Hop-o'-My-Thumb

Hop-o'-My-Thumb
Illustration by Gustave Doré (1862)
Folk tale
Name	Hop-o'-My-Thumb
Also known as	Le Petit Poucet
Aarne–Thompson grouping	ATU 327A (The Children and the Ogre), ATU 327B (The Small Boy defeats the Ogre)
Country	France
Published in	Histoires ou contes du temps passé (1697)
Related	The Lost Children Hansel and Gretel

Hop-o'-My-Thumb (Hop-on-My-Thumb), or Hop o' My Thumb, also known as Little Thumbling, Little Thumb, or Little Poucet (French: Le Petit Poucet), is one of the eight fairytales published by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou Contes du temps passé (1697), now world-renowned.^[1][2] It is Aarne-Thompson type 327B. The small boy defeats the ogre.^[3] This type of fairytale, in the French oral tradition, is often combined with motifs from the type 327A, similar to Hansel and Gretel; one such tale is The Lost Children.^[4]

The story was first published in English as Little Poucet in Robert Samber's 1729 translation of Perrault's book, "Histories, or Tales of Past Times". In 1764, the name of the hero was changed to Little Thumb. In 1804, William Godwin, in "Tabart's Collection of Popular Stories for the Nursery", retitled it Hop o' my Thumb, a term that was common in the 16th century, referring to a tiny person.^[5]