We very early in the Bible narrative meet with references to giants, but it is by no means agreed by commentators that the word nephilim thus translated means men remarkable for their stature. The context in the case of the first reference to them, for instance, seems to render it more probable that these were men not of gigantic stature, but of gigantic wickedness—men who had departed from the true religion, and were sustaining their apostasy by acts of violence and oppression, and endeavouring by these means to gain to themselves power on the earth. At the same time in other passages the references to the size of the couch or the spear clearly implies their ownership by a man of much more than the ordinary stature. According to Jewish tradition Og lived three thousand years, and walked beside the Ark during the deluge, while after his death one of his bones was used as a bridge for crossing a river. According to Moses his bedstead was not quite sixteen feet long, so that it seems the brook that any single bone would span could scarcely have required bridging at all; while the depth at what we may be allowed to term “high water” during the Noachic deluge must have been very much less than all one’s preconceived notions would suggest, if its volume was a thing of indifference to the owner of this sixteen-feet couch. The nearest approach to a giant in modern times was an Irishman named Murphy, who attained to a height of eight feet ten inches. Many of our readers will remember seeing the Chinese Chang, or at least hearing of him, as he was exhibited to the curious in London in 1866 and 1880. His height was eight feet two inches. Patrick Cotter, an Irishman, who died in 1802, exceeded this by six inches; and one fine youth named Magrath, an orphan adopted by Bishop Berkeley, died at the age of twenty, after reaching a height of seven feet eight inches. There is no absolutely authenticated instance of any one in modern times reaching nine feet, though, of course, when tradition and hearsay have taken the place of the measuring-tape, there is no difficulty in going considerably beyond that limit. Plutarch tells of a giant eighty-five feet high, and Pliny of another who only reached sixty-six. Many of the skeletons of giants that were then supposed to be found during the Middle Ages were really the remains of extinct animals. In the imperfect state of surgical and osteological knowledge, the leg or blade bone of some gigantic antediluvian monster was ascribed to some hero of the past, and a very pretty little giant story promptly built upon it.
Any curious natural phenomena were generally ascribed by our ancestors to diabolical influence, or else recognised as the labour of giants. The Giant’s Causeway is a notable and very familiar illustration of this, and there are few mountains in Wales that are not invested with some fairy tradition or legend of the marvellous. Trichrug, in Cardiganshire, which derives its name from three united hills, is believed to have been a favourite resort of the giants, and, like Cader Idris, this lofty elevation was once the special seat or chair of a giant whose grave is still pointed out. In a match at quoits which took place here between the giants of Cambria, he of Trichrug is said to have thrown one across St. George’s Channel to the opposite coast of Ireland, thus winning the contest triumphantly. His grave was fabled to possess such extraordinary capabilities that it not only adapted itself to the size of any one that lay down in it, but also gifted the individual with greatly renewed strength. All defensive weapons placed in this grave were either destroyed or swallowed up. The rocky fortification, or carnedd, on the summit of Cader Idris is in like manner invested by the surrounding peasantry with a mysterious tradition respecting the giant Idris.
The warring of the giants against the rule of Jehovah finds its parallel in the Greek myth of the sons of Tartaros and Ge attempting to storm the gate of heaven and the seat of Zeus, only to meet with signal discomfiture. The common expression for adding difficulty to difficulty and embarrassment to embarrassment, the piling of Pelion on Ossa, refers to this struggle, as the giants piled two mountains of these names on each other as a scaling ladder to reach the heights of high Olympus.
In “Measure for Measure” we find two well-known allusions to giants:—
“O! it is excellent
To have a giant’s strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.”
The second of these is equally familiar:—
“The sense of death is most in apprehension,
And the poor beetle that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.”
In Matthew Green’s play of “The Spleen,” written at the beginning of the eighteenth century, we find an evident allusion to the struggle between David and Goliath in the line—
“Fling but a stone, the giant dies.”
Coleridge, again, writes—“A dwarf sees further than the giant, when he has the giant’s shoulder to rest on.” This idea is not, however, his own, for in Herbert’s “Jacula Prudentum” we find the line, “A dwarf on giant shoulders sees further of the two;” and in Fuller’s “Holy State” he says—“Grant them but dwarfs, yet stand they on giants’ shoulders and may see the further.” Many other illustrations might, of course, readily be given of what may be termed the literary existence of giants, but enough has been quoted to show how valuable these personages have in poesy and general literature. In the West “Gulliver’s Travels” and in the East the “Arabian Nights’ Entertainments” are two examples that at once occur to one’s mind.