Corineus

Also Known As: chieftain of the Trojan exiles who followed Antenor out of Troy; eponym of Cornwall; killer of the giant Goemagot, also written Goëmagot and better known now as Gogmagog
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: English Mythology, Medieval Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: Strength enough to handle a twelve-cubit giant the way another man handles a boy at wrestling, and an appetite for doing it that the story treats as his defining trait rather than his talent.
Role in Mythos: He is the giant-clearer of the Trojan settlement of Britain and the man who gives Cornwall its name, emptying the land of its original inhabitants so the newcomers can plough it.
Relation to Humans: He is human himself, first among Brutus’s captains and later father-in-law to a king, and the people who take his name are the Cornish. Mortals in his own story treat him as something to be managed rather than worshipped, and one king waits for him to die before crossing him.

He came up the cliff path with a giant on his shoulders and three of his own ribs broken. Gulls, salt wind, the drag of all that weight hauling his neck sideways at every step. At the top he shrugged the load off and Goemagot went out over the edge, struck the rocks below and came apart on them, and the water under the cliff turned the colour of him. The place kept a name afterwards. Goemagot’s Leap, and the man who threw him was called Corineus.

Brutus had found him years earlier and half a world away, off the Tyrrhene shore, where four generations of Trojan exiles had been living since Antenor led their great-grandparents out of the burning city. Corineus was their chieftain. Geoffrey of Monmouth, who is the whole source of him, describes a sober-minded man, excellent in counsel, so strong in the body that he could put down a giant in single combat as easily as if he were wrestling a lad. Brutus took him into the fleet, and after that no captain was worth more to the expedition.

None of this happened. Geoffrey finished his History of the Kings of Britain in about 1136 and claimed he had done nothing but translate a very old book in the British tongue, a book nobody has ever found and which almost certainly never existed outside his own head. The Trojan founder at least had a thin ninth-century Welsh precedent behind him. Corineus did not. He steps into the record fully formed in Geoffrey’s Latin, and every line written about him since has been written downstream of that one book.

What Geoffrey gives him instead of a past is conduct. The fleet stopped seven days in Aquitaine, anchored in the mouth of the Loire, and Corineus went ashore with two hundred men to hunt deer in a wood belonging to King Goffar the Pict. The king’s envoys came on him mid-hunt and demanded to know who had given him leave. Corineus told them the question did not arise. One of them, Imbert, drew and loosed; Corineus stepped off the line of the arrow, closed the distance before the man could nock another, and broke his skull with the bow he was carrying. The rest ran.

The war that followed nearly finished the expedition. Late in a long day, with the Aquitanians refusing to break, Corineus drew his own men off to the right of the line, packed them tight and drove a wedge through the enemy front until there was nothing ahead of him but open ground and running backs. He had lost his sword by then and picked up a battle-axe, and with it he split men from the crown of the head down to the belt. He shouted after the ones who fled. Turn round and fight Corineus. So many thousands of you, running from one arm. The Trojans stared. So did the Aquitanians.

Albion, when the fleet finally reached it, was a country with no people in it and a great many giants. The Trojans drove them into the mountain caves, divided the land by lot, and began building as though they had always been there. Corineus could have had the pick of the island. He took the south-western horn instead and called it after himself, though Geoffrey hedges on whether the name comes from cornu, the horn of Britain, or from a wearing-down of Corineus. He chose it because it had more giants in it than any other share, and nothing on earth pleased him more than wrestling giants.

They came to him soon enough. Brutus was holding a festival to the gods in the harbour where the fleet had beached, roasting smoke going up off the fires, when Goemagot came down on the feast with twenty others and did terrible slaughter before the Britons could gather from every quarter and kill them. All of them died but Goemagot. He stood twelve cubits high and could pull up an oak and swing it like a hazel switch, and Brutus kept him alive on purpose, because he wanted to see the bout.

Corineus flung his weapons away and went to meet him bare. They locked, each hugging the other tight in the shackles of his arms, and for a long stretch the only sound either of them made was the gasping. Then Goemagot got his grip and set it, and Corineus felt three ribs go, two on the right side and one on the left. What happened next was temper as much as strength. He got under the giant, heaved him up onto his shoulders and ran for the nearest sea with him while the weight allowed, and that is how the pair of them arrived at the top of the cliff.

The strength has a job to do in the story. Britain cannot be farmed while the giants hold it, and the settlement needs more than a man who is able to fight them. It needs one who prefers it. Everything Corineus is given, the shoulders, the axe work, the habit of walking towards trouble rather than around it, exists to clear ground for people who want to plant barley.

His limits are set out just as plainly. He bleeds and he breaks, and a giant crushes his chest in the fight he wins. The temper that carried him through the Aquitanian line is not something he can put down afterwards. When Brutus’s son Locrinus fell for a captured German princess and looked ready to renege on his engagement to Gwendolen, Corineus came to court with the battle-axe swinging in his right hand and reminded the young king, at volume and more than once, how many giants that same arm had quietened on the Tyrrhene shores. Friends threw themselves between the two men. The wedding went ahead.

That threat is the real measure of him, because the one thing Corineus cannot do is outlast his own authority. Locrinus married Gwendolen and then hid Estrildis in a chamber cut under Trinovant for seven years, visiting her in secret under cover of making private sacrifice, too frightened of his father-in-law to do anything else. The moment Corineus was dead he put Gwendolen aside and made Estrildis queen. Gwendolen went home to Cornwall, raised its young men, met Locrinus on the river Stour and killed him with an arrow, then had Estrildis and the child Sabrina thrown into the river that still carries the girl’s name. Geoffrey says she was driven by the same fury as her father, which is as near as he comes to an epitaph.

Later writers kept the fight and moved it. By the end of the sixteenth century the place to point at was Plymouth Hoe. William Camden put it there in 1586, Edmund Spenser followed in 1590 with a line about “the western Hogh, besprinkled with the gore” of the giant, and Michael Drayton set the battle on the Hoe again in 1612. There was something to point at, too. The Warwick antiquary John Rous, writing by 1486, recorded two giant figures cut into the turf beside the leap, kept clear of weeds every year by the tenants who held the land nearby, and Plymouth’s own accounts show the corporation paying for the job: sevenpence to a man called Gotewyll, in 1494, for renewing the picture of Gogmagog upon the Hoe.

The turf figures are gone now. So, in a quieter way, is Corineus. The two giants carried through London in the Lord Mayor’s Show were still being named Corineus and Gogmagog in a pageant of 1605, and at some point after that the pairing collapsed and the single name Gogmagog split neatly down the middle. The wooden pair who stand in the Guildhall today are Gog and Magog. The giant-killer was written out of his own procession and replaced by a second giant.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Corineus?

Corineus is the Trojan warrior who leads a band of exiles into Britain alongside Brutus and becomes the legendary founder and namesake of Cornwall. He appears first in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain, written around 1136, as the strongest of Brutus’s captains and a man who took genuine pleasure in fighting giants. He is remembered above all for killing the giant Goemagot, now usually called Gogmagog.

How did Corineus kill Gogmagog?

Corineus killed him in a wrestling match by throwing him off a sea cliff. The giant had attacked a Trojan feast with twenty others and was the only one taken alive, kept back so Brutus could watch the bout. Goemagot broke three of Corineus’s ribs during the grapple, and Corineus, enraged, hoisted him onto his shoulders, ran to the nearest cliff and hurled him onto the rocks below.

Why is Cornwall named after Corineus?

Because Corineus chose that share of Britain for himself and named it after his own name, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth. Geoffrey offers two explanations of the word and does not settle between them: either it comes from cornu, meaning the horn of Britain, or it is a worn-down form of Corineus. Corineus picked the region deliberately, since it held more giants than any other portion of the island.

Was Corineus a real person?

No. Corineus is a literary creation of Geoffrey of Monmouth, who invented him for a history he presented as a translation of an ancient British book that has never been found and probably never existed. Unlike Brutus, who had a vague ninth-century Welsh precedent, Corineus has no attestation of any kind before Geoffrey wrote him in the 1130s.

What happened to Corineus in the end?

Geoffrey never describes his death, only its consequences. Corineus threatened King Locrinus with a battle-axe for slighting his daughter Gwendolen, and Locrinus was frightened enough to keep his mistress Estrildis hidden underground for seven years; the moment Corineus died, Locrinus set Gwendolen aside. Gwendolen raised Cornwall against him, killed him with an arrow on the river Stour, and drowned Estrildis and her daughter Sabrina.