Ettin

Region/Culture: Northern Europe
Mythos: English Mythology, Scottish Mythology, Norse Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Monsters and Beasts
Mythical Attributes: Towering brute strength joined to two or three heads that rarely agree, and, in the Scottish tale, the power to turn the unworthy to stone with a failed riddle.
Role in Mythos: The man-eating giant who bars the road or guards a stolen captive, the obstacle a hero must outwit rather than outmuscle.
Relation to Humans: Ettins prey on people, devouring travellers and carrying off royal daughters in the old stories. Yet they are reliably undone by a clever mortal who answers their riddles or strikes before the heads can settle on a single plan.

The ground knew before the eye did. A slow shudder came up through the heather, loose stones ticking against one another, and then a smell arrived on the wind, rank and warm, the breath of something that ate often and washed never. Only after all that did the shape climb the ridge: a giant tall as a gable end, two heads set on one pair of shoulders, the heads muttering at each other as he came.

The ettin is one of the oldest monsters in the English imagination, older than the settled spelling of his own name. He begins as the Old English eoten, the word the poets of Beowulf reached for when they needed something vast and hostile, kin to the giants and ogres and walking dead the poem traces back to Cain. The root runs deeper still, into a Proto-Germanic word that also gave the Norse their jötunn, the wilderness giants who stood against the gods. One reading of the name is plain and grim: the devourers, the eating things. To name him was to say what he did to you.

What the eoten looked like in those earliest centuries no surviving line bothers to describe, because everyone already knew. He was huge and he was hungry, and that was the whole of him. The familiar picture, the giant with two heads quarrelling on one neck, hardens into shape much later, and owes as much to long retelling and to later stories and games as to any single ancient source. The bones of him, though, never change. More body than brain. Strong enough to fold a man in half, slow enough that a quick one might live.

The story that carried him into the nursery is The Red Ettin, written down by Joseph Jacobs and set among the wonders of Andrew Lang’s Blue Fairy Book. There the monster has three heads, comes out of Ireland, and has stolen the daughter of King Malcolm of Scotland to keep in his castle. A widow sends her elder son out to make his fortune. He meets the Red Ettin, fails the three riddles the giant puts to him, and is turned to grey stone where he stands, mid-breath, mid-step.

The riddles are the true heart of it, and they are better than the giant deserves. What is the thing without an end? A bowl. The smaller, the more dangerous; what is that? A bridge. When does the dead carry the living? When a ship sails the sea with men inside her. The younger son, who left home with his mother’s full blessing and the help of a fairy met on the road, answers all three. He takes an axe to the heads, frees the captive princess, and lifts the curse from the stone men ranged about the hall, who shake off the cold and stand blinking back into their lives.

An ettin’s strength is the obvious thing about him and the least interesting. The real menace in the tale is the question. The Red Ettin does not merely club his victims; he interrogates them, and a wrong answer locks the body into stone like frost taking a pond. His doubled or trebled heads suggest a watchfulness you cannot slip past, a creature with a face turned to every quarter of the road at once. He devours, he abducts, he keeps. He is the wall between the hero and the thing the hero is walking toward.

And yet the heads are also the ruin of him. Two minds on one body seldom agree, and an ettin caught arguing with himself is an ettin doing nothing at all, which is precisely the gap a hero steps into. He can be out-thought. The riddles that kill the careless are gifts to the clever, and the giant who has petrified a dozen grown men is undone by a boy who simply knows the answers. Brawn without wit is just a large target. The younger son swings while the heads are still deciding what to make of him, and that, in the end, is the whole craft of beating an ettin.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is an ettin?

An ettin is a giant from English, Scottish, and broader Germanic folklore, typically pictured as a brutish, shaggy humanoid with two or three heads. The name descends from the Old English word eoten, meaning “giant,” and the creature is best known as a man-eating obstacle that heroes must overcome.

What does the name “ettin” mean and where does it come from?

“Ettin” comes from the Old English eoten, used in Beowulf for the race of giants descended from Cain. It shares a Proto-Germanic root with the Old Norse jötunn, the wilderness giants of Norse myth, and is often interpreted to mean “the devourer,” a reference to the giant’s appetite for human flesh.

How many heads does an ettin have?

In popular tradition the ettin is most often a two-headed giant, with each head having its own personality, which is why the heads frequently bicker and fail to cooperate. In the Scottish fairy tale The Red Ettin, however, the giant has three heads.

What happens in the story of The Red Ettin?

The Red Ettin is a three-headed giant from Ireland who kidnaps the daughter of King Malcolm of Scotland and poses three riddles to anyone he catches. A widow’s elder son fails the riddles and is turned to stone, but her younger son answers all three correctly, kills the giant, and frees both the princess and the petrified captives.

How do you defeat an ettin?

An ettin is defeated by wit rather than force, because its great strength is matched by poor cooperation between its heads. In The Red Ettin the younger son wins by correctly answering the giant’s three riddles, then beheading the distracted monster, breaking the spell that had turned its earlier victims to stone.