Sir Gammer Vans
"Sir Gammer Vans" is a whimsical tale that features an anonymous narrator who embarks on a surreal journey after inquiring about a woman who had drowned herself in feathers. The narrator is directed to Sir Gammer Vans, a giant bottle-maker living in a peculiar brick house. Upon meeting Sir Gammer Vans, the narrator is invited to breakfast, which includes curious dishes like sliced beer and cold veal. The story unfolds with a series of nonsensical events, such as a small dog that refuses to be hanged for a previous misdeed, and various oddities in Sir Gammer Vans's garden, where anomalies abound, like an iron apple tree and wooden switches that thresh tobacco.
As the narrator pursues a royal hunting permit, he engages in absurd hunting exploits that see a mix of mishaps, including a flying salmon and disturbed birds. The narrative, rich in contradiction and non sequitur, exemplifies the characteristics of nonsense literature, drawing on earlier folklore traditions. The tale's significance lies in its playful structure, which diverges from conventional storytelling, leaving readers both amused and perplexed. "Sir Gammer Vans" reflects the 19th-century fascination with nonsense and folklore, while its origins can be traced to earlier works that inspired its unique blend of whimsy and absurdity.
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Subject Terms
Sir Gammer Vans
Author: Joseph Jacobs
Time Period: 1851 CE–1900 CE
Country or Culture: England
Genre: Fairy Tale
PLOT SUMMARY
While sailing over mountaintops, an anonymous narrator meets two men riding on one horse. He asks them if they know whether a woman who had been hanged for drowning herself in feathers is dead. The two men plead ignorance on this matter and refer the speaker to Sir Gammer Vans, a more reliable source for information on the subject. Asking for directions, the narrator learns that the man he seeks is easy to find because he lives in a solitary brick house made of flints in the middle of several buildings just like it.
When the narrator finally meets Sir Gammer Vans, he discovers that the man is a giant and a bottle-maker. As such, Sir Gammer Vans makes his appearance as all giant bottle-makers do—by jumping out of a tiny bottle situated behind the door of his home. Sir Gammer Vans invites the narrator to join him for a breakfast of sliced beer and cold veal in a cup. A small dog eats the crumbs that fall from the table.
The narrator demands that Sir Gammer Vans hang the dog under the table. The giant declines because the dog had killed a hare the day before. He offers to prove it to the narrator by showing him the hare, alive, in a basket that he keeps out in his yard. They commence to walk through Sir Gammer Vans’s garden, a place teeming with wonders including a fox hatching eagle’s eggs, an iron apple tree bearing pears and lead, and wooden switches threshing tobacco.
The threshing switches become so agitated at the approach of the narrator and Sir Gammer Vans that a plug of tobacco hurls through the garden wall and blasts a hole through a dog. The narrator jumps the gate, turns the dog inside out, and proceeds to follow Sir Gammer Vans to a deer park. The narrator produces a royal warrant permitting him to shoot venison for the crown’s table and commences to shoot at a herd of deer.
The narrator breaks several ribs by shooting his arrow, but whether they are his own or his target’s remains unclear. Regardless, the speaker loses his arrow only to recover it in the hollow of a tree where he disturbs a covey of partridges living in a beehive. The narrator fires at the birds and kills several of them as well as a flying salmon from which he makes an apple pie.
SIGNIFICANCE
The American folklorist Joseph Jacobs included “Sir Gammer Vans” in his 1894 publication More English Fairy Tales. He cites a book compiled by English scholar Joseph Halliwell-Phillipps, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales (published in the mid-1840s), as his source for this strange tale. But the roots of this unique, nonsensical account likely extend back to an anonymous seventeenth-century English tract titled “A Strange and Wonderful Relation of the Old Woman Who Was Drowned at Ratcliff-Highway a Fortnight Ago.”
This earlier iteration of “Sir Gammer Vans” was known to the Anglo-Irish authors Jonathan Swift and Oliver Goldsmith, and it contains many details present in Jacobs’s tale. For example, like “Sir Gammer Vans,” the older tale features an anonymous narrator and opens with contradictions that prepare readers for the nonsense that characterizes the story. Various absurdities ensue: a dead horse runs, apples fill an empty cart, and a party of sleeping people playing nine-pins eats a freezing hot roasted pudding. Sir Gammer Vans does not appear in this version of the story, however. Instead, readers encounter the bottle-making giant Sir John Vangs, his wife Gammer Vangs, and their son, who is an old woman.
“Sir Gammer Vans” clearly uses storytelling techniques evident in the earlier version of the account. By consistently presenting nonsensical observations, events, and exchanges, the narrator conveys a curious sense of order throughout the piece. The very title of the tale suggests this notion, as it conflates Sir John and Gammer Vangs from the earlier story into one character, a man with a knightly title whose first name is an antiquated English term for grandmother.
Unlike its source, however, “Sir Gammer Vans” abandons any conventional plot trajectory and instead crowds the tale with non sequiturs. While “A Strange and Wonderful Relation of the Old Woman Who Was Drowned” describes a series of nonsensical contradictions, its narrator returns to his original question about the drowned woman. This repetition grounds the plot in the speaker’s quest for an answer to his query. In “Sir Gammer Vans,” on the other hand, the question that opens the tale never recurs, and each turn of events spontaneously leads to other unexpected events. The plot even leaves behind the title character by its conclusion.
Readers may be baffled by “Sir Gammer Vans” and question the meaning of the story and whether it was simply an exercise in nonsense composition. There are many possible critical approaches to this curious work. One such approach is to recognize that nineteenth-century scholars likely discovered and transmitted the story during an era when nonsense literature in English—especially by authors such as Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll—enjoyed tremendous popularity. The nineteenth century also marked a period when readers were interested in folklore and mythology. Another reading might consider conventions of courtly literature evident in the tale, as suggested by the giant’s knightly title and the deer hunt, while yet another might explore the violence that runs throughout the tale.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Briggs, Katharine. British Folk Tales and Legends: A Sampler. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.
Halliwell, J. O., ed. “Notices of Fugitive Tracts and Chap-Books.” Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages, Edited from the Original Manuscripts and Scarce Publications. Vol. 29. London: Percy Soc., 1851. 1–96. Print.
Jacobs, Joseph, ed. “Sir Gammer Vans.” More English Fairy Tales. New York: Putnam’s, 1922. 43–45. Print.
Malcolm, Noel. The Origins of English Nonsense. London: Harper, 1997. Print.
Nash, Walter. The Language of Humour: Style and Technique in Comic Discourse. London: Longman, 1985. Print.
Sewell, Elizabeth. The Field of Nonsense. London: Chatto, 1952. Print.