"Finn MacCoul,
Wha dung the deil, and gart him yowl,"
and who, by the famous causeway of his own construction, could cross the Irish Channel to Britain whenever he chose.
Fiannam is probably the same personage. He is said to have lived in the time of Ewen II. of Scotland, a potentate who, according to Buchanan, "reigned in the year before Christ 77, and was a good and civil king;" and local story connects with his name the Giant's Chair, a rock above the river Dullan, in the parish of Mortlach.
England, too, is not without traces of some interest in the sons of Anak. We have the Giant's Grave, a long and grassy ridge in the beautiful Fairy Glen at Hawkstone, in Salop; another place so named on the coast of Bristol, and a third at Penrith, where two stone pillars in the churchyard, standing fifteen feet asunder at the opposite ends of a grave, and covered with runes or unintelligible carving, mark the size and tomb of Owen Cæsarius. Near these pillars is a third stone, called the Giant's Thumb.
Two miles below Brougham Castle, on the steep banks of the Eamont, are two excavations in the rock, having traces of a door and window, and of a strong column indented with iron; and these caves are assigned by tradition to a giant, who bore the classic name of Isis.
The vast stature of the Patagonians was long the subject of implicit belief, until it passed into a proverb. Antonio Pagifeta, who accompanied the adventurous Ferdinand Magellan on his famous voyage in 1519, records that on the coast of Brazil they found wild and gigantic cannibals so nimble of foot, that no man could overtake them. Bearing on thence to south latitude 49°, the land seemed all desolate and uninhabited, for they could see no living creature. At last a giant came singing and dancing towards them, and threw dust on his head. He was so tall, that the head of a Spaniard reached only to his waist. His apparel was the skin of a monstrous beast. All the inhabitants were men of the same kind, wherefore "the admiral called them Patagons."
This absurd story was corroborated a hundred years later by Jacob le Maire, in a voyage to the same region, and by the Dutch navigator Schouten, when they relate that at Port Desire they found graves containing human skeletons from eleven to twelve feet long. However, the Spanish officers of Cordova's squadron, by accurate measurements, reduced the utmost stature of the real Patagonian to seven feet one and a half inches, and their common height to six feet.
Premising that, of course, the great bones about to be referred to were those of the mammoth, the mastodon and other antediluvian animals, perhaps the most amusing instance of the credulity and gullibility even of the learned in such matters was a mémoire, read seriously to the Royal Academy of Sciences at Rouen, in the middle of the last century, by a savan named M. le Cat.
Therein he asserted and affected to give proof that Ferragas, who was slain by Orlando, the nephew of Charlemagne, was eighteen feet in height; that Isoret, whose tomb lay near the chapel of St. Pierre, in the suburbs of Paris, had been twenty feet high; and that in the city of Rouen, when digging near the convent of the Jacobins in 1509, during the reign of Louis XII., there was found in a tomb of stone a skeleton, the skull of which would hold a bushel (thirty-eight pounds weight) of corn. The shin-bones were entire, and measured four feet long. On this astounding tomb was a plate of copper, bearing the epitaph, "In this grave lies the noble and puissant Lord Riccon de Valmont and his bones." He then proceeds to tell us that Valence in Dauphiné possesses the bones of the giant Buccart, tyrant of the Vivarais, whom his vassal, the Count de Cabillon, slew by a barbed arrow, the iron head of which was found in his tomb when it—with all his bones intact—was discovered in 1705, at the base of the mountain of Crussol, whereon the giant dwelt, and whence he used to come daily to drink of the river Merderet. The skeleton when measured was twenty-two feet six inches long.*
* "In the Dominican Church there's the picture of a giant called Buard, who they pretend, by his bones dug up in their monastery, was fifteen cubits high and seven broad."—Atlas Geographus, 1711, 4to.