## Quick Facts - Here is a delightful folktale about a [fight with a giant witch](http://www.jstor.org/stable/658329), via indigenous folks from northeastern America. It's got everything: a beautiful young woman singing, a huge heap of human bones, a glorious resurrection, and 1800s pushback against the stereotype / trope of the [Savage Indian](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSavageIndian). - In most stories, Germanic giants turn to stone in sunlight and live in mountain caves. - Three different Hebrew terms are used to describe the "unusual stature" of men encountered by [spies investigating the exceptional fertility of the Canaan valley](http://www.jstor.org/stable/25618668); _[’an·šê](https://biblehub.com/hebrew/anshei_376.htm)[middah](https://biblehub.com/hebrew/4060.htm)_ (men of great stature), _[nefilim](https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/nephilim)_ (gigantic primordial heroes), and their genetic descendants the _bnei anak_ ([sons of giants](https://jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/1453-anakim)). - The Lenapé Nation has a legend about [a race of Giants who protected all the local animals](https://www.nativeamericanembassy.net/www.lenni-lenape.com/www/html/LenapeArchives/LenapeSet-01/animleft.html) from being wasted by early hunters. - There exists an entire series of folkloric myths about [sailors mistaking giant whales for islands](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/five-real-sea-monsters-brought-life-early-naturalists-180953155/). ## Cannibal Killers The Anishinaabe of the Great Lakes region have a mythic tradition that is absolutely filled with hilarious stories, one of which involves the complex mythic hero (Wenabozho) being boiled alive by a giant cannibal. He's saved when the giant falls asleep and a snake crawls up its butt, into its stomach, where it's able to bite into the giant's heart and kill it. My favorite part is that it was relayed by [an Anishinaabe academic](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4128493). ## How Tall is Tall? The author of [A Look at Kumsay The Graveyard of Giants](https://musaeumscythia.blogspot.com/2021/11/a-look-at-kumsay-graveyard-of-giants.html?m=1) is very excited because some graves associated with the [Yamnaya people](https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24132230-200-story-of-most-murderous-people-of-all-time-revealed-in-ancient-dna/) (but who might not be, quite) are filled with people who are considered "giants" at around 2 meters tall. Every time I've heard folktales and myths about "giants" I've tended to think they referred to _monstrously huge_ giants like I've seen in cartoons, but this discovery put the myths about "[giants invading Ireland](https://fantasticalhistory.wordpress.com/2017/02/09/the-fomorian-giants/)" into perspective for me. ## World Movers I'm not ridiculous for imagining giants as being _huge,_ by the way. Germanic giants from the _Eddas_ come with delightful stories like "dropping some dirt from his apron led to the creation of islands" and "Thor mistook a giant's glove for a building." Folklorists like C. von Sydow think that [giants were](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1260141) _[explicitly](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1260141)_ [invented because people needed to imagine something big](https://www.jstor.org/stable/1260141) and powerful enough to have shaped the landscape, although there is a lot of variance. Lotte Motz, by contrast, doesn't consider size to be the defining characteristic of Germanic giants — which I find sort of puzzling. ## What Unit of Measure? Tim Urban of [wait but why](https://waitbutwhy.com/2019/08/giants.html) thinks that we should think of multi-celled creatures (like sponges) as being roughly on the same level of complexity as a colony of ants or tribe of humans; he suggests that we think of groups of social animals as a sort of giant creature where the individual parts cannot survive on their own any more than a single cell of a sponge does well on its own... or conversely, like how plucking off a piece of some plants can allow it to become a separate plant even though we would have considered the first plant to be _one_ biological construct. It's a very philosophically interesting argument. --- 📗 ICYMI: If you found this interesting, you may also enjoy my article about [giants in war: frost giants & firbolgs](https://eleanorkonik.com/giants-in-war-frost-giants-firbolgs/). 💚 If you learned something from this overview, consider forwarding it to a friend and encouraging them to [sign up](https://eleanorkonik.com/membership/) for more research deep dives into obscure history and science.