Henny Penny, more commonly known as Chicken Little and sometimes as Chicken Licken, is
a folk tale with a moral in the form of a cumulative tale about a chicken who believes
the world is coming to an end. The phrase "The sky is falling!" features prominently
in the story, and has passed into the English language as a common idiom indicating a hysterical
or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent. Versions of the story go back more than 25
centuries; it continues to be referenced in a variety of media.
The story and its name
The story is listed as Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 20C, which includes international examples
of folktales that make light of paranoia and mass hysteria. There are several Western versions
of the story, of which the best-known concerns a chick that believes the sky is falling when
an acorn falls on its head. The chick decides to tell the King and on its journey meets
other animals which join it in the quest. After this point, there are many endings.
In the most familiar, a fox invites them to its lair and there eats them all. Alternatively,
the last one, usually Cocky Lockey, survives long enough to warn the chick, who escapes.
In others all are rescued and finally speak to the King.
In most retellings, the animals have rhyming names, commonly Chicken Licken or Chicken
Little, Henny Penny or Hen-Len, Cocky Locky, Ducky Lucky or Ducky Daddles, Drakey Lakey,
Goosey Loosey or Goosey Poosey, Gander Lander, Turkey Lurkey and Foxy Loxy or Foxy Woxy.
The moral to be drawn changes, depending on the version. Where there is a "happy ending",
the moral is not to be a "Chicken" but to have courage. In other versions where the
birds are eaten by the fox, the fable is interpreted as a warning not to believe everything one
is told. In English, the most common name for the story
is "Chicken Little", as attested by illustrated books for children dating from the early 19th
century. In Britain and its former colonies, it is also known as "Henny Penny" and "Chicken
Licken", although these are less common within the United States.
History
In 1840, in Roxbury, Massachussetts, author J. G. Chandler published an illustrated children's
book titled The Remarkable Story of Chicken Little. In this American version of the story,
the characters' names are Chicken Little, Hen-Pen, Duck-Luck, Goose-Loose, and Fox-Lox;
Chicken Little is frightened by a leaf falling on her tail.
A Scots version of the tale is found in Robert Chambers's Popular Rhymes, Fireside Stories,
and Amusements of Scotland of 1842. The characters are Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Daddles,
Goosie Poosie, and an unnamed "tod". Henny Penny became convinced that "the lifts were
faun" when a pea fell on her head. In 1849, an English version was published
featuring Chicken-licken, Hen-len, Cock-lock, Duck-luck, Drake-lake, Goose-loose, Gander-lander,
Turkey-lurkey and Fox-lox. Chicken-licken was startled when "an acorn fell on her bald
pate". In the Scots and English versions of the story,
the animals want "to tell the king" that the skies are falling; while in the American version
they are not given any specific motivation. In all three versions, they end up eaten by
the fox. Idiomatic usage
The name "Chicken Little" — and the fable's central phrase — The sky is falling! - have
been applied to people accused of being unreasonably afraid, or those trying to incite an unreasonable
fear in those around them. The first use of the name "Chicken Little"
to "one who warns of or predicts calamity, especially without justification" recorded
by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary is in 1895, but idiomatic use of the name significantly
predates that attestation. In fact, this usage is recorded in the United States very soon
after the publication of Chandler's illustrated children's book in 1840. Already, in 1842,
a journal article about the Government of Haiti referred to "Chicken Little" in an offhand
manner. An "oration" delivered to the city of Boston on July 4, 1844, contains the passage:
To hear their harangues on the eve of the election, one would suppose that the fable
of Chicken Little was about to become a truth, and that the sky was actually falling.
Fear mongering — whether justified or not — can sometimes elicit a societal response called
Chicken Little syndrome, described as "inferring catastrophic conclusions possibly resulting
in paralysis". It has also been defined as "a sense of despair or passivity which blocks
the audience from actions". The term began appearing in the 1950s and the phenomenon
has been noted in many different societal contexts.
Adaptations Walt Disney Pictures has made two animated
versions of the story. The first was Chicken Little, an animated short released during
World War II as one of a series produced at the request of the U.S. government for the
purpose of discrediting Nazism. It tells a variant of the parable in which Foxy Loxy
takes the advice of a book on psychology by striking the least intelligent first. Dim-witted
Chicken Little is convinced by him that the sky is falling and whips the farmyard into
mass hysteria, which the unscrupulous fox manipulates for his own benefit. The dark
comedy is used as an allegory for the idea that fear-mongering weakens the war effort
and costs lives. It is also one of the versions of the story in which Chicken Little appears
as a character distinct from Henny Penny. The second Disney film was the very loosely
adapted Chicken Little, released in 2005 as a computer-animated feature. It is an updated
science fiction sequel to the original fable in which Chicken Little is partly justified
in his fears. In this version, Foxy Loxy is changed from a male to a female, and from
the main antagonist to a local bully. Another film adaptation was the animated TV
episode "Henny Penny", which was part of the series Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for
Every Child. In this modern update the story is given a satirical and political interpretation.
On the sitcom The Golden Girls, there was a 1991 episode in which the characters perform
a short musical based on the fable at a school recital. This was followed in 1998 by Joy
Chaitin and Sarah Stevens-Estabrook's equally light-hearted musical version of the fable,
"Henny Penny". Designed for between six and a hundred junior actors, it has additional
characters as optional extras: Funky Monkey, Sheepy Weepy, Mama Llama, Pandy Handy and
Giraffy Laughy. There have also been a number of musical settings.
American composer Vincent Persichetti used the fable as the plot of his only opera The
Sibyl: A Parable of Chicken Little, op. 135, which premiered in 1985. In 2007 American
singer and composer Gary Bachlund set the text of Margaret Free’s reading version
of “Chicken Little” for high voice and piano. In his note to the score Bachlund makes
it clear that he intends a reference to alarmism and its tragic consequences.
In Singapore a more involved musical was performed in 2005. This was Brian Seward's The Acorn
- the true story of Chicken Licken. It is a tale of mixed motivations as certain creatures
take advantage of the panic caused by Chicken Licken.
Popular references
There are many novels, films, CDs and songs titled "The Sky is Falling", but the majority
refer to the idiomatic use of the phrase rather than to the fable from which it derives. The
following are some lyrics which genuinely refer or allude to the story:
During the later 1940s, Lightnin’ Hopkins had a song titled "Henny Penny Blues", largely
on the strength of the line, "She's my little chicken, she's my honey pie". In 2005 the
Canadian poet David Pekrul borrowed the title for a lyric of his own, satirising those too
quick to believe prophecies of doom. British band Happy Mondays have the lines
"Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Goosey Loosey, Turkey Lurkey, Ducky Lucky, Chicken Little,
It seems they are all on the move when the sun is falling in" in the song "Moving in
with" on their second album, Bummed. The Aerosmith song "Livin' on the Edge" has
the lines "If Chicken Little tells you that the sky is falling, Even if it wasn't would
you still come crawling back again?" "Chicken Little" is a song from the 1997 album
Fancy, by the California avantrock band Idiot Flesh; it contains the line, "The sky is falling,
gotta tell the king". "The Sky Is Falling" is a song by Owsley from
the 1999 debut album Owsley; it includes the line "Chicken Little had a big day today".
The British rock band Radiohead references the tale in the songs "2 + 2 = 5" and "Where
I End and You Begin" on the album Hail to the Thief.
Related stories A very early example containing the basic
motif and many of the elements of the tale is some 25 centuries old and appears in the
Buddhist scriptures as the Daddabha Jataka. In it, the Buddha, on hearing about some particular
religious practices, comments that there is no special merit in them, but rather that
they are "like the noise the hare heard." He then tells the story of a hare disturbed
by a falling fruit who believes that the earth is coming to an end. The hare starts a stampede
among the other animals until a lion halts them, investigates the cause of the panic
and restores calm. The fable teaches the necessity for deductive reasoning and subsequent investigation.
The Tibetan version of the Jataka tale has been told in rhyme by Australian author Ursula
Dubosarsky in her book "The Terrible Plop", which has since been dramatised, using the
original title "Plop!". In this, the animal stampede is halted by a bear, rather than
a lion. The ending has been changed from the Tibetan original as well.
There also exists a Br'er Rabbit story that is closer to the Eastern versions. In this
story, Br'er Rabbit initiates the panic but does not take part in the mass flight, although
Br'er Fox does. In this case it is Br'er Terrapin that leads the animals back to question Br'er
Rabbit. Notes
References
External links The Remarkable Story of Chicken Little printed
in Boston between 1865-71. SurLaLune Fairy Tale Site, Henny-Penny as
collected by Joseph Jacobs, 1890 The Cock and Hen That Went to the Dovrefell
a Norwegian variant, 1888 Happy Ending Version