In folklore, giants (from Ancient Greek: gigas, cognate giga-) are beings of humanoid appearance, but are at times prodigious in size and strength or bear an otherwise notable appearance. The word giant is first attested in 1297 from Robert of Gloucester's chronicle. It is derived from the Gigantes (γίγαντες, Georg Autenrieth, A Homeric Dictionary, on Perseus Digital Library) of Greek mythology.
Fairy tales such as Jack the Giant Killer have formed the modern perception of giants as dimwitted and violent ogres, sometimes said to eat humans or livestock. In more recent portrayals, like those of Jonathan Swift and Roald Dahl, some giants are both intelligent and friendly.
Literary and cultural analysis Giants appear many times in folklore and myths. Representing the human body enlarged to the point of being monstrous, giants evoke terror and remind humans of their body's frailty and mortality. They are often portrayed as monsters and antagonists, but there are exceptions. Some giants intermingle with humans in a friendly way and can even be part of human families, their offspring portrayed as regular humans often referred to as half-giants.
Folklorists and historians examine the role giants are assigned in regional geomythologies. For example, Fionn mac Cumhaill is said to have built the Giant's Causeway on the island of Ireland. Per a 1965 examination in an American studies journal, It is generally admitted today that Paul Bunyan was a synthetic figure conceived by advertising men rather than the spontaneous product of the folk mind, yet he has been adopted by the American people with enthusiasm...Paul and his blue ox Babe are supposed to have altered the appearance of the American continent; the animal's hoof prints became the lake beds of the Northwest and from its drinking trough spilled the Mississippi River. Fossilized remains of ancient mammals and reptiles common to the Sivalik Hills of India may have influenced aspects of the Mahābhārata that tell of battles in which "hundreds of mighty, and sometimes gigantic, heroes, horses, and war elephants are said to have died."
Archeology and paleontology
Claudine Cohen, in her 2002 book The Fate of the Mammoth, argued that the history of human interaction with fossil bones of prehistoric megafauna was heavily influenced by giant lore. Per Cohen, the proto-scientific study of giants appears in several phases of human history: Herodotus reported that the remains of Orestes were found in Tegea; Pliny described a giant's skeleton found in Crete after an earthquake, and seemed to refer to evolution as the process by which giants become human-size over time; and Saint Augustine mentions what is believed to have been the fossilized molar of an ancient Elephantidae in his City of God, in a passage reflecting on the nature and meaning of the Noahacian deluge.
The academic consideration of giants continued through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and even the early modern period. Boccaccio devoted a passage of his Genealogies of the Pagan Gods to purported archeological discoveries in Sicily that he thought might be evidence of the historicity of The Odyssey's Polyphemus. Rabelais created a wholly "fabricated giantology" for his 16th-century Gargantua and Pantagruel.Smith, P. J. (2019). Parody and Appropriation of the Past in the Grandes Chroniques Gargantuines and in Rabelais's Pantagruel (1532). In K. A. E. Enenkel & K. A. Ottenheym (Eds.), The Quest for an Appropriate Past in Literature, Art and Architecture (Vol. 60, pp. 167–186). Brill. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1163/j.ctvbqs5nk.14 Massive bones found in 1613 in France were initially assigned to Teutobochus but the examinations of them by various physicians and their publication of diverging conclusions about the bones kicked off a "pamphlet war" between anatomists and surgeons of the day. The discovery of the so-called Claverack Giant in colonial New York triggered giantological investigations by two important early American intellectuals, Cotton Mather and Edward Taylor. Religion and mythology Abrahamic
Genesis tells of the Nephilim before and after Noah's Flood. The word Nephilim is loosely translated as giants in some translations of the Hebrew Bible, but left untranslated in others. According to , the Nephilim were destroyed in the Flood, but Nephilim are reported after the Flood, including:
The Anakim The AmoritesNave's Topical Bible: Amorites, Nave, Orville J., Retrieved:2013-03-14 The Rephaites, also known as The Emites
The Book of Numbers includes the discouraging report by the spies sent by Moses into Canaan: "We can't attack those people; they are stronger than we are. (...) All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them." The Book of Joshua, describing the actual conquest of Canaan in a later generation, makes reference to such people living there in (Joshua 14:12–15 and Joshua 15:13–14).
The Bible also tells of Gog and Magog, who later entered European folklore, and of the famous battle between David and the Philistine Goliath. While Goliath is often portrayed as a giant in retellings of the Biblical narrative, he appears to be significantly smaller than other giants, biblical or otherwise. The Masoretic Text version of the Book of Samuel gives his height as six cubits and one span (possibly ), while the Septuagint, the 1st-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus and the 2nd–1st-centuries BCE Dead Sea Scrolls give Goliath's height as four cubits and one span (possibly ). For comparison, the Anakites are described as making the Israelites seem like grasshoppers. See also Gibborim.
Josephus also described the Amorites as giants in his Antiquities of the Jews, circa 93CE, indicating that some sort of fossils may have been on display at that time:Freedman, David Noel, ed., The Anchor Bible Dictionary, (New York: Doubleday, 1997, 1992). "For which reason they removed their camp to Hebron; and when they had taken it, they slew all the inhabitants. There were till then left the race of giants, who had bodies so large, and countenances so entirely different from other men, that they were surprising to the sight, and terrible to the hearing. The bones of these men are still shown to this very day, unlike to any credible relations of other men."Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book 5, Chapter 2, Number 3, Antiquities of the Jews: Book 5, Retrieved: 15 March 2013
The Book of Enoch describes giants as the offspring of Watchers and women in 7:2.
Armenian Hayk was known as the founder of the Armenian state. Hayk was part of a race of giants who helped construct the Tower of Babel. Ancient historian Movses Khorenatsi wrote, "Hayk was handsome and personable, with curly hair, sparkling eyes and strong arms. Among the giants he was the bravest and most famous, opponent of all who raised their hand to become absolute ruler over the giants and heroes."
Mount Nemrut is known to have received its name from an Armenian tradition in which Nimrod was killed by an arrow shot by Hayk during a massive battle between two rival armies of giants to the south-east of Lake Van.
Aztec Aztec mythology features the Quinametzin, a race of giant men created in one of the previous solar eras. They are credited with the construction of Teotihuacan.
Basque Giants are rough but generally righteous characters of formidable strength living in the hills of the Basque Country. Giants stand for the Basque people reluctant to convert to Christianity who decide to stick to the old lifestyle and customs in the forest. Sometimes they hold the secret of ancient techniques and wisdom unknown to the Christians, like in the legend of San Martin Txiki, while their most outstanding feature is their strength. It follows that in many legends all over the Basque territory the giants are held accountable for the creation of many stone formations, hills and ages-old megalithic structures (dolmens, etc.), with similar explanations provided in different spots.
However, giants show different variants and forms, they are most frequently referred to as jentilak and mairuak, while as individuals they can be represented as Basajaun ("the lord of the forests"), Sanson (variation of the biblical Samson), Errolan (based on the Frankish army general Roland who fell dead at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass) or even Tartalo (a one-eyed giant akin to the Greek Cyclops Polyphemus).
Bulgarian
In Bulgarian mythology, giants called ispolini inhabited the Earth before modern humans. They lived in the mountains, fed on raw meat and often fought against dragons. Ispolini were afraid of blackberries which posed a danger of making the giants trip and die, so they offered sacrifices to that plant.
Chilean
There are tales of giants in the northern Chilean port town of Caldera telling of giants who play with ships moving them from one port to another. Tales of the same area also tells of giants who are able to crush humans with their feet and when laying down to sleep being so long as to reach from the mountains to the sea. In some stories the giants are black humanoids or black bulls. In southern Chile there are stories of giants said to belong to certain volcanoes such as Calbuco and Osorno.
The mythical city of Tololo Pampa in northern Chile is said to be guarded by a giant known by various names including; Pata Larga, Gigante Minero and Minero Gigante. The giant enters to the mountains to obtain riches to the princess of Tololo Pampa. If a person manages to watch the giant while he works folklore says the person will be blessed with good luck for the rest of their life.
Greek
In Greek mythology, the Gigantes (γίγαντες) were (according to the poet Hesiod) the children of Uranus (Ουρανός) and Gaia (Γαία) (spirits of the sky and the earth) where some depictions had them with snake-like legs. They were involved in a conflict with the Olympian gods called the Gigantomachy (Γιγαντομαχία) when Gaia had them attack Mount Olympus. This battle was eventually settled when the hero Heracles decided to help the Olympians. The Greeks believed some of them, like Enceladus, to lie buried from that time under the earth and that their tormented quivers resulted in earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Herodotus in Book 1, Chapter 68, describes how the Spartans uncovered in Tegea the body of Orestes, which was seven cubits long — approximately 3.73m, or about 12feet 3inches. In his book The Comparison of Romulus with Theseus, Plutarch describes how the Athenians uncovered the body of Theseus, which was "of more than ordinary size." The kneecaps of Ajax were exactly the size of a discus for the boy's pentathlon, wrote Pausanias. A boy's discus was about in diameter, while a normal adult patella is around , suggesting Ajax may have been nearly 14feet (over 4m) tall.
The Cyclopes are also compared to giants due to their huge size (e.g.Polyphemus, son of Poseidon and Thoosa and nemesis of Odysseus in Homer's The Odyssey). The Elder Cyclopes were the children of Gaia and Uranus, and later made Zeus' "master thunderbolt", Poseidon's trident, and Hades' "helm of darkness", during the Titanomachy.
The Hecatoncheires are giants that have 100 arms and 50 heads who were also the children of Gaia and Uranus.
Other known giant races in Greek mythology include the six-armed Gegeines, the northern Hyperboreans, and the cannibalistic Laestrygonians.
Hindu There are accounts stating humans grew to the size of giants during the Satya Yuga, the first of the four cyclical ages (yugas) in the Hindu reckoning of time.
Jain According to Jainism, there was a time when giants walked upon this earth. Jain cosmology divides the worldly cycle of time into two parts or half-cycles, avasarpani (age of descending purity) and ascending (utsarpani).