Fie, foh, and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man.[3]
The verse in King Lear makes use of the archaic word "fie", used to express disapproval.[4] This word is used repeatedly in Shakespeare's works: King Lear shouts, "Fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!", and in Antony and Cleopatra, Mark Antony exclaims, "O fie, fie, fie!"
The earliest known printed version of the Jack the Giant-Killer tale appears in The history of Jack and the Giants (Newcastle, 1711) and this,[2][5] and later versions (found in chapbooks), include renditions of the poem, recited by the giant Thunderdell:
Fee, fau, fum,
I smell the blood of an English man,
Be alive, or be he dead,
I'll grind his bones to make my bread.[1]
Fe, Fi, Fo, Fum.
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he living, or be he dead,
I’ll grind his bones to mix my bread.[6]
Charles Mackay proposes in The Gaelic Etymology of the Languages of Western Europe that the seemingly meaningless string of syllables "Fa fe fi fo fum" is actually a coherent phrase of ancient Gaelic, and that the complete quatrain covertly expresses the Celts' cultural detestation of the invading Angles and Saxons:
Fa from faich (fa!) "behold!" or "see!"
Fe from Fiadh (fee-a) "food";
Fi from fiú "good to eat"
Fo from fogh (fó) "sufficient" and
Fum from feum "hunger".
Thus "Fa fe fi fo fum!" becomes "Behold food, good to eat, sufficient for my hunger!"[7]
"Devil's Gun", a 1977disco song by C.J. & Company that repeatedly uses the phrase "Fee Fi! Fo Fum! (You're) lookin' down the barrel of the devil's gun."
^ abTatar, Maria (2002). "Jack and the Beanstalk". The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W. W. Norton & Co. pp. 131–144. ISBN0-393-05163-3.
^ abcMcCarthy, William Bernard; Oxford, Cheryl; Sobol, Joseph Daniel, eds. (1994). Jack in Two Worlds: Contemporary North American Tales and Their Tellers (illustrated ed.). UNC Press Books. p. xv. ISBN9780807844434.
^"Fie". The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. The Houghton Mifflin Co. 2000. Archived from the original on 13 October 2008. Retrieved 13 November 2008.
