Pliny gravely writes of the Fanesii, a tribe in the far north of Scandinavia, whose ears were so long that they could cover up their whole body with them; while the author of “Guerino Meschino” speaks of Indians with feet so large that they carried them over their heads as sunshades. Their means of locomotion must have been, under these circumstances, decidedly curious.
Amongst one-eyed people we have the Arimaspians and the Cyclops. The former were a race in Scythia, and were legendarily supposed to be in constant war with the gryphons, as elsewhere we find recorded the continuous hostilities between the pigmies and the cranes. They are referred to by Milton in his “Paradise Lost.” The Cyclops were giants, whose business it was to forge for Vulcan; their single eye was placed in the centre of their foreheads. Of these the most notable was the great giant Polyphemus, the defeated and blinded foe of Ulysses:—
“Roused with the sound, the mighty family
Of one-eyed brothers hasten to the shore,
And gather round the bellowing Polypheme.”[22]
[22] Addison’s “Milton Imitated.” [Back]
All the departures from the ordinary human type that we have hitherto considered sink into insignificance when we come to the great Briaræus, the fifty-headed and hundred-handed giant, and his companions:—
“He who brandished in his hundred hands
His fifty swords and fifty shields in fight.”[23]
[23] The “Jerusalem Delivered” of Tasso. [Back]
Giants of this overwhelming type may be also met with in the mythology of Scandinavia and India, but space forbids our dwelling at greater length on their charms. Having, therefore, so far done homage to the dictum of Pope, “The proper study of mankind is man,” by considering in the first place the combination of the human nature with the animal, and in the second division man himself, yet warped and distorted from the image of God, we now, in the third place, deal with those forms of human mould that owe their departure from the type form to an excess of bulk or the reverse—a class that includes the men of Lilliput and of Brobdingnag, and all their fellows in towering height or microscopic proportion.
The Fairies were held by our ancestors to be a kind of intermediate beings, partaking of the nature both of men and spirits. They had material bodies, and yet possessed the power of rendering themselves invisible at will. They had minds and hearts that could be touched by kindly feelings, and at the same time they delighted in practical jokes of the most pronounced description, while some displayed a cruel and malignant ferocity. The general idea, however, of them seems to have been of a diminutive race possessed with supernatural gifts, animated with joyous spirits, of great beauty, and full of kindliness to the sons of men when not crossed or slighted. We are told, for instance, of an honest farmer who had been reduced by the badness of the seasons to poverty, and was about to return homewards one morning from the fields in despair, having sown what little seed he had, which was not nearly so much as the ploughed land required. While pondering, not knowing what to do, he imagined that he heard a voice behind him saying—
“Tak’—an’ gie
As gude to me.”