Traditions, Superstitions and Folk-lore Part 20

The boy, who was unacquainted with his superior, in answer to questions, said his father was dead, and he was driving the cow to Sir Ralph's as the heriot due under the circ.u.mstance. He further asked if the stranger did not think that, on Sir Ralph's death, the devil, his master, would demand his soul as heriot. The question so astonished the Knight that he sent the cow back to the poor widow. Dr. Hibbert Ware mentions a similar tradition, but the Knight's name is not Ralph, but Robert Ashton.

[33] "This wheel reappears in the Gaelic story of the Widow and her Daughters, Campbell, ii. 265, and in Grimm's German tale of the Iron Stove. The treasure house of Ixion, which none may enter without being either destroyed like Hesioneus or betrayed by marks of gold or blood, reappears in a vast number of popular stories, and is the foundation of the story of Bluebeard."

CHAPTER X.

GIANTS, MYTHICAL AND OTHERWISE.

His other parts besides p.r.o.ne on the flood, extended long and large, Lay floating many a rood, in bulk as huge As whom the fables name of monstrous size; t.i.tanian, or Earth-born, that warr'd on Jove, Briareos or Typhon, whom the den By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea beast Leviathan, which G.o.d of all His works Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.

_Milton._

Amongst the traditionary beings which linger yet in the legends of nearly every race or tribe, few are more universal than those relating to giants or men of colossal size and superhuman power. Geoffrey of Monmouth gravely informs us that, before the arrival of his legendary Trojan, Brutus, Britain was "called Albion, and was inhabited by none but a few giants." According to the same authority, Ireland was originally peopled by a similar race of monsters. He a.s.serts that the magician Merlin transported the materials for the building of Stonehenge from the Irish mountain Killaraus, to Salisbury Plain. Merlin a.s.sured Uther Pendragon that the stones were "mystical, and of a medical virtue," and that "the giants of old brought them from the farthest coasts of Africa, and placed them in Ireland while they inhabited that country."

The ancient Britons believed Stonehenge to have been built by giants, hence its name, in their language, _Choir-gaur_, which signifies the "Giant's Dance."

The earliest reliable notice of the British Islands is, however, to be found in the work "De Mundo," section three, attributed to Aristotle (B.C. 340). The writer says:--"Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the ocean which flows round the earth. In it are two very large islands, called Britiannic; these are Albion and Ierne."

The Ramayana, which is the next Sanscrit work in point of age to the Vedas, gives a singular account of the conquest of Ceylon, in which some mythic giants and monsters appear together with monkey warriors. Rama, by the aid of celestial weapons, conquered demons. He obtained his wife, Sita, by snapping the bow of her gigantic father. The said bow was conveyed from place to place by an eight-wheeled carriage, drawn by eight hundred men! His wife having been carried off through the sky by the demon monarch of Ceylon, "at whose name heaven's armies flee," Rama entered into an alliance with Sugriva, king of the monkeys, whose general, Hanuman, at the head of his monkey army, aided Rama in the conquest of his enemy's territory. The demon king was slain, and Sita recovered. The latter successfully underwent the ordeal of walking through blazing fire, in order to demonstrate her purity.

The confusion which existed in ancient times respecting wild men, monsters, and some kind of gigantic ape or monkey, has had some little light thrown upon it by the recent experiences of M. Du Chaillu in Equatorial Africa. In his "Journey to Ashango-land," he says:--

"After reconsidering the whole subject, I am compelled also to state that I think it highly probable that gorillas, and not chimpanzees, as I was formerly inclined to think, were the animals seen and captured by the Carthaginians under Hanno, as related in the 'Periplus.' Many circ.u.mstances combine in favour of this conclusion. One of the results of my late journey has been to prove that gorillas are nowhere more common than on the tract of land between the bend of the Fernand Vaz and the sea-sh.o.r.e; and, as this land is chiefly of alluvial formation, and the bed of the river constantly s.h.i.+fting, it is extremely probable that there were islands here in the time of Hanno. The southerly part of the land is rather hilly, and, even if it were not then an island, the Carthaginians, in rambling a short distance from the beach, would see a broad water (the Fernand Vaz) beyond them, and would conclude that the land was an island.... The pa.s.sage in the 'Periplus,' which I mentioned in 'Equatorial Africa,' is to the following effect:--'On the third day after sailing from thence, pa.s.sing the streams of fire, we came to a bay called the Horn of the South. In the recess was an island like the first, having a lake, and in this there was another island full of wild men. But much the greater part of them were women with hairy bodies, whom the interpreters called gorillas.... But, pursuing them, we were not able to take the men; they all escaped from us by their great agility, being _cremn.o.bates_ (that is to say, climbing precipitous rocks and trees), and defending themselves by throwing stones at us. We took three women, who bit and tore those who caught them, and were unwilling to follow. We were obliged, therefore, to kill them, and took their skins off, which skins were brought to Carthage, for we did not navigate further, provisions becoming scarce.'" Du Chaillu adds his opinion that "the hairy men and women met with were males and females of the _Troglodytes gorilla_. Even the name 'gorilla,' given to the animal in the 'Periplus,' is not very greatly different from its native name at the present day, 'ngina' or 'ngilla,' especially in the indistinct way in which it is sometimes p.r.o.nounced."

Mr. Robert Hunt seems to regard the giants of "old Cornwall" as something generically distinct from those depicted in Mr. Dasent's translation of Asbjornsen and Moe's collection of "Norse Tales." He says:--

"May we venture to believe that the Cornish giant is a true Celt, or may he not belong to an earlier race? He was fond of home, and we have no record of his ever having pa.s.sed beyond the wilds of Dartmoor. The giants of Lancas.h.i.+re, and Ches.h.i.+re, and Shrops.h.i.+re have a family likeness, and are no doubt closely related; but if they are cousins to the Cornish giants, they are cousins far removed."

So far from entertaining a doubt as to the common origin of these mythical monsters, on account of the diversity of local costume in which they are presented, I rather feel disposed to express astonishment at the vast amount of similarity they yet retain, after being subjected for centuries to so many diverse influences. The t.i.tans and the Cyclops, of the polished Greeks, some of whom are said to have covered nine acres of land when laid on the earth; the Goemagot, who succ.u.mbed in the famous wrestling match to the Trojan chief Corineus, on the cliff at Plymouth, and who, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, was twelve cubits high, and tore up huge oak trees as if they were hazel wands; that prince of pedestrians, Bolster, immortalised by the pencil and burin of George Cruickshank, who took his six miles at a stride, over a Cornish valley, without discomfort; the trolls and giants of the Norse, who, like their Greek cousins, warred with the ascendant G.o.ds; the ogres and huge club-wielding monsters of our nursery days, that in Lancas.h.i.+re, as in other parts of England (Cornwall included), yielded to the prowess of the redoubtable "Jack, the Giant-killer," or "Jack, the Tinkeard,"

present too many corresponding family features and mental and physical coincidences to permit a serious doubt of their common parentage. The Teutonic giants of the German tales collected by the brothers Grimm, bear unmistakable relations.h.i.+p both to those of Cornwall and the north of England. Indeed, "Gogmagog," the very name of the Shrops.h.i.+re colossus who was located in the ruins of the Roman city Uriconium, is preserved in that of the Cornish giant wrestler above referred to. There are Gog-Magog hills, too, near Cambridge; and the Corporation of London yet retains the huge wooden images which represent this mythic monster split into two, and converted into the giant warders of the ancient city--the well-known Gog and Magog. I have seen at Norwich two huge wooden dolls, which, if they do not actually represent the said Gog and Magog, are evidently intended as portraits of some very near relatives of those ponderous misshapen relics of the past.

Much useless discussion has been devoted to the attempt to show that mankind, or at least some portion thereof, in the "pre-historic time,"

was of Cyclopean or gigantic stature. All known evidence of a reliable character, however, condemns this hypothesis as untenable. The power of ignorance and rumour to magnify small facts into monstrous fictions is aptly ill.u.s.trated by the story of the famous three black crows. The deeds of a man of uncommon stature, or extraordinary strength, would furnish, under certain circ.u.mstances, a sufficient modic.u.m of truth to lay the foundation of a most extravagant myth. We have a modern ill.u.s.tration of the p.r.o.neness of ignorant or superst.i.tious persons to hyperbole in matters of this kind, in the statements of early voyagers anent the aborigines of Patagonia. Our early school geographies informed us that this then relatively unknown portion of South America was peopled by a race of giants. Indeed, I think it was even intimated that these colossi were most probably the _bona fide_ descendants of the supposed mythical monsters of the days of old. Some Spanish officers, in 1785, measured several of these Patagonian giants, and they reported that the greatest monster of the lot only reached seven feet one inch and a quarter! I can never remember England being without two or three exhibited giants, who would look with contempt upon such pretensions to the honours of the caravan, to say nothing of the "reception room" of such "gentlemanly freaks of nature" as Chang, the Chinese Anak, Mons.

Brice, or Captain Bates, with his colossal wife, _nee_ Miss Swan. But Captain Wallis informs us that, on his carefully measuring several of these Patagonian prodigies, he found that the stature of the greater part of them ranged between five feet ten inches and six feet! The well-known regiment of grenadiers raised by Frederick William the First, of Prussia, would have completely dwarfed these once celebrated Patagonian t.i.tans. One of them, a Swede, measured eight feet six inches.

"O'Brien, the Irish giant," who died in 1783, was eight feet four inches in height. His real name was Byrne. His skeleton is preserved in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, London. Chang, at nineteen years of age, was said to be seven feet nine and a half inches in height. He stated that a deceased sister was eight inches taller than himself! The p.r.o.neness to exaggeration or hyperbole to which I have referred was shared in even by such men as Julius Caesar and Tacitus; or, at the least, they dealt largely in the article at second-hand. They believed and recorded the then vulgar notion that the German "barbarians," our own ancestors, were a race of gigantic men.

Indeed the belief in giants and other monsters was almost universal amongst the more educated section of the Roman people. Pliny speaks of the existence of men in India whose height exceeded five cubits. He a.s.sures his readers, on the most unimpeachable authority, that "they are never known to spit, are not troubled with pain in the head or teeth, or grief of the eyes, and seldom or never complain of any soreness in any other parts of the body, so hardy are they, and of so strong a const.i.tution, through the moderate heat of the sun." He likewise talks of a people who, having no heads, stand on their necks. These monsters were said to carry their eyes in their shoulders. He describes the Choromandae as a savage people, without a distinct speech. Their bodies were rough and hairy. They gnashed their teeth and made a hideous noise.

Their eyes were red, and their teeth of the canine order. This same India, according to Pliny, possessed a great variety of other monstrosities, such as men without noses, men with feet a cubit long, while those of their wives were so small that they were called "sparrow-footed."

That such stories were ordinarily accepted as true, even in Shakspere's days, is attested by the fact that the great poet and dramatist places in the mouth of Oth.e.l.lo, in his eloquent defence before the senate of Venice, when explaining his method of courts.h.i.+p, the following words:--

Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances, Of moving accidents, by flood and field; Of hair-breadth scapes i'th imminent deadly breach; Of being taken by the insolent foe And sold to slavery; of my redemption thence And portance in my travel's history; Wherein of antres vast, and deserts idle, Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven, It was my hint to speak, such was the process; And of the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders.

Again, in the Tempest, after the appearance of Prospero's magic repast, Sebastian says,--

Now I will believe That there are unicorns; that in Arabia There is one tree, the Phnix' throne; one phnix At this hour reigning there.

And Gonzala adds,--

When we were boys, Who would believe that there were mountaineers Dew-lapp'd like bulls, whose throats had hanging at them Wallets of flesh? or that there were such men, Whose heads stood in their b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

The Amorites, the most important tribe of the aborigines of Palestine, are described in the Jewish Rabbinical writings as of enormous stature.

Amos indeed, speaks of them, figuratively, as being as high as cedars and as strong as oaks. It is stated in Deuteronomy that the iron bed of Og, King of Bashan, was nine cubits long and four in breadth. This bed, however, by some, is believed to have been really a kind of divan. The Rabbinical writers were not, however, content with even a literal interpretation of these pa.s.sages. In the _Jalkut s.h.i.+moni_ we are told that Moses informed Azrael, the Angel of Death, that the dimensions of Og and Sihon were so great that they escaped drowning at the great Deluge, the water of which reached no higher than their ancles!

According to the _Sevachir_, Og placed his feet on the fountains of the Great Deep, and, by putting his hand on the windows of Heaven, he stopped the Deluge! On the water being made so hot, however, that the monster's lower extremities became parboiled, he was compelled to desist. He nevertheless mounted the ark, and survived the great catastrophe. He was said to consume daily one thousand oxen, one thousand head of game, and one thousand measures of wine. He was a famous hand at uplifting mountains and other objects of similarly trifling magnitude! He met with a mishap, however, whilst conveying a rock "three miles in extent," with which he proposed to annihilate the Israelitish army at one blow! We are further informed that Joshua, who was ten ells high, perceiving that the rock was crumbling to pieces around the giant's shoulders, struck him on the ancle with an axe ten ells in length, and thus lamed him for life. Sihon was so powerful that no creature on earth could withstand him. It seems, however, that he derived his strength not altogether from his immense physique, but from a demon with which he was connected, inasmuch as the Israelites speedily vanquished both him and his gigantic Amorite followers, after the said demon had been effectually confined in chains. The Amorites may have been men of large stature in comparison with the surrounding tribes.

This is by no means improbable. Two recent travellers, Mr. Porter and the Rev. Cyril Graham, testify to the Cyclopean character of the remains of some of the ancient cities of Bashan, which they succeeded in discovering, after infinite toil and fatigue, the former in 1853 and the latter in 1857. Some of the houses are described as being built of immense ma.s.ses of squared stones of the neighbouring basalt rock, without mortar or other cement, with an enormous basaltic "flag" for the roof, and a similar one for a door or gateway. Some of the latter Mr.

Graham found still in position, and capable of being turned on the stone pivots which supplied the place of hinges.

Mr. Gladstone, in his "Juventus Mundi," contends that the "Cyclops, a G.o.dless race," are the children of Poseidon, and that Poseidon (the Greek Neptune) was the chief G.o.d of the Phnicians. He adds, "Syria was inhabited by Canaanites; and it has been observed that the names given in Scripture to that race indicate great stature and physical force, which became the basis of a tradition that they were a race of giants. To the Greek mind this would naturally convey that they were the children of Poseidon, as the Phnician G.o.d."

The ruins at Baalbec, and the sites of other ancient Phnician cities, present numerous specimens of colossal masonry, of most extraordinary dimensions. In a wall at Baalbec three large blocks of stone are described as still _in situ_, at the height of twenty feet from the ground, which measure each twelve feet in width, twelve feet in depth, and sixty feet in length. Mr. John D. Baldwin, in his "Pre-historic Nations," contends that the ancient Phnicians were of Cus.h.i.+te of Hamite origin. Speaking of their stupendous architectural remains, he says:--

"The Cus.h.i.+te origin of these cities is so plain that those most influenced by the strange monomania which transforms the Phnicians into Semites now admit that the Cus.h.i.+tes were the first civilisers in Phnicia. These old builders, whose sculpture produced such astonis.h.i.+ng effects in coa.r.s.e rock, resorted to wood and metal for the finish and ornamentation of their work. The stone they used was not Parian marble, therefore they covered it with ornament of another material, and 'what remains of their monuments is not the monument itself, but the gross support that served to bear the whole system of decoration under which the stone was concealed.'"

In relatively recent times, India appears to have been regarded as especially the land of giants, marvels, and enchantments. Honest old Sir John Mandeville, in his quaint, credulous, innocent way, tells us that there are, in one of the Indian islands, "folks of great stature, as giants, and they be hideous to look upon, and they have but one eye, and that is in the middle of the front, and they eat nothing but raw flesh and raw fish." He further adds that they were clothed in the skins of beasts, they drank milk, preferred man's flesh to all other food, and they had no houses to live in. In another Indian island, Sir John tells us he was informed that giants dwelt "of great stature--some fifty cubits long;" but he adds, with commendable caution, "I saw none of these, for I had no l.u.s.t to go to those parties, because no man cometh neither into that Isle nor into the other, but he is devoured anon. Men say that many times the giants take men into the sea out of their s.h.i.+ps and bring them to land, two in one hand and two in another, eating them going, all raw and all quick."

The extravagance manifested in these giant legends may have arisen from two distinct sources, besides the one to which I have alluded. In the first place _giant_ did not originally mean bulk or extraordinary height. The Hebrew word _nephilim_, used in the Bible, according to Dr.

Derham, is sometimes employed to signify "_violent_ men," and it is translated by a word carrying such a meaning by several ancient writers.

He considers that "monsters of rapine and wickedness" are referred to rather than giants in stature. And it is perfectly true that vice and violence are almost always characteristic of these legendary huge-limbed gentry; while the conqueror, who represents the better morals of the age of the myths, is generally of the dimensions of ordinary humanity.

The discovery of certain fossil bones of colossal size for a time seemed to countenance the belief in the physical existence of this mythic race.

Buffon, indeed, describes and figures large bones as the remains of giants, which are now well known to pertain to a species of extinct fossil elephant.

In a letter from Dr. Mather to Dr. Woodward, published in the Royal Society's Transactions, reference is made to a discovery, at Albany, in New England, in 1705, of enormous bones and teeth. The doctor calls them the bones of a giant, and refers to them as corroborative of the statement in Genesis, c. 6, v. 4. The bones in question, however, turned out to belong to the great American fossil pachyderm, the _Mastodon giganteus_. There is a tradition amongst the red Indians, that a race of men, relatively large in stature, existed contemporaneously with these animals, and that both were destroyed by the Great Spirit with thunderbolts. One account says,--that "as a troop of these terrible quadrupeds were destroying the deer, the bisons, and the other animals created for the use of the Indians, the 'Great Man,' slew them all with his thunder, except the Big Bull, who, nothing daunted, presented his enormous forehead to the bolts, and shook them off as they fell, till, being at last wounded in the side, he fled towards the great lakes, where he is to this day."

Dr. Hitchc.o.c.k, in one of his geological works, informs us that "Felix Plater, Professor of Anatomy at Basle, referred the bones of an elephant, found at Lucerne, to a giant at least nineteen feet high, and, in England, similar bones were regarded as those of the fallen angels!"

The discovery of remains of a fossil elephant beneath the cliff at Plymouth was not very long ago held by some to furnish demonstrative evidence not only of the strictly historical character of Geoffrey of Monmouth's idle romance respecting the landing of Brute and his Trojans in England, but of the precise locality where the mythic champion wrestler, Corineus, hurled the equally mythic giant, Gogmagog, from the cliff into the sea![34]

At Coggeshall, in Ess.e.x, similar remains have been found. One of the earliest notices of these interesting discoveries is by old Norden, who says that at Coggeshall "ther were to be seene 2 teeth of a monstrous man or gyant of so great magnitude and weight as 100 of anie men's teeth in this age cannot countervayle one of them."

White Watson alludes to the discovery, last century, of the skull of a fossil elephant, at Wirksworth, in Derbys.h.i.+re, which was commonly believed at the time to be the brain-pan of an enormous giant.

In the second place, it does not appear a difficult matter to recognise in these giant legends, one form in which the memory of the dethronement of the G.o.ds of the various Aryan myths has been preserved. In fact, the very feats performed by the giants in Cornwall, such as the hurling of huge rocks, and striding across valleys, are, as I have previously shown, attributed in Lancas.h.i.+re and the north of England to the devil. A tradition yet exists that the Roman highways, which cross each other not far from Fulwood Barracks, near Preston, extended from the North Sea to the South Sea, and from the East Sea to the West Sea, and that the devil made them himself in one night. Indeed in mythical and traditionary lore, giants and devils are frequently convertible personages.

Mr. A. Russel Wallace, in his "Malay Archipelago," tells us that the present inhabitants of the island of Java, "who now only build rude houses of bamboo and thatch," look upon the ruins of the colossal edifices, the remarkable examples of ancient sculpture, and other evidences of the extinct civilisation amidst which they dwell, "with ignorant amazement," and regard them as "the undoubted productions of giants or of demons." The mythology of the Southern Aryans presents a similar confusion; their tribe of demons, the Rakshasas or Atrins (devourers), Kelly regards as the "earliest originals of the giants and ogres of our nursery tales. They can take any form at will, but their natural one is that of a huge misshapen giant 'like a cloud,' with hair and beard of the colour of red lightning. They go about open-mouthed, gnas.h.i.+ng their monstrous teeth and snuffing after human flesh. Their strength waxes most terrible in twilight, and they know how to increase its effect by all sorts of magic. They carry off their human prey through the air, tear open the living bodies, and with their faces plunged amongst the entrails they suck up the warm blood as it gushes from the heart. After they have gorged themselves they dance merrily."

These Rakshasas, certainly look very like the originals of the monsters described by Sir John Mandeville.

The story of the t.i.tans, overthrown by Zeus, and cast into Tartarus, is the h.e.l.lenic form of this giant myth, which Milton has imitated in his Paradise Lost, where Satan and his host, formerly angels and archangels, are hurled from heaven into the bottomless pit. Milton's devils are, in fact, veritable giants. Speaking of Satan, the poet describes him as

In bulk as huge As whom the fables name of monstrous size; t.i.tanian or Earth-born, that warr'd on Jove, Briareos or Typhon, whom the den By ancient Tarsus held, or that sea beast Leviathan, which G.o.d of all His works Created hugest that swim the ocean stream.

Again, speaking of his ponderous weapon, he says,--

His spear, to equal which the tallest pine Hewn on Norwegian hills to be the mast Of some great admiral, were but a wand.