Jack and the Bangers

DAVE LEWIS

Jack was a teenaged boy who lived in the three digit part of the first millennium. He lived in that part of the British Isles where  traces of Pict and Celt genes are usually found. Jack's family and tribe displayed the Pict's short physical stature and an affinity for tattoos.  When a stranger moved into the neighborhood forest who was much taller than Jack's tribe, he was identified as a GIANT. 

In fact the stranger was only in the upper decile of the heights of his family and neighbors at home.  He was a Viking berserker that was about 72 barley corns taller than Jack's father. The Viking had a name of course but he was always just GIANT to Jack's tribe.  GIANT had retired from the Viking trade when the forearm he preferred for sword-wielding  was lopped off.  He stuck to it for four a five years with a hook in place of the hand.   GIANT decided to get out of the berserker business while he still wore a head so he deserted a pillaging party and set up a dwelling in a forest in the English Isles. GIANT didn't bother the native Pict tribe and they stood clear of him, keeping him under close watch. 

Jack was a natural born snoop so he volunteered for the majority of the GIANT oversight.  He found a tree he could climb that enabled him to see into the GIANT'S hut. He watched day and night and observed the daily routine of the big man.  GIANT'S  behavior was so strange to Jack that he had trouble reporting it to the elders - to whom it was also strange.  It is a human trait to fear and distrust a stranger's behavior that is unknown to the observer.

What Jack saw the GIANT doing was repeatedly chopping up meat, onions, wild garlic, various leaves, tubers he dug up in strange places, and mushrooms.  He braised them in a clay pot and then stuffed them into deer entrails that he had cleaned and cured. At intervals of about 24 barley corns the GIANT tied a knot across a gap in the stuffed intestines. The GIANT dug up salt and applied it to the rope of linked parcels. Then he hung them along his ceiling to cure.  He was observed cutting some of the oldest parcels or links from the rope and then cooking them on an open fire.  The heated link was considered edible by the GIANT when the juices inside boiled and ruptured the link walls with a loud noise.  When Jack tried to recreate the noise for the elders, it came out phonetically as BANG.  Soon a string of these meat based parcels got the name: BANGERS.

It was unfortunate that this phonetic description of an exploding sausage sounded to the Picts as near to the term they used to describe themselves.  When Jack reported an approximation of a chantey the GIANT sang when he returned to his hut, the linguistic coincidences became more sinister.  The GIANT was singing in Old Norse, "I detect the aroma of roasting bangers."  The elders pondered over Jack's rendition of the GIANT'S tune and they deduced he was saying: "I smell the blood of a Pict for dining."  Pictese was just vaguely similar to Old Norse. They decided the GIANT had to be eliminated before he started dining on Picts. They delegated the killing strategy to Jack.  He was the  son of the tribal chief after all.

By now the GIANT had trained a wolf cub to track game for him.  The wolf cub also subsisted on and relished bangers.  Jack stole a chain of the GIANT'S bangers  and dragged some along a prepared trail that went under an immense hornet's nest. The nest was higher than the wolf, higher than Jack, higher than any Pict but at head level for the GIANT. The wolf picked up the scent and started on the trail at full speed, the GIANT close behind. The wolf ran under the hornet's  nest without stirring up a reprisal but when the GIANT broad-sided the nest, the hornets swarmed his head.  As the panicked GIANT tried to brush away the stinging hornets, he knocked himself unconscious with his iron hook-hand and the GIANT fell in the forest.  A squad of waiting Picts smoked the hornets away, trussed the giant with stout bonds of vines and leather and dragged him into their compound where a stake and bon-fire fuel were ready.  The GIANT woke up positioned rather like a banger ready to be toasted.

The Pict's party didn't go as planned because a squad of marauding Vikings heard some loud Norse swearing and appeals to Odin. The Vikings arrived on the scene just as the fire was to be lit and they quickly dePicted the area.  Only  Jack survived to pass the tale - much revised - on to posterity.

The  Vikings used the bonfire materials to roast a fair amount of bangers.  They were very impressed. It sure beat dried fish on a long voyage and it went well with lefse and the Pict's ale. The GIANT, not especially large among his countrymen, reverted to his real name of Hagar.  He became the cook on the dragon ship and with his share of the plunder, retired to a farm in Iceland where his tale was memorized  by the poets and eventually written four hundred years later.   Now however, most people have only heard  Jack's version.  It was more adaptable by Disney.

2013