Giant

Giants are the great oversized beings of mythology, humanlike in shape but built on the scale of mountains, and they turn up almost everywhere people tell stories. In the oldest myths a giant is the raw material the world is made from, or the elder power the gods must overthrow to rule; in folklore the giant shrinks into the brute on the hill who eats cattle and the occasional traveller and is finally outwitted by a clever boy. Across all these forms the giant stands for what is older, wilder, and bigger than the human and the civilized, the force that has to be either defeated or kept beyond the fence.

The Shape on the Ridge

From the valley floor it looks at first like a spur of the mountain itself, until the spur moves. A leg swings clear of a hilltop, a shadow the length of a village slides across the fields, and the cattle scatter. The thing on the ridge is shaped like a man and built like a landscape, and the sound of it walking arrives a moment after the ground has already shaken. People who lived where the hills were strange explained them this way for thousands of years. Something enormous had been here, and some of the stories said it had never quite left.

The giant is among the most universal figures in myth, and one of the most variable. The word covers the primordial beings whose bodies became the world, the towering enemies of the gods, the ogres of the folktale, and the dim mountain-dwellers who pile up stones into causeways. What holds them together is not a single origin but a single quality. A giant is the human form pushed past its limit, and with the size comes everything the size implies: old age, raw strength, a closeness to the rock and the storm, and a standing quarrel with the smaller, cleverer creatures who have taken over the world.

The Body of the World

The oldest giants are the largest, because the world is made out of them. The Norse told that before there was earth or sky there was only the frost-giant Ymir, born of melting ice, and that Odin and his brothers killed him and built everything from the corpse: the earth from his flesh, the mountains from his bones, the sea from his blood, the dome of the sky from his skull, the clouds from his brains. India’s Rigveda tells of Purusha, the cosmic man sacrificed by the gods so that the pieces of him could become the sun, the moon, the sky, and the ranks of human society. China remembers Pangu, who held the sky and the earth apart for eighteen thousand years and, dying, became them, his breath the wind, his eyes the sun and moon, his bones the rock. The same idea keeps recurring. Creation is a giant taken apart, and the world we walk on is the body.

The Enemies of the Gods

Where giants are not the world’s foundation they are usually its first ruling class, the order the gods have to break. In Norse myth the jötnar, the frost and mountain giants of Jötunheim, are the gods’ oldest enemies and, awkwardly, their relatives and frequent in-laws. They are not stupid; they are dangerous and deep, keepers of wisdom and of threats. Thor spends much of his career among them, smashing the skull of Hrungnir, fishing for the world-serpent, dressing as a bride to recover his stolen hammer from the giant Thrym, and being humiliated by the illusions of Útgarða-Loki, who makes him wrestle old age and try to drink the sea. At the end of the world the fire-giant Surtr will ride out of the south with a flaming sword and burn the nine worlds to ash. The gods can hold the giants back. They cannot finally be rid of them.

Greece told a version of the same war. The Gigantes, sprung from the blood of wounded Earth, rose against the Olympians in the Gigantomachy, and the gods learned that they could not win it alone; a prophecy held that the giants would fall only with the help of a mortal, and so Heracles was brought in to finish each one the gods struck down. Other Greek giants are solitary horrors: the one-eyed Cyclops Polyphemus, who traps Odysseus and his men in a cave and eats them two at a time until a sharpened stake and a false name undo him; Antaeus, invincible as long as he touches his mother Earth, whom Heracles defeats by lifting him off the ground and crushing him in the air.

The Brute on the Hill

As the gods receded, the giant came down in the world and turned into the ogre of folklore, and here the story flips. Now the giant is huge and slow and not very bright, and the hero is small and quick and clever. The Bible gives the template in Goliath, nine feet of Philistine armour brought down by a shepherd boy with a sling and a single stone, and folklore repeats it endlessly. The English told of giants who built the land itself, hurling rocks that became hills and piling the stepping-stones of the Giant’s Causeway, and of Gogmagog and Cormoran and the rest, until a boy named Jack made a career of killing them with pits and tricks and a sharp blade. Other peoples kept their own builder-giants and ancestors: the Basque jentilak, the pagan giants said to have raised the standing stones and dolmens before the coming of Christianity; the Aztec Quinametzin, a vanished race of giants believed to have built the great ruined cities; the Armenian Hayk, the giant archer who slew the tyrant Bel and gave his people their name. The giant in these tales is strength without sense, and the moral is always the same. Size is not the same thing as winning.

Bones in the Hills

Some of the belief seems to have come straight out of the ground. People who ploughed fields and quarried hillsides kept turning up enormous bones, the thighs and skulls of mammoths, whales, and dinosaurs, and a race of vanished giants was a reasonable thing to reconstruct from a femur taller than a man. Whole local legends grew up around a single fossil. The hills themselves did the rest of the work, since a landscape of standing stones, strange boulders, and basalt causeways begs for an explanation on a human scale, and a giant is the most human-shaped answer to the question of who could have moved a rock that size. The stories disagree on which giant did which hill. They agree that something once walked here that we no longer do.

Powers and the Small Undoing

What a giant can do is mostly a matter of scale. It is immensely strong, able to throw boulders, shape coastlines, and crush a man underfoot without noticing. The eldest giants are old beyond reckoning, closer to the raw stuff of the cosmos than the gods themselves, and some carry deep and dangerous knowledge. They belong to the cold and the high places, the frost, the mountain, the storm. But the same size that makes a giant terrible is the flaw at its centre. A giant is slow, often dim, and easily led; it can be tricked, blinded, lifted off its source of strength, or simply stepped around. Across the whole tradition the giant is undone not by something bigger but by something smaller and sharper, a god with a hammer, a hero with a sling, a boy with a pit dug in the dark. The world remembers the giant as the thing it had to outgrow.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a giant in mythology?

A giant is a being of humanlike shape but enormous size found in mythologies worldwide, ranging from primordial beings whose bodies form the world to the towering enemies of the gods and the brutish ogres of folklore. Giants generally represent older, wilder, and more powerful forces than humanity, forces that the gods or human heroes must overcome or keep at bay.

What are the giants in Norse mythology called?

The giants of Norse mythology are called the jötnar (singular jötunn), and they include frost giants and mountain giants who live in Jötunheim. They are the chief enemies of the gods but also their kin and frequent marriage partners, and figures such as Ymir, Surtr, and Thrym are among the most important beings in Norse myth.

Were the world and humans made from a giant?

In several mythologies the world is literally formed from the body of a primordial giant. The Norse built the earth, sea, and sky from the slain frost giant Ymir, the Hindu Rigveda describes the cosmos and human society emerging from the sacrificed cosmic being Purusha, and Chinese myth says the world formed from the body of the dying giant Pangu.

How are giants defeated in myths?

Giants are rarely beaten by brute force and are usually defeated through cleverness or divine help. Odysseus blinded the Cyclops Polyphemus with a sharpened stake, David killed Goliath with a sling, Heracles crushed Antaeus by lifting him off the earth that gave him strength, and folklore heroes like Jack the Giant Killer used pits and tricks rather than matching the giant’s power.

What is the difference between giants and Titans?

In Greek mythology the Titans are a specific older generation of divine beings, the parents and predecessors of the Olympian gods, while the Giants (Gigantes) are a separate race born from the Earth who later warred against the Olympians. More broadly, “giant” is a general term for any enormous humanlike being across cultures, whereas “Titan” refers to those particular Greek elder deities.