XIV.
Giants and Dwarfs.—Duel between Efthesim and Grommelund.—Court Dwarfs and Little Dwarfs.—Ymer’s Solis.—The Invisible Reapers.—Story of the Dwarf Kreiss and the Giant Quadragant.—How the Giants came to serve the Dwarfs.
If legendary tradition is only a distant vibration of the bell of history, where must we go and look for traces of the real existence of giants? Must we believe the Edda or Holy writ itself? Afterwards the great fossil skeletons of mammoths, mastodons, and other antediluvian animals only revived the memory of gigantic men. The Apocryphal Books tell us that in the days of Enoch, a number of angels, amounting to two hundred, had conceived a desire for the daughters of men and came down to Mount Hermon in order to be near them. Some of the principal ones are even mentioned by name; there were Urakabaramiel, Sanyaza, Tamiel, and Akibiel. Is it a wonder, then, that credulous people should have believed that devils also, who after all are but fallen angels, have acted in the same way towards the descendants of Eve. The Killecroffs, we have seen, were the offspring of a union between devils and earthborn women; in like manner giants were the offspring of marriages between women and angels. Women are evidently capable of setting heaven, earth, and hell on fire.
Germany, which was the last part of Europe to enter the great Catholic Church, and was to be the first to leave it again at the time of the Reformation, kept up the belief in giants longer than any other country. Perhaps this was one of the results of the right of free inquiry.
The giant Einheer lived in the days of Charlemagne and even served in his army. Several centuries later there were gigantic burgraves (Burggra-fen), living all along the banks of the Rhine. They have a well known story there of a young and ingenious giant’s daughter, who had been jealously guarded in her father’s castle, and when she got out into the fields for the first time in her life, brought back in her apron a peasant with his plough and his two horses, whom she had picked up on the way. She showed them to her father as being all three little animals of very curious shape.
[Full Page Image] -- [Medium-Size]
After a while, however, the giants became smaller and smaller, until there were only a few left in the highest mountains, in dark forests, and in the romances of chivalry. After that they disappeared altogether.