For more than two hundred years practically every English-speaking child has read, or been read, the stories of "Jack the Giant-killer" and "Jack and the Beanstalk," which are full of echoes of Thor's adventures among the Frost Giants, and other misty myths of earliest times. The famous "Fee, fi, fo, fum," speech of the giant seems to come down from a couplet spoken by a giantess of old in the Arabic story of "Sunebal and the Ogress."
While the present tales are not so well known, they doubtless have a similarly ancient pedigree. Thus the Serbian tale comes largely from the "Arabian Nights"; and it is our old friend Polyphemus from whom the Korean seaman escaped.
Even Gulliver's Travels in the land of Brobdignag has a close parallel in faraway Japan: a man of Nagasaki, Shikaiya Wasōbiōye by name, after marvelous adventures among the Three Thousand Worlds, comes to the Land of Giants.
He rides on the back of a stork through total darkness for five months, and at length reaches a country where the sun shines again, where weeds are as large as bamboos, trees so great that it is a journey to walk round them, and the men some sixty feet in height. A giant picks him up and feeds him on single grains of huge rice. When the traveler tries to question the Tall Man upon the ways of his people, the giant laughs and declares so tiny a person could not possibly have intelligence enough to understand such great matters.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE GIANT HAND
Irish
A day Finn and his men were in the Hunting-hill they killed a great number of deer; and when they were wearied after the chase they sat down on a pleasant green knoll, at the back of the wind and at the face of the sun, where they could see every one, and no one at all could see them.
While they were sitting in that place Finn lifted his eyes toward the sea, and saw a ship making straight for the haven beneath the spot on which they were sitting. When the ship came on land, a Big Young Hero leaped out of her on the shore, seized her by the bows, and drew her up, her own seven lengths, on green grass, where the eldest son of neither land-owner nor of holder of large town-land dared mock or gibe at her. Then he ascended the hillside, leaping over the hollows and slanting the knolls, till he reached the spot on which Finn and his men were sitting.
He saluted Finn frankly, energetically, fluently; and Finn saluted him with the equivalent of the same words. Finn then asked him whence did he come, or what was he wanting? He answered Finn that he had come through night-watching and tempest of sea where he was; because he was losing his children, and