What Is a Giant? The Beings Who Were Here Before the Gods

Across several traditions the giants occupy a consistent structural position. They exist before the current order and frequently before the gods themselves, so the world is made from or against them. They are associated with mountains, storms, the sea and the wild, which places them outside cultivated and ordered space. They are defeated by the gods in a founding conflict that establishes the present arrangement, and that conflict is the event the tradition treats as constitutive. They are not eliminated, generally being imprisoned, buried or exiled to the edges, which leaves them as a continuing threat and supplies an explanation for earthquakes, volcanoes and storms. And they are frequently the gods' relatives, which makes the conflict a family matter and complicates any simple reading of them as evil. That combination, older, wilder, defeated and still present, is what distinguishes the category from monsters, which are obstacles rather than predecessors.

The figures differ substantially while occupying the same structural place:

• •Titans in Greek tradition, an earlier generation of divine beings overthrown by the Olympians and imprisoned, alongside a separate set of giants defeated in another conflict
• •Jotnar in Norse tradition, who are not primarily defined by size, who intermarry with the gods, and who are prophesied to destroy them at the end
• •Asuras in Hindu tradition, in perpetual conflict with the devas, with the relationship between the two categories shifting across the texts
• •Nephilim in Hebrew tradition, mentioned briefly and elaborated extensively in later literature
• •Giants in Celtic and folk traditions across Europe, frequently attached to specific landscape features
• •Comparable figures across African, Pacific and American traditions, with local meanings that the shared outline does not capture

The defeat of an older generation by a younger one is doing work in these traditions beyond storytelling. It establishes the current gods as legitimate by showing them winning, which is the standard function of a founding conflict and which maps onto the political situations of the societies telling the stories, where a ruling group frequently claimed descent from the victors. It separates order from disorder and assigns the wild to the losers, which justifies clearing, farming and settlement as acts continuing the original victory. It explains why the world contains destructive forces without making the gods responsible for them. And in traditions where the defeat is provisional, most explicitly the Norse one where the giants return and win at the end, it expresses a view of order as temporary and hard-won rather than guaranteed, which is a substantially different outlook from traditions where the victory is permanent.

The most durable form of the figure is explanatory, since a giant accounts for features that obviously were not made by people and are too regular to look accidental. Standing stones, causeways, cairns, isolated boulders and unusual rock formations are attributed to giants across an enormous range of folklore, generally as things thrown, dropped or built during a fight, and the pattern is so consistent that it constitutes a recognisable genre. The Giant's Causeway in Ireland is the best-known example, with the columnar basalt explained as a road built across the sea. Erratic boulders deposited by glaciers attract the same explanation everywhere they occur, which makes sense given that a large rock of foreign stone sitting alone on a plain demands some account. Prehistoric monuments were frequently attributed to giants by later populations who had no memory of their construction, which is a reasonable inference from the size of the stones and the absence of any other candidate.

Belief in giants persisted into the early modern period and had evidential support of a kind. Large fossil bones were found regularly and, before comparative anatomy, the reasonable interpretation of an enormous limb bone was that it belonged to an enormous person, and mammoth and other large mammal remains were displayed and described as giant human bones in several European towns. A mammoth skull viewed from the front has a large central nasal opening that has been proposed, plausibly and without proof, as the origin of the one-eyed giant. Scriptural authority supported the belief in Christian Europe. Occasional individuals of genuinely unusual height were exhibited and encouraged the general idea. The reinterpretation of such bones as belonging to extinct animals was a substantial intellectual achievement of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it happened alongside the recognition that extinction had occurred, which was itself resisted.

The figure is generally older than the gods, tied to mountains, storms and wild ground, defeated in a founding conflict and imprisoned rather than destroyed, which makes it the previous order rather than a monster. Norse giants intermarry with the gods and are prophesied to end them. Standing stones and erratic boulders are attributed to giants everywhere, and large fossil bones were read as giant human remains before comparative anatomy.