Lazy heroes abound in fairy tales, all around the world. Which just shows that even in the lands of make-believe, idlers have got it right. Nicholas Jubber on the folklore fellows who were more lucky than plucky

“Aladdin is a slacker.” So says his own mother: “He has no job but playing the vagrant and spends his whole time hanging around with the kids.” Before he rubs the lamp, falls in love with the princess and takes possession of his own genie-rigged palace, Aladdin is, to quote the earliest version of the tale (published in 1712), “wicked, wilful, disobedient to his mother and father”; and it’s his relentless unruliness that caused his dad “a sickness so obstinate that he died of it after a few months”.

Of course, it’s common enough for fairy tale heroes to start at the bottom. It makes the journey to happily-ever-after all the more impressive. But the focus is usually on the rise from rags to riches. The main character’s personality doesn’t change, and the assumption is that they are lifted from squalor as a reward for their virtue – such as Cinderella, scrubbing away for her step-sisters without complaint.

But when we look more closely at traditional tales from around the world, there’s another pattern, another hero’s path. It’s an embarrassing one for those who support a meritocratic point-of-view, but it’s there all the same. Because many of the most beloved heroes of fairy tales are the least likely and least deserving heroes of all.

The fact that Aladdin’s fortune is unearned goes without saying. An incorrigible layabout who couldn’t be bothered to learn a trade, he just so happens to be selected by fate as the only individual who can extricate the magic lamp from its cave. Abandoned by the malevolent sorcerer who exploited him, he summons the genie and amasses a fortune. No heroism on his part earns him his fortune – it’s the fortune that makes him a hero. Out with his lazy side, now he’s increasingly active, although he manages to retain his subversive streak: disobeying an official edict against looking upon the princess when she’s stepping into the bath-house, for example, and having his love-rival deposited in a toilet by the genie.

By the end of the story, when he slays the sorcerer and rescues the princess, he’s been transformed into an epic hero. It’s as frantic a shift in character as it is in fortune. And while this tale may not be underpinned by any psychological nuance, it still points out a truth: you might be a waster, the story suggests, but all you need is that mysterious magic spark – an influx of lucre, an inspirational teacher, a genie at your service – and you can reach your illustrious destiny.

Stories like Aladdin’s have been told all over the world. In the medieval Indian collection known as The Ocean of the Streams of Story, a gambler called Saktideva lies his way into a royal palace, then after he’s been kicked out as a time-waster, he transforms into a resilient dynamo of determination, setting out in search of a fabled city of gold. The Slavic tales have Ivan the Fool, Germany has Stupid Hans.

In Italy, there’s Nardiello, “the most wretched blockhead you could ever find on any ship of fools”, who squanders his father’s money at the market and comes back with a cockroach, a mouse and a cricket, which just so happen to have musical gifts. Kicked out of home, he wins a princess’s hand in marriage when his tiny orchestra makes her laugh, giving Nardiello a happy-ever-after he’s done nothing to achieve. Meanwhile in England there are numerous stumbling heroes by the name of Jack.

The typical trajectory for the everyman numbskull is encapsulated in the Danish folk tale of Lazy Lars. A particularly unpromising youth, Lars is mocked for his passivity and incompetence. He stays “at home the whole day doing nothing but being a complete lazy bones” and when a princess sees him staggering under her window with an old iron kettle, she laughs so hard she’s almost sick.

But Lars finds a magic frog in his kettle when he’s drawing water, and it grants him a wish. Cleverly, he asks for as many wishes as there are blades of grass covered by his hat. Too idle to think what he might wish for, he finds himself at sea with the princess, until she puts wishes into his mouth – for “a beautiful castle and everything that went with it”, carriages and horses, splendid clothes and soldiers, and most importantly for Lars to be “a normal human being”. Sparked with “new life”, the fool becomes the model of a prince, showing that anybody can change into the ideal version of themselves: all they need is a stroke of magic.

Not all folk heroes change, and some retain their incompetence or indolence all the way to their happy ending. Take the English folk hero Lazy Jack. Sent out to work by his fed-up mother, he has a habit of losing his payment – whether it’s a penny he accidentally drops in a brook or a jar of spilt milk. Near the end of the tale, his mother is calling him a ninny-hammer, which may not be a common term but is clearly not complimentary.

But when he carries a donkey on his back, its legs sticking in the air, the sight is so comical it causes a rich man’s deaf and dumb daughter to recover her speech and hearing through the healing power of “a great fit of laughter”. So grateful is her father that he arranges her marriage to Jack, who lives the rest of his life in the lap of luxury.

He’s the undeserving roll-over lottery winner who the rest of us can look down on, even as he’s scaling the heights. These days we might call him Homer Simpson or Mr Bean. We’ll find him in the pop charts, or eating a cow’s anus in the celebrity jungle. In his less lovable form, he’ll be on the front benches in Parliament. There’s a truth embedded in these stories, which is why they’ve been popular across the ages: beware whom we mock, for they may get the last laugh.

But there’s one thing all these lucky idlers have in common – a Y chromosome. Laziness in females is less easily forgiven. The Slavic tale of Baba Yaga and the Stepmother’s Daughter is echoed around the world. Lost in the woods, the heroine is forced to work for a witch, scrubbing her house, tidying up, cleaning the toads and eels in the bathhouse. Her reward is a chest full of jewels. But when her lazy step-sister is sent in her place one day, she can’t be bothered to do the same work and is given a box full of pitch that burns her to death.

The same template applies to the girls who work for the German sorceress Frau Hölle, and to Cinderella and her narcissistic step-sisters, whether in the 17th-century French version or the much earlier tale narrated in ninth century China.

This idea of the hard-working heroine goes way back. In the first fairy tale recorded in western literature, Cupid and Psyche, the heroine Psyche is set a series of impossible tasks, and performs them with aplomb, helped by the spirits of nature that recognise her innate goodness. It’s not all hard work for Psyche, who at least gets to travel, roaming the world in search of her beloved Cupid. Other variations allow even more powerful possibilities for heroines, as anyone who’s delved into the marvellous tales by the Baroness d’Aulnoy and her associates from late 17th-century France knows (one of them even gets to trap her harasser in a nail-studded barrel and roll him down a hill).

But female counterparts to Lazy Jack or Lazy Lars are as unlikely as hens’ teeth. The heroines who won’t get out of bed tend to be stuck there by a spell, like Sleeping Beauty.

In discriminating in this way, folk tales represent the pre-industrial societies who made them – where men who ventured far and wide were more likely to bring back the bacon, while their wives were charged with maintaining the continuity of society.

The fairy tales may embellish that reality, but they are echoing the lives of the pre-modern people who invented them and handed them down. And they still speak to us today, retold in sitcom clichés of hapless dads and sensible mothers, even if modern storytellers are more and more likely to play around with these stereotypes. For all that social mores have changed, the lucky lad remains a much-loved ideal. None of us have a tailor-turned-prince on our contacts list – and certainly not one with a magic lamp – but we’ve all heard of people whose fortunes have turned on a dime – won the lottery, for instance. Such stories remind us that “just deserts” are as fanciful as the magic spells of fairy tales. Life’s winners aren’t always the ones who’ve earned it.

There’s proper folk wisdom there, but also a smidgeon of hope for everyone. Maybe that lucky spark will strike us one day.

This article is from Idler #91.

Subscribers may comment. Please add your idle thoughts using the box below

Subscribe to the Idler here and get 17% off the shop price plus a FREE copy of Idle Thoughts by Tom Hodgkinson, worth £8.95

“A Drink with the Idler” returns in the autumn

How to Live Like a Stoic

The July 2026 issue of the Idler (#110) is available in Waitrose, Smiths and TG Jones.

Click here for your nearest stockist.