Cormoran

Also Known As: also Cormelian in some tellings; called Careg-Cowse, after the rock itself, in the West Penwith drolls; the giant of St Michael’s Mount
Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: Celtic Mythology, English Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Enormous strength and reach, enough to carry cubical granite blocks across country and to wade the tidal channel at Mount’s Bay with cattle slung over his shoulders.
Role in Mythos: He is the builder and occupant of St Michael’s Mount, and the first giant killed by Jack in the chapbook tale that made both of them famous.
Relation to Humans: He fed on the farms and villages of Mount’s Bay, taking oxen, sheep and pigs, and in the printed versions people as well. The country around him responded with traps, enchantment and, eventually, a boy with a shovel.

Twice a day the sea pulls back from Marazion and leaves a granite causeway steaming in the open air, and for a few hours St Michael’s Mount stops being an island. Anyone can walk out to it. In the older telling, something used to walk in.

Before the water came, the Mount was not an island and not even near the coast. It stood about six miles inland in a forest of elm and beech and birch, and the Cornish called it Carrek Los yn Cos, the grey rock in the wood. That is the part of the story the fairy tale drops. The rock was not there by geology. A giant put it there, block by block, because every other giant in Cornwall had a hill to keep watch from and he did not.

He chose granite, and he chose it fussily, working the moors of Penwith for the masses that split closest to a cube. The hauling was brutal. Stone dust worked into the creases of his hands, and the forest floor behind him filled with dragged furrows. Most of the labour he pushed onto his wife, Cormelian, who carried the blocks in an apron stitched from the hides of ten bulls while he ate his way through barrels of pilchards and whole cows and then slept off the meal in the shade.

There was a bed of greenstone much nearer the site. Cormelian, tired and sick of the walk, broke off a lump and carried it quietly toward the half-built rock while her husband snored. He woke, in one version because a gull landed on his nose. He saw the wrong colour of stone in her apron, came up behind her at a run, and kicked her. The apron strings tore. The greenstone dropped into soft ground and half buried itself, and it is still there, out in the bay between the shore and the Mount, with a small chapel built on top of it five centuries ago. It is called Chapel Rock.

The West Cornwall drolls tell it differently and give him a different name. There he is Careg-Cowse, named for the rock he lives in rather than the other way round, a member of a diminished later race of giants with six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot. He and the giant of Trencrom hill, three miles off, shared a single cobbling hammer and threw it back and forth between them as they needed it. His wife came out of the dark cave one bright afternoon to shout a greeting up the hill, was blinded by the sun, and never saw the hammer coming. It hit her between the eyes and crushed the bone. The two giants sat over her body and roared until the noise came back off every hill in the district. Where they buried her is disputed. Under Chapel Rock, say some. Under the castle court. Or they rolled her into the sea and thought no more about it, which is what the giants’ detractors say.

He grew old badly. By the time the lord of Pengerswick came home from the East with a working knowledge of white witchcraft, the giant of the Mount had lost every tooth in his head and carried one eye in the middle of his forehead, and he still crossed to Market-Jew whenever he was hungry and took the best cow in the parish. He came for a Pengerswick calf and found himself walking in circles. The enchanter held him fast on the black rock at the western edge of the cove, stiff as iron and perfectly awake, through a whole winter night, with the calf trussed across his shoulders bleating into his ear. In the morning Pengerswick rode down and horsewhipped him until he dropped the calf and went into the water, and he never set foot on the mainland again. He was reduced, at the end, to buying butter and eggs at inflated prices from a farmer’s wife out of Gulval, whose family became the richest in the parish on the proceeds.

None of that is where the name Cormoran comes from. The name is not in the early Cornish tradition at all. It surfaces in the chapbook printings of “Jack the Giant Killer” that came off presses in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Nottingham, the earliest surviving of which, The History of Jack and the Giants, was issued at Newcastle in 1711, and it is not Cornish in origin. What the chapbook supplied was the measurements everyone now repeats. Eighteen feet tall. Three yards around the middle. Half a dozen oxen on his back at once, with sheep and hogs knotted round his waist like a bunch of tallow candles.

It also supplied his death. Jack, a farmer’s son from near Land’s End, asked the magistrates what the treasure was worth, took a horn and a shovel and a pickaxe over to the Mount on a winter evening, and dug through the dark. By morning there was a pit twenty-two feet deep and nearly as wide, floored over with long sticks and straw and dusted with loose earth so that it read as solid ground. At first light Jack stood on the far lip of it and blew his horn as though he were hunting a fox. The giant came out of the cave promising to broil him whole for breakfast, got about two thirds of the way through the sentence, and dropped. The impact shook the Mount. Jack finished him with the pickaxe, filled the hole in, and was given a belt with a motto stitched on it in gold.

A giant that size is undone by a hole in the ground.

His powers were never subtle, and they follow from what he was: mass, reach and an appetite the country could not meet. He could quarry and carry rock that no team of men could shift, throw and catch a hammer across three miles of open air, and treat the tide as a road rather than a wall. His limits follow just as directly. He was predictable, he ate at fixed times and from fixed places, and he slept like the dead after doing it. His temper cost him his wife twice over, once by his own foot and once by a game of catch. And he was tied to one rock, which is a poor arrangement for anything that has made itself the enemy of everyone within walking distance.

The drowned forest is still down there. After a heavy storm strips the sand off Mount’s Bay, the stumps and branches come up out of the beach, and the grey rock that used to stand in the middle of them is an island twice a day.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Cormoran?

Cormoran is the giant of St Michael’s Mount in Cornish folklore, best known as the first giant killed by Jack in the tale of Jack the Giant Killer. Cornish tradition also credits him with building the Mount itself, hauling cubical granite blocks from the moors of Penwith back when the rock stood inland in a forest.

How did Jack kill Cormoran?

Jack dug a covered pit twenty-two feet deep outside the giant’s cave during a winter night, then woke him at dawn by blowing a hunting horn. Cormoran charged out, fell into the pit, and Jack killed him with a blow of a pickaxe to the crown of the head. He then filled in the pit and took the treasure from the cave.

Is the name Cormoran actually Cornish?

No. The name does not appear in the early Cornish traditions about the giant of St Michael’s Mount, which call him Careg-Cowse after the rock, or simply the giant of the Mount. Cormoran first turns up in the English chapbook printings of Jack the Giant Killer produced at Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Nottingham, the earliest surviving of which dates to 1711.

Who was Cormelian?

Cormelian is named in Cornish tradition as the giant’s wife, who carried building stone for the Mount in a leather apron. She was killed either by a kick from her husband when she tried to substitute nearer greenstone for granite, or by a cobbling hammer thrown from Trencrom hill that struck her between the eyes. The sources are confused enough that the name Cormelian is sometimes attached to the giant of the Mount himself rather than to his wife.

What is Chapel Rock?

Chapel Rock is the mass of greenstone standing between the shore at Marazion and St Michael’s Mount, said in Cornish legend to be the block that fell from Cormelian’s apron when her husband kicked her. A small chapel was built on it in the medieval period, and in some versions of the story the giantess is buried underneath it.