by J J Cohen
In about 45 minutes I will be interviewed
for this nonsensationalistic British series, for a show on giants. Note the restrained prose that describes the program:
Giant human skeletons are found across four continents, eerie supernatural noises are heard coming from the sky, massive sinkholes appear in five major cities overnight… These are events that leading scientists can’t explain – but they’re not being discovered by cranks, they’re being discovered by multiple credible experts and witnesses.
The series description also states that "leading scientific experts will be interrogated about their conflicting explanations for the phenomena," so I'm happy I'm a humanist: I don't like to be interrogated because that bright light they shine in your eyes dries out my retinas.
I was asked to be a talking head on this nonsensationalistic series because my dissertation and
first book were on giants, a monster I have never left behind.
Stories of Stone has giants in most chapters, since they are so intimate to the lithic (they built Stonehenge, after all). A while back I also composed an encyclopedia entry on giants for the
Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters (ed.
Jeffrey Weinstock, a brilliant scholar who did his PhD at GW). The encyclopedia costs £100.00 (so expensive they did not even send me a contributor's copy), so rather than have my entry be locked behind Fort Ashgate, here it is.
And wish me luck being interviewed by the director of UNEXPLAINED FILES, a "compelling factual series" that "will tell the remarkable stories of these true phenomena." Like, giants.
Giants
From fairy tale to
fantasy fiction, Greek mythology to Hollywood film, the giant is a familiar
figure. Almost every culture possesses some version of this monster, probably
because the giant amounts to nothing more than a body enlarged to the point at
which the human figure becomes estranged. Looming over our diminished selves,
the giant makes evident our frailty, our mortality. Giants typically elicit
terror, as in Goya’s famous painting Il
Colosso, in which a panicked mob flees the monster’s towering form. Some,
however, offer an invitation to corporeal pleasure: food, sex, mirth. The giant
is therefore an ambivalent monster, combining fear of self-annihilation with an
undercurrent of desire, forces of domination with possibilities of subversive celebration.
Because only size need distinguish giants from humans, the line separating
these groups is easily traversed. Even when giants are imagined as a separate,
monstrous race, humans sometimes intermingle with them. Thus the biblical
Goliath is a Philistine; the Cyclops Polyphemos is famous for his love of a
normally proportioned woman, Galatea; Cain was sometimes held to be the father
of monsters, including giants; medieval Norse giants were often lovers for gods
and humans; the offspring of giants are sometimes depicted as ordinary in size.
For all their monstrous excess, giants are in the end rather human.
The giant has long
haunted the Western imagination. Greek myth, the earliest verses of the Hebrew
Bible, early Christian interpreters of that text, and Irish, Welsh, and
Icelandic stories record the monster’s ancient presence. The giant pervades
every level of society, from popular culture and folklore to self-consciously
artistic literature and scholarly discourse. With some notable exceptions, the giant
is strongly gendered male. He often figures the masculine body out of control,
demarcating a cultural boundary not to be traversed. The giant is foundational.
The world may have been created from the body of a giant, as in Norse fable; or
the body of the earth may spawn giants, as in classical tradition. He is so
elemental that humanity cannot escape his abiding presence. His reality is
often attested through the landscape he has supposedly reconfigured, so that
his name becomes attached to mountains and rock formations. The giant often therefore
serves an etiological function.
What follows is a
sort of family album of the Western giant, a collection of portraits that
provide an overview of this monster’s multifarious lineage and enduring
vitality.
Greek and Roman Myth
Classical giants are an
autochthonous order of beings associated with the brute forces of the earth.
They are monsters that must be eradicated so that humans – and the
anthropomorphic gods who watch over them – may flourish. The Theogony is a complicated cosmogony
attributed to the poet and farmer Hesiod (8th-7th century BCE). The poem
describes how the emasculation of rapinous Uranos (“Sky”) by his son Cronus
engendered the giants, a race of pernicious creatures who eventually attempt to
overthrow the gods by storming Olympus. This battle against Zeus was called the
Gigantomachia and was frequently depicted in literature and painted on vases.
Vergil and Ovid both refer to the war, describing the giants’ monumental feat
of stacking the mountain Ossa atop Pelion in order to reach the home of the
gods. Other classical giants include the Titans; the sons of Aloeus, who
likewise attempted a divine assault; Argus Panoptes, the hundred eyed giant who
served as Hera's watchman; and Briareus, who possessed a hundred hands. All of
these monsters possessed long afterlives. Briareus, for example, appears in the
ninth circle of Dante's Inferno, the windmill episode of Don Quixote,
the Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual, and The Battle of the Labyrinth
by Rick Riordan.
One-eyed
giants also appear frequently. Homer describes the Cyclopes as solitary beings,
lacking the laws that form communities and the technology necessary for
agriculture. When the itinerant hero Odysseus requests food and shelter from
Polyphemos, the most famous of their kind, the monster responds by
cannibalizing his men. Odysseus’s blinding of the giant’s single eye is a
rebuke to the creature’s worldview, one in which the sacred bond between host
and guest may be ignored.
These
classical giants were eventually conflated with similar monsters from the
Hebrew Bible, with whom they share several traits, especially hostility towards
the divine. As early as the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus (1st
century CE), the murderous spawn of Uranos were linked to the Nephilim of
Genesis.
Biblical Giants
Following the
precedent set by Latin translations of the Bible, in English versions the term
“giant” quietly collects a variety of Hebrew words, creating a false impression
of unity, as if all the biblical giants constituted a single race. The first
mention of giants occurs in a mysterious passage from Genesis, which states
“giants [Nephilim] were upon the
earth in those days” (6:4). These monsters are the apparent offspring of the
“sons of God” (sometimes understood to be the mortal children of Seth, at other
times fallen angels) and the “daughters of men” (usually glossed as the
offspring of Cain, exiled for murdering his brother). The Flood follows shortly
after the appearance of the Nephilim, implicitly linking the birth of these
creatures with a mysterious miscegenation and a subsequent proliferation of
earthly evils. The passage is obscure enough never to have found a definitive
interpretation. It eventually yielded the medieval idea that a giant might be
the child of an incubus (a kind of fallen angel) and a mortal woman. Though the
giants of Genesis 6:4 should have been wiped from the earth as a result of the
Deluge, moreover, they also appear well after the story of Noah. They therefore
posed a difficult problem for rabbinical interpreters as well as Christian
exegetes. The Talmud developed a complete mythology for the giant Og of Bashan
(Deut. 3:11), a postdiluvian giant destroyed by the Israelites. Supposedly he
made a pact with Noah and submitted himself and his children to slavery to
board the ark.
Giants enter the
biblical narrative a second time in Numbers, after which their presence
proliferates. When Moses sends spies into the Promised Land, they return to the
waiting Israelites with a report of a land flowing with milk and honey. Canaan
also holds inimical giants [Anakim, said to be descendants of the Nephilim] “in
comparison to whom we seemed as locusts” (Numbers 13:28-34). These monsters
appear to represent indigenous peoples, figured as inhumanly vast to convey the
difficulty of settling the territory and to dispossess them of a claim to their
land. Other biblical groups assimilated into the Latin and English categories
of “giant” include similarly aboriginal peoples, the Emim (Deut. 2:10) and the
Zamzummim (Deut. 2:20). The giant [raphah]
Goliath of Gath, defeated by the young David, is a lone monster rather than a
member of a group or race. The young warrior’s defeat of that giant and display
of his severed head became iconic, so that the expected fate for almost all
giants in Western texts is decapitation. The vivid encounter between David and
Goliath (I Samuel 17) intermingles the theological with the nationalistic.
Goliath curses his opponent by his gods, while the boy replies with his faith
in a single deity. The humiliation of the giant is a gleeful disparaging of his
polytheism: a shepherd boy too young to wear armor, carrying a staff which his
enemy bemoans as grossly insulting, defeats the monster with a well aimed stone
from a slingshot. Called the nanus contra
gigantem (“boy against the giant”) theme, the scene of David’s victory
would become among the most frequently illustrated biblical episodes.
Caravaggio, Michelangelo, Titian, and Rubens created famous depictions.
Medieval and Early Modern Giants
The medieval Irish
imagined that their island had once been held by the Fomori, a primordial race
who were disfigured and bellicose. Though not originally imagined as giants
[Old Irish aithech], over time their
size was exaggerated in order to render them more fearsome. They were
associated with stonework and caves, their historical presence readable from
the landscape. The famous Giant’s Causeway in County Antrim is supposed to have
been their handiwork. These frozen sprays of lava, jutting from the sea in
weirdly architectural black columns, are called by the Irish Clochán na bhFomharaigh, “the stepping
stones of the Fomori.” Various Neolithic edifices were also associated with
this race. For the Irish – as for many other cultures – the primeval race of
giants served an explanatory function, anchoring present landscape to an origin
in the distant past. Nearby Wales told stories of more singular giants, such as
Ysbaddaden, a foe of Arthur who withholds his daughter from marriage and is,
when overcome, shaved to the skull and decapitated. Bran the Blessed is another
important Welsh giant. King of Britain, he possesses a magic cauldron that can
restore vitality to the dead. Mortally wounded in Irish battle, Bran instructs
his men to cut off his head and return it to his island. The severed head
retains its ability to speak for seven years, after which it is interred in
London at the site of the future White Tower. Supposedly the giant’s head kept
Britain free from invasion so long as it remained buried.
According to Norse
mythology, the earth itself was fashioned from the corpse of the giant Ymir.
Elemental and rather primitive, giants might inhabit a distant geography
(Glasisvellir or Jotunheim), but also mingle freely with humans as they wander
the world. Norse giants are frequently female, and often intermarry with gods
and men. Odin is the son of a giantess named Bestla. Although they could be
fierce, the Norse jötnar are more
ethically complex than other traditions of giants: chaos-loving, perhaps, but
rather indifferent to binaries like good versus evil, wildness against
civilization. Giants were especially associated with stone and topography.
Boulders, ruined buildings, and mountains indicated their former presence. This
etiological function is shared by giants in Old English literature, which
frequently refers to ancient structures like Roman walls as enta geweorc, the work of giants. Though
never precisely described, the monster Grendel and his mere-dwelling mother appear
both to be giants. Enormous, humanoid, and children of Cain, they share the
same fate, decapitation.
In his History of the Kings of Britain, the
text that bestowed to the future the mythic King Arthur we know today, Geoffrey
of Monmouth imagined that the island of Britain was originally settled by an
exiled Trojan named Brutus. His only impediment to making a kingdom of the new
land was its current occupants, giants who attack Brutus’s men and are
exterminated as a result. Like the biblical Anakim, these giants represent in
monstrous form native peoples and the challenges of conquest. Later mythology
would develop the idea that these giants were the spawn of incubi or devils and
Greek princesses exiled to Britain for their crimes. In a culminating moment of
the History of the Kings of Britain,
moreover, Geoffrey will have Arthur defeat a menacing but lone giant on Mont
Saint Michel in Normandy. A rapist and a cannibal, this monster is the male
body out of control. He harkens from Muslim Spain, aligning him with
non-Christian others at a time not long after the First Crusade. Giants, like
all monsters, tend to gather to themselves all the contemporary signifiers of
otherness and difference. Whereas Arthur fights with his famous sword, the
giant wields a primitive club. After the king defeats the brute he orders the
head displayed, Goliath-like, to his men to announce the triumph. This scene of
warrior against giant set the stage for many similar combats in the chivalric
romances of the Middle Ages. Overcoming the giant became a way for the young
knight to demonstrate that he had overcome the monster within, that he could
control his body sexually and martially.
In the Inferno, as Dante prepares to descend
into the Ninth Circle of Hell, he spots what appears to be a tower but is in
fact a giant, interred from the waist down. The monster bellows gibberish at
the poet. His guide Vergil reveals that this is Nimrod, architect of the tower
of Babel. Though this episode takes great liberties with the biblical narrative,
it demonstrates the creativity to which giants spurred medieval authors, and
the tendency of these monsters to lurk darkly at foundational moments in human
history. Giants could easily be allegorized. They were often associated with
pride, inspiring Edmund Spenser’s Orgoglio in the Faerie Queene. Yet not all giants were depicted so negatively.
Saint Christopher was often believed to have been a converted giant. Medieval
romances offered comic giants like Ascopart and Rainouart, whose attempts to
become Christian knights lead to ridiculous scenes of horse riding, jousting,
and baptism gone wrong. Geoffrey Chaucer provides a comedic version of the
monster in “The Tale of Sir Thopas,” which features an inept knight threatened
by the three-headed Sir Olifaunt. François Rabelais’ beloved Gargantua and
Pantagruel celebrate bodily excess. Their merry presence inspired the Russian
literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to develop the idea that such seemingly
folkloric figures pose a carnivalesque challenge to domineering, official
culture.
Giants made
frequent appearances in travel literature. The enormously popular Book of John Mandeville is typical,
describing giants that clothe themselves in the skin of beasts and devour raw
flesh, including humans they snatch from ships. Jonathan Swift will reverse
this negative depiction with the cultured Brobdingnagians of Gulliver’s Travels, whose king declares
Europeans to be the savages. Patagonians, giant denizens of the New World, were
reported by Ferdinand Magellan and Francis Drake.
Contemporary Giants
Giants are
familiar figures in films, novels, comic books, and fairy tales. As the cloud
dweller in “Jack in the Beanstalk,” he invites children to the rewards of
self-assertion over parental obedience. In the form of Bigfoot or the Yeti, the
giant reassures that the world has not been completely mapped, that some wild
remnant remains. As a corporate emblem the monster promises us that our frozen
and canned vegetables taste fresh (the Jolly Green Giant, mascot in the
employment of General Mills) and that our processed paper products arrive with
a patina of wilderness (the fakelore figure of Paul Bunyan, promulgated by a
logging company). The vast, humanoid trees called Ents in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings similarly connect
giants and ecological concerns. The science fiction thriller Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman (1958)
originally encoded a social anxiety about the women’s movement with its
depiction of a huge housewife run amuck, but today that figure has become more
campy feminist heroine than crazed and fearful horror. Another contemporary
film, The Amazing Colossal Man
(1957), features an army colonel exposed to plutonium who rapidly grows to
sixty feet tall. Brain damage causes him to become insane, and after a rampage
through Las Vegas he is killed by the army atop the Hoover Dam. Victor
Frankenstein’s Creature and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator may not
precisely be giants, but they both invoke that monster’s mythology as they come
to embody anxieties about technology’s ability to enable humans to exceed their
traditional limits. A wrestler named André the Giant played Fezzik in the The Princess Bride (1987), an enduringly
popular film that attempts to re-enchant a cynical world. Hagrid, a central
character in the Harry Potter series of books by J. K. Rowling, is half giant
in descent. He likewise figures in a magical landscape that offers an
alternative to the impoverished one of contemporary adulthood. Giants can be
spotted in video and role playing games
as well.
Varied as they
are, these modern instances suggest that although some monsters vanish as the
fears, anxieties and desires that engendered them change, the giant never
departs for long. Perhaps giants are such intimate monsters because their forms
are so familiar. Many writers placed giants at the origin of the human, arguing
that our stature had declined over time. A figure of chaos and merriment,
severity and celebration, life as well as death, the elemental giant is a
constant companion, a version of the human writ so large that our own
monstrousness is vividly displayed in his form.
References and Recommended Reading
Asma, Stephen T. Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst
Fears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène
Iswolsky (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1984)
Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle
Ages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999)
Friedman, John Block. The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and
Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)
Stephens, Walter. Giants in Those Days: Folklore, Ancient
History, and Nationalism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989)
Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the
Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1993).
