ATU 2035 The House that Jack Built
Open in the ATU tale-type index →
The tale in brief
A cumulative rhyme that adds one link at a time and repeats the whole chain each time: this is the house that Jack built; this is the malt that lay in the house that Jack built; this is the rat that ate the malt, and so on. The Finnish song asks 'Did you see the man who carried the pork?', then the dog that bit him, the stick that beat the dog, the knife that cut the stick and the smith who forged the knife.
Summary written for RunoVerse and checked against the Finnic texts linked on this page.
Runosong types
Possibly related: the songs of these types follow the formula of this chain tale (as judged by a language model).
- Läskinkantaja The bacon carrier · SKVR · 18 poems
Motifs and related tale types
Motifs: The House That Jack Built Z44
Example tales
English example tales of this type in the Trilogy folktale corpus; their texts can be read in the ATU tale-type index.
- The House That Jack Built · · James Orchard Halliwell [Halliwell-Phillipps], The Nursery Rhymes of England: Collected Chiefly from Oral Tradition, 4th edition (London: John Russell Smith, 1846), no. 398, pp. 175-78.
Sources
Tale-type number, title, classification, related types and the Finnic sources: Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales (FF Communications 284–286, Helsinki 2004). · Uther 2004, part II (FF Communications 285), free online ↗
Possibly related runosong types: a reading of the song types by a language model (Claude Opus 5.5, 2 November 2026); only links it rated high or medium in confidence are shown.
Motifs and combinations with other tale types: the Trilogy dataset, from Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature and the ATU catalogue.
Example tales: the Trilogy folktale corpus; each tale’s own source is named beside it.
The plot summary, the notes and the arrangement of this page are RunoVerse’s own.