Giant

• 1. Introduction

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  Giants appear in the recorded word at least as far back as 1297, when Robert of Gloucester's chronicle first set down the English term in writing. The word itself traces to the Gigantes of Greek mythology, and from that root the modern word "giant" carries millennia of accumulated dread and wonder. What is it about the oversized human form that has compelled storytellers from Armenia to the Andes, from Norse fjords to the Hebrew scriptures, to keep returning to this same figure? The documentary ahead moves through mythology, archaeology, literature, and folklore to answer that question. Along the way it will uncover a shoemaker who stopped a giant from burying Shrewsbury, a pamphlet war that broke out in France over a pile of massive bones in 1613, and a frozen ox whose hoofprints became the lake beds of the American Northwest.

• 2. The Fear Behind the Form

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  Folklorists who study giants note that the figure does something precise to the human imagination: it takes the human body and enlarges it to the point of becoming monstrous. At that scale, the body no longer offers safety. It becomes a reminder of frailty and mortality. Giants evoke terror in part because they are recognizable. They are not alien creatures; they are us, magnified beyond control.

  Fairy tales sharpened that terror into a particular type. Jack the Giant Killer and stories like it gave the modern world its default image of the giant: dimwitted, violent, an ogre who sometimes consumes humans or livestock. Jonathan Swift and Roald Dahl pushed back against that template in their own ways, writing giants who are intelligent and even friendly. The tradition always contained both possibilities. Some giants in world folklore intermingle peacefully with humans, join human families, and produce offspring described simply as regular people, sometimes called half-giants.

  The Bulgarian tradition names these pre-human beings ispolini. They lived in the mountains, fed on raw meat, fought dragons, and harbored a peculiar fear of blackberries, which threatened to trip them to their deaths. In that tradition, the ispolini offered sacrifices to the blackberry plant. Such details reveal how each culture's giant carries local texture, shaped by local landscape and local anxieties.

• 3. Bones and Pamphlet Wars

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  Claudine Cohen, in her 2002 book The Fate of the Mammoth, traced a long arc of human encounters with fossil remains through the lens of giant lore. The argument is that giant mythology heavily shaped how people interpreted the bones of prehistoric megafauna when they dug them up. Herodotus, writing centuries before the common era, reported that the remains of Orestes had been located in Tegea. Pliny described a giant's skeleton uncovered in Crete after an earthquake, and appeared to gesture at something like evolutionary thinking, suggesting that giants had become human-sized over time.

  Saint Augustine, in his City of God, mentioned what is now believed to have been the fossilized molar of an ancient Elephantidae. He framed it as evidence bearing on the nature of Noah's flood. Boccaccio, in his Genealogies of the Pagan Gods, devoted a passage to supposed archaeological discoveries in Sicily, believing they might support the reality of Polyphemus from Homer's Odyssey. Rabelais, working in the 16th century, built an entirely fabricated "giantology" for his Gargantua and Pantagruel.

  The most spectacular collision between giant lore and fossil evidence in this period came in 1613, when massive bones were found in France and attributed to Teutobochus. Physicians and anatomists published competing conclusions about the bones, and the dispute escalated into a full pamphlet war between surgeons and anatomists. A parallel episode unfolded in colonial New York, where the discovery of what was called the Claverack Giant drew the attention of Cotton Mather and Edward Taylor, two of early America's most prominent intellectual figures.

• 4. Scripture's Enormous Figures

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  Genesis names the Nephilim both before and after Noah's flood. Some translations of the Hebrew Bible render the word as "giants"; others leave it untranslated. The Book of Numbers preserves a first-person account from the spies sent by Moses into Canaan, reporting that all the people they saw were of great size: "We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them." The Book of Joshua later describes the actual conquest of Canaan and references those same people in chapters 14 and 15.

  Goliath, the Philistine warrior who fought David, is often portrayed as a giant in later retellings, but the source texts disagree on his measurements. The Masoretic Text gives his height as six cubits and one span. The Septuagint, the historian Flavius Josephus writing around 93 CE, and the Dead Sea Scrolls dating from the 2nd to 1st centuries BCE all give a shorter figure: four cubits and one span. Either way, he is described as considerably smaller than the Anakites, who made the Israelites feel like grasshoppers by comparison.

  Josephus, in his Antiquities of the Jews, described the Amorites as a remnant race of giants and claimed their bones were still on display in his own time. His language is direct: the bones were "unlike to any credible relations of other men." The Book of Enoch adds another layer, describing giants as the offspring of supernatural Watchers and human women.

• 5. Giants Across World Traditions

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  Hayk, the legendary founder of the Armenian state, was recorded by the ancient historian Movses Khorenatsi as a giant with curly hair, sparkling eyes, and strong arms, described as the bravest and most famous among the giants. Khorenatsi wrote that Hayk was part of the race that helped build the Tower of Babel. Mount Nemrut received its name from an Armenian tradition in which a rival giant named Nimrod was killed by an arrow Hayk fired during a massive battle to the south-east of Lake Van.

  The Aztec Quinametzin were a race of giant men said to have been created in an earlier solar era and credited with building the city of Teotihuacan. The Paiute of North America passed down oral histories describing the Si-Te-Cah as a tribe of red-haired cannibalistic giants, remains allegedly found by guano miners in Nevada's Lovelock Cave in 1911. A separate Paiute creation story tells of "beautiful giants" who once lived between the Sierra Nevadas and the Rocky Mountains, eventually reduced to two survivors whose skin turned brown from living permanently in a hot, desolate land.

  In Norse mythology, the jötnar stand in complex relationship to the gods. Most are described as roughly human-sized rather than enormous, though some frost giants, fire giants, and mountain giants are portrayed as vast. Odin himself, the chief Norse god, is the great-grandson of the jötunn Ymir. Norse tradition held that the entire world of men was fashioned from Ymir's flesh. In the Basque tradition, giants called jentilak and mairuak represent the Basque people who refused to convert to Christianity and retreated to the forest, where they guard ancient techniques and wisdom. The Basque giant Errolan is based on the Frankish general Roland, who died at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass.

• 6. Builders of the Landscape

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  Across European traditions, giants became the default explanation for anything inexplicably large. The Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus believed giants had a hand in building megalithic monuments. The Old English poem The Seafarer attributed high stone walls to giant construction. The basalt columns of the Giant's Causeway on the coast of Northern Ireland were understood as the work of Fionn mac Cumhaill.

  In the Netherlands, two giants were said to have dug a channel together until they reached the village of Akkrum, quarreled, and each went a separate way, splitting the channel into two waterways. Others threw up hills or simply became hills themselves when they died in place. In the English county of Shropshire, a giant named Gwendol Wrekin set out to bury the city of Shrewsbury under dirt, having quarreled with the mayor. A shoemaker on the road convinced the giant that the walk from Shrewsbury had already worn out all his shoes, implying the city was impossibly far away. The giant gave up and dumped his load of dirt on the spot, and that pile is said to have become The Wrekin and The Ercall, two hills still standing today.

  The American Paul Bunyan belongs to a version of this same tradition. A 1965 examination in an American studies journal concluded that Bunyan was a synthetic figure invented by advertising men rather than a spontaneous product of folk culture, yet American audiences adopted him enthusiastically regardless. Bunyan and his blue ox Babe were credited with reshaping the continent: the ox's hoof prints became the lake beds of the Northwest, and water spilling from its drinking trough carved the Mississippi River.

• 7. Half-Giants and Later Legends

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  Antaeus of Greek mythology is the son of Poseidon and the primordial entity Gaia, making him a half-giant by the classical definition. Arthurian legend counted Galehaut, Guinevere, and the Green Knight among half-giants as well. The general pattern across traditions is that the half-giant offspring of a human and a giant tends toward normal or only slightly above normal size, but often inherits unusual strength or supernatural ability.

  In fantasy role-playing, the half-giant concept has been built into playable characters: the Dark Sun setting for Dungeons & Dragons includes a half-giant race adapted to the harsh terrain of a world called Athas, with origins described in the lore as unclear. The MMORPG Horizons: Empire of Istaria features a separate half-giant race as well.

  J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series brought the half-giant into contemporary popular fiction. Rubeus Hagrid and Olympe Maxime, headmistress of Beauxbatons Academy of Magic, are both presented as half-giants. The Yoruba warrior king Oranmiyan, founder of the Oyo Empire, is sometimes described in legend as a giant. A 20-foot obelisk in the city of Ife, known as Opa Oranmiyan, is believed in local tradition to have been driven into the ground by Oranmiyan himself before his death, leaving a monument that still stands as evidence of what a giant once held.