Chapter 18

Our own giant-stories know nothing of this grim thirst for blood, even the Norse iötunn is nowhere depicted as a cannibal, like the Greek and Oriental giants; our giants are a great deal more genial, and come nearer to man's constitution in their shape and their way of thinking: their savagery spends itself mainly in hurling huge stones, removing mountains and rearing colossal buildings.

Saxo Gram. pp. 10. 11 invests the giantess Harthgrepa with the power to make herself small or large at pleasure. This is a gift which fairy-tales bestow on the ogre or the devil, and folk-tales on the haulemutter (Harrys 2, 10; and Suppl.).

It is in living legend (folktale) that the peculiar properties of our native giants have been most faithfully preserved; the poets make their giants far less interesting, they paint them, especially in subjects borrowed from Romance poetry, with only the features common to all giants. Harpîn, a gaint in the Iwein, demands a knight's daughter, hangs his sons, and lays waste the land (4464. 4500): (68) when slain, he falls to the ground like a tree (5074). (69) Still more vapid are the two giants introduced at 6588 seq. Even in the Tristan, the description of giant Urgân (15923) is not much more vivid: he levies blackmail on oxen and sheep, and when his hand is hewn off, he wants to heal it on again (16114). (70) The giant show more colour as we come to poems in the cycle of our hero-legend. Kuperân in the Hürn. Sîfrit (Cüpriân of the Heldens. 171) rules over 1000 giants, and holds in durance the captive daughter of a king. The Rother brings before us, all alive, the giants Aspriân, Grimme, Widolt, the last straining like a lion at his leash, till he is let loose for the fight (744. 2744. 4079); in the steel bar that two men could not lift he buries his teeth till fire starts out of it (650. 4653-74), and he smites with it like a thunderbolt (2734); the noise of his moving makes the earth to quake (5051), his hauberk rings when he leaps over bushes (4201); he pitches one man over the heads of four, so that his feet do not touch the ground (1718), smashes a lion against the wall (1144-53), rubs fire out of millstones (1040), wades in mould (646. 678) up to the knee (935), a feature preserved in Vilk. saga, cap. 60, and also Oriental (Hammer's Rosenöl 1, 36). Aspriân sets his foot on the mouth of the wounded (4275). And some good giant traits come out in Sigenôt: when he breathes in his sleep, the boughs bend (60), (71) he plucks up trees in the fir-wood (73-4), prepares lint-plugs (schübel) of a pound weight to stuff into his wounds (113), takes the hero under his armpit and carries him off (110. 158. Hag. 9, Lassb.). A giantess in the Wolfdiet. picks up horse and hero, and, bounding like a squirrel, takes them 350 miles over the mountains to her giant cell; another in the folk-song (Aw. 1, 161) carries man and horse up a mountain five miles high, where are two ready boiled and one on the spit (a vestige of androphagi after all); she offers her daughter to the hero, and when he escapes, she beats her with a club, so that all the flowers and leaves in the wood quiver. Giant Welle's sister Rütze in the Heldenbuch takes for her staff a whole tree, root and branch, that two waggons could not have carried; another woman 'of wild kin' walks over all the trees, and requires two bullocks' hides for a pair of shoes, Wolfd. 1513. Giant Langbein (Danske viser 1, 26) is asleep in the wood, when the heroes wake him up (see Suppl.).

A good many giant-stories not yet discovered and collected must still be living in the popular traditions of Norway and Sweden, (72) and even we in Germany may gather something from oral narration, though not much from books. The monk of St. Gall (Pertz 2, 756) has an Eishere (i.e. Egisheri, terribilis) of Thurgau, but he is a giant-like hero, not a giant. (73)

Of sacrifices offered to giants (as well as to friendly elves and home-sprites), of a worship of giants, there is hardly a trace. Yet in Kormakssaga 242 I find blôtrisi, giant to whom one sacrifices; and the buttered stone (p. 546) may have been smeared for the giantess, not by her, for it was the custom of antiquity to anoint sacred stones and images with oil or fat, conf. p. 63. As to the 'gude lubbe' whose worship is recorded by Bp. Gebheard (p. 526), his gianthood is not yet satisfactorily made out. Fasolt, the giant of storm, was invoked in exorcisms; but here we may regard him as a demigod, like Thorgerðr and Irpa, who were adored in Scandinavia (see Suppl.).

The connexion pointed out between several of the words for giant and the names of ancient nations is similar to the agreement of certain heroic names with historic characters. Mythic traits get mysteriously intergrown with historic, and as Dietrich and Charles do duty for a former god or her, Hungarians and Avars are made to stand for the old notion of giants. Only we must not carry this too far, but give its due weight to the fact that iötunn and þurs (74) have in themselves an intelligible meaning.




ENDNOTES:

68. One giant is 'hagel al der lande,' hail storm to all lands, Bit. 6482. Back

69. N.B., his bones are treasured up outside the castle-gate (5881), as in Fischart's Garg. 41ª: 'they tell of riesen and haunen, show their bones in churches, under town halls.' So there hangs in a church the skeleton of the giantess struck by lightning (p. 531n.), the heathen maiden's dripping rib (Deut. sag. 140), and her yellow locks (ibid. 317); in the castle is kept the giant's bone (ibid. 324). At Alpirsbach in the Black Forest a giant's skeleton hangs outside the gate, and in Our Lady's church at Arnstadt the 'riesenribge,' Bechst. 3, 129; conf. Jerichow and Werben in Ad. Kuhn, no. 56. The horns of a giant ox nailed up in the porch of a temple (Niebuhr's Rom. Hist. 1, 407). Back

70. The Romance giants are often porters and bridge-keepers, conf. the dorper in Fergût (supra, p. 535); yet also in Nib. 457, 4. 458, 1: 'rise portenære.' Back

71. The same token of gianthood is in Vilk. saga, cap. 176, and in a Servian lay. Back

72. Hülphers 3, 47 speaks of 'löjlige berättlelse om fordna jättar,' without going into them. Back

73. It is quite another thing, when in the debased folktale Siegfried the hero degenerates into a giant (Wh. heldensage, pp. 301-16), as divine Oden himself (p. 155) and Thôrr are degraded into düvels and dolts. A still later view (Altd. bl. 1, 122) regards riese and recke (hero) as all one. Back

74. Schafarik (Slov. star. 1, 258) sees nothing in them but Geta and Thyrsus; at that rate the national name Thussagetæ must include both. Back