, but aside from that everything turned out alright for everyone.
Very soon again, he was in trouble, and this time it was a cow. Skipping through the boring parts, we’ll just get straight to the part where Thomas gets swallowed up. Actually, that part is not that interesting either; at least not any more interesting than the times he was almost almost impaled by a violent cat, or almost drowned in a bucket of milk, or almost crushed by a furious rooster. Anyway, he’s swallowed by a cow, but he gets out. Nothing too exciting. He’s a very difficult child to take out and about.
Once upon a day after these ones though, his luck runs out. He’s in the field with Pop, and an eagle flies along, snatches him up, and takes Thomas in his - historians believe it was a he, but this has been a subject of great debate - beak and eventually dumps him in a giant giant’s castle.
Coincidentally, the giant is walking along the ramparts and picks up what he thinks is a baby bird, which are one of his favourite snacks. This also leads us to question the relationship between the eagle and the giant. Why would the eagle be bringing a baby bird for the giant to eat? Did they have a quid pro quo sort of relationship where they each did some sort of favor for the other? What was in it for the eagle? We don’t know, but I’m not afraid to conjecture. But that’s for another time.
Sadly, the giant does eat Thomas. Or rather...the giant - and his name was Cory - stuffed Thomas into his mouth, as he was not averse to eating small children, although he had never done so before. But this is where Tom’s pluckiness paid off: he fought, scratched, kicked, gagged, and pooped until the giant spit him out; apparently doing so before taking a chomp, which could have ended the whole struggle then and there. As an aside, it is important to chew your food thoroughly, a well-known fact that the giant should have learned from his parents, which leads me to believe that he may have had an unsatisfying childhood in which he was not taught some of those basic things, which leads me to possess a certain degree of sympathy for Cory.
But because Thomas is our protagonist, we are glad he has leaped out and survived.
Cory picks him up and, apparently impressed by the boy’s pluck gently hurls him into the sea. What does Cory think will happen? Who knows? Anyway, Thomas ends up getting swallowed by a fish by the name of Burton.
Now Burton has his whole life story which is fascinating in and of itself, and involves a wonderful romance off the coast of what is now Sri Lanka, but this is not his story, and if it was, this is where his story ends. Short version is that he’s caught by a fisherwoman. Caught, as in killed for food. Burton is such a beautiful fish, even in death, that she is compelled to present it (him) as a gift to her king. That king being…
King Arthur. Yes. The King Arthur. Arthur says thanks, what a beautiful fish, let’s eat it for supper! And sends it off to be cooked. Back in the kitchen - and it gets super exciting here - the cook is cutting open poor Burton - who fortunately is dead at this point - and out pops Thomas!
This is a surprising happenstance, to the degree that the cook shrieks in fright, trips backwards, and accidentally drops the knife on his foot, severing the middle toe of his right foot. This is the second time in Thomas’s life that something like this has happened after he startled someone. The cook is crying and screaming, which is understandable, and everyone starts showing up, including King Arthur - who hasn’t been to the kitchen for three years - and imagine their surprise to find nine-toed cook screaming and...the littlest man they’ve ever seen.
Thomas has dirt and blood all over, so he asks for some water to bathe in; a concept that was almost but not completely foreign at this point in the Fifth Century.
After everyone is cleaned up, except for King Arthur, who loathed a bathe of any sort, a feast is held, and Thomas is the guest of honor. Everyone falls in love with the little fellow and his lively sense of physical humor and adroit, although not always appropriate, wit.
Eventually Thomas became a great favourite of King Arthur’s court, although Gawain was never a big fan, and he did much good throughout his life, and he was good to his parents. For the most part.
Phil, his dad, lived to the ripe old age of 32 and eventually died in his sleep from natural causes. The natural cause being that Thomas went for a surprise visit to see his parents and woke them both up at midnight, knowing they would be overjoyed to see him. They would have been, but they were so surprised that Phil fell backwards off his side of the bed, where he had unfortunately placed Excalibur, King Arthur’s sword that he graciously had loaned Phil for the week to admire and play with. Short version is, don’t sleep with swords facing the wrong way by your bed. Maude was so surprised that she slipped out on the other side, and was fine, accept for dislocating her other hip - the one that was still working fine - and she survived, but she was never able to walk again. But for everyone else, there were happy endings, and several of them lived into the golden years of their early 40s.
True story.
The End.
[Original source material: France]