Chase, Richard. "Sop Doll!" The Jack Tales. Boston: Houghton, 1943, pp. 76-82. With two drawings by Berkeley Williams, Jr. Jack gets a reward by helping a miller discover that his wife is a witch, haunting the mill in the form of a cat at night; they destroy the witch's gang with fire. Chase notes that this witch tale is very popular in British-American traditions. His notes include comments on the title words and pronunciation. "Jack and the Sop Doll." Folklore of the United States. Jack Tales I. Told by Mrs. Maud Long of Hot Springs, NC. Ed. Duncan Emrich. LP. Washington: Library of Congress, Division of Music, 1947. "Grinding at the Mill." In "Ray Hicks." American Folktales: From the Collections of the Library of Congress. Ed. Carl Lindahl. Vol. 1. Armonk NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2004, pp. 149-55. Also includes "Jack and the Robbers," "The Unicorn and the Wild Boar," "The Witch Woman on the Stone Mountain on the Tennessee Side," "Mule Eggs." With photographs of Ray Hicks and background on him. "Sop Doll." Told by Mary Hamilton. Haunting Tales. Audio cassette. Kentucky, 1996. "Sop Doll." Told by Jackie Torrence. Country Characters. LP and audio cassette. Chicago, Il: Earwig Music Co., 1983 and 1986. From an evening of storytelling live in Lexington, MA to benefit Arts Created Together. Recorded at Cary Hall, Lexington, MA. Also includes Old Dry Frye, Wicked John and the Devil, "The Maco Station Light," and "The Fiddler's Dram." See also: Jack's contests with a witch in Hardy Hardhead and Cat 'n Mouse Overnight stays in a haunted house in Soldier Jack, The Hainted House, Jack and the Hainted House, and Cat 'n Mouse Jack rescues his brothers and outsmarts a witch with the help of magical animals and objects in R. Rex Stephenson's story theatre script "Jack and the Witch's Tale." He obtains help by first doing favors for the witch's cow, pig, and mill so they help hide him from the witch, while his brothers would not take time to help the things that asked them for favors. (See The Jack Tales in Stephenson bibliography.) "The Candy Doll." In Roberts, Leonard. I Bought Me a Dog: A Dozen Authentic Folktales from the Southern Mountain. Berea, KY: The Council of the Southern Mountains, 1954. n. pag. Told by 12-year-old Margie Day, Leslie County, KY. Roberts calls this unusual tale "short and perhaps imperfect...the only version that I have collected, or even known of in America. It is also about the best and most concise example of a peculiar power of witches known as Murder by Sympathetic Magic (Motif D2061.2.2). A little girl mistreated by her widowed father gets tired of doing all the work so she visits a witch after doing her chores although her father forbade it. The witch gives her a candy doll and tells her to eat it but she wants to play with it because she has no toys. When her father finds out she has been to the witch, he won't let her eat so she asks the doll for a bite. When she bites off an arm and then the head, her father's axe turns against him, severing his arm and head. The witch moves in and "the little girl lived with her forever." "Jack and the Witch," an award-winning tale by a fourth grader, in Students Write Jack Tales Related tales and superstitions from Anglo and African American traditions, as well as Long's and Chase's "Sop Doll" tales, are discussed by Bill Ellis in "Why is a Lucky Rabbit's Foot Lucky? Body Parts as Fetishes." Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 39 (Jan-April 2002): p. 51 (36). Available online through library services such as Academic Index ASAP. Ellis argues that superstitions involving severed paws or hands relate to social power struggles. "Possessing a fetish that embodies the essence of a dangerous Other--whether trickster, badman, or witch--and using it for one's own purposes effectively neutralizes the threat represented by that Other." Last
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