The medieval streets of Cerne, a village about seven miles north of Dorchester, meander around the ruins of an abbey and an ancient church, fine old inns, and thatched yellowstone houses. It is a tranquil setting. But on the high hill just half a mile to the north of the village it is a different story. For seeming to stride straight out of the hill, brandishing a gnarled club gripped aggressively in his right hand, is the huge image of a naked, male giant. And aggression is not the only action he suggests: his enormous presence includes not only his height – 200 feet from the top of his club down to his feet – but also his erect phallus, which measures 30 feet! In ancient times people here had climbed the hill, and carved the giant’s outline by cutting ditches into the grassy hillside, exposing the white chalk beneath. He has glowered over the village beneath for centuries since.
Actually, no one knows for sure the Cerne giant’s origins. Some believe he may be only a few hundred years old – a sixteenth-century caricature of Oliver Cromwell, cut into the hillside by his critics. But many believe he may have been originally cut into the hillside at the start of the age of the real Middle-earth – in Celtic times, before the Romans came. They think he was a Celtic god who once clutched a severed head – a Celtic religious symbol which, they argue, is represented by a mound below the giant’s left hand. Some writers speculate that he was created a little later, during the Roman occupation of Britain. In this case, he could be the god Helith or Hercules, ordered to be cut by the Emperor Commodus (who believed he was a reincarnation of Hercules) during his reign from AD 180 to 193. The figure does bear a resemblance to representations of Hercules – naked and wielding a club – discovered on Romano-British archaeological finds from Norfolk.
But the idea of the Cerne Abbas giant as the revered figure of a god, lovingly carved into the turf as an act of worship, strays far from the deep, abiding terror associated with the giants in Middle-earth. After all, they were beings who had the ability to crush a person easily in their grip, and tear humans limb from limb as the monster Grendel did in Beowulf. In his classic study of ancient Germanic mythology, Grimm derives ‘eotan’ from Gothic ‘itan’, to eat, and ‘thyrs’ from Gothic ‘dry’: these two words would thus signify creatures with an inordinate desire for eating and drinking. Their superhuman appetites could be satisfied, if Grendel is a model, by gorging on human flesh and blood.
More likely is that the giant was carved into the hillside to keep him under control. Perhaps it was to fix his ‘real’, mobile presence by a spell, paralysing his limbs from action by their bound image in the ground. This idea fits better with the legend that the giant had been terrorizing the local people. When he lay down on the hill to sleep, a posse of locals crept slowly up the hill, their footsteps drowned out by his thunderous snores. They gathered around him, and with a hundred spear strokes slew him where he lay. They then carved his outline into the turf – thus rendering the Cerne giant the oldest forensic chalk outline in history!
Giants were a species of being that cast huge shadows over the imagination of the people of Middle-earth. They were believed to be the first forms of life at the creation of the cosmos. They had seen how Middle-earth was constructed. They were possessed of elemental powers – and so were both terrifying and wise.
Ymir, the Melting Giant
According to the later Norse literature, people of Middle-earth believed that a cosmological cataclysm created the original spark of life. At the beginning of time ‘there was nothing but the Yawning Gap’, says Snorri Sturluson. He describes a state of suspended power in which, before the cosmos was formed, there were two immense polarities of fire and frost. Muspellheim was a region of pure heat and flame, raging, burning. Niflheim, freezing fog, was deep chill, locked, bound, creaking cold. These two mighty forces held each other in balance. The space between them was Ginnungagap, highly charged, explosive energy. The vision was like an ancient Norse version of the ‘steady-state universe’ theory of modern astrophysics, explaining the formation of our galaxy.
And then came the Big Bang. In one fateful instant, the two mighty polarities intersected. Fire and Frost exploded into each other’s domain. In the Yawning Gap between the formerly separate realms, in Sturluson’s words, ‘… where the freezing met the livid heat it melted and dripped away. From the fermenting drops fusing to life by virtue of the power which threw up the heat, there was shaped the likeness of a man. He is called Ymir.’
Ymir had emerged from the primeval hoar frost in human form. But although he took the form of a man, he was not human. He was huge, for the ice had melted into giants as big as mountains. Possibly they are ancestral memories of Ice Age glaciers – ice giants moving only a few feet each year, their immense footprints leaving tracks the size of valleys and gorges shaping the contours of the earth’s skin.
But the concept was even bigger than this. For out of the material being of this first giant was formed the entire world as we know it. Sturluson quotes from Grimnismal: ‘Out of Ymir’s flesh was the earth fashioned and from his gushing gore the seas; mountain tops from his bones, trees from his hair, heavenly sky from his skull. Then out of his brows the joyous gods built Middle-earth for the sons of men; and from his brains there burgeoned all the clouds.’
Today cosmologists say we are all composed of stardust which came from a big bang – or the detritus of space for the less romantically inclined! The elements which comprise our bodies – like iron or oxygen – were all forged in the burning cores of distant suns, before being catapulted across space by the tremendous impact of stellar explosions. The ancient figure of Ymir was the image which connects these celestial realms with our earthly bodies.
As the earth was created other human forms appeared, some as people, others giant-sized. One of the humans was Buri, who had a son called Bor. A giant called Bolthor had a daughter named Bestla. Bor and Bestla had a child. This child was Odin. So the giants came before the gods.
The giants were slow-witted, but had knowledge. Cleverer beings, like dwarves and humans, have come along since and elaborated the world, but the basic structure and dynamics of life were in the hands of the giants. They retained a kind of brute wisdom; knowledge from the beginning. It is intriguing to imagine this wisdom residing within the primeval forces of the cosmos – not in our minds, not in our libraries, our scientific laboratories, or our computer banks. Truth not in our hands, but in the earth’s forces. Out there, in the dynamic waters of creation, condensed in deep pools of wisdom.
Ents, Orcs and Thyrs
In Anglo-Saxon, there are many different words depicting various sorts of giant. Some of them have terrifying aspects. ‘Fifel’ is a term applied to Grendel in Beowulf, and so must have indicated a large monster. Other terms represent giants occurring in watery places, such as Thyrs, a ‘spectre’ ‘that shall dwell in the fen’. Thyrs giants occured in place names elsewere too, as in Thursford in Norfolk, and Thyrspittes in Lincolnshire.
The form orc-thyrs is also found, the prefix showing the connection with the Lowerworld, for orcs were demons emanating from the realm of the dead. An Anglo-Saxon note written on a manuscript in Latin glosses ‘orcus’ as meaning ‘orc, giant or demon of hell’. It is from this name that Tolkien conjured his ‘orcs’, which he treated in his tales as the perpetual enemy, to be slain in great numbers.
In Anglo-Saxon, many giants were referred to as ‘ents’. In size they ranged from the immense ice-giants, the first beings after the formation of the cosmos, down to smaller ents which stood like mighty oaks, rooted to the ground but with their heads in the clouds, like Tolkien’s ent, Treebeard. Even these were of impressive presence. Treebeard is described in The Lord of the Rings as having eyes which seemed to have behind them aeons of memory.
Such giants were tall as huge oaks, feet splaying yards across the ground, heads sometimes ethereal-looking as they stuck up into the clouds. One story concerned a giant who had something in his eye that pricked him. It was making his eye water. He tried to get it out with his finger, but that was too bulky. So he took a sheaf of corn and with that he managed to remove the speck in his eye. Then he picked it up and examined it on the end of his finger. ‘Why, it’s a fir-cone!’ he said. ‘Who would have thought that a little thing like that could have hurt me so?’
The Old English word ‘ent’ carries the connotation of a fallen race of wise and faithful giants, whose passing was spoken of regretfully in the later Norse Prose Edda at the end of the age of Middle-earth.
An Anglo-Saxon text tells the story of a child giant. As she was walking in enormous bounds across the hills, she looked down and saw something moving. Bending to her knees, she picked up a ploughman with his ox and plough. Putting them in her lap, she watched with curiosity as they crawled and slipped about in panic. Finally she carried them to her mother, and asked, ‘What kind of beetle can this be, mother, that I have found rooting up the ground in tiny furrows?’
The mother looked at the ploughman crawling in her daughter’s palm. ‘Put it away, child,’ she said. ‘We will have to leave this land one day, and they will live here instead.’
A sad story for the giants. A hopeful one for the people of Middle-earth.
According to the German folklorists the Grimm brothers, giants could be as good-natured as lambs. But when angered, they raged, thundered, uprooted trees, hurled rocks and squeezed water out of stones. In temper they stamped their huge feet on the ground with such force that their legs were buried up to the knees. Their very size, allied with their temper, made them volatile neighbours in Middle-earth. If provoked, the giants of legend could be very dangerous. Especially when they argued.
Elemental Rages
A giant like this appears at Wilmington in Sussex. He is another ancient giant cut into the turf to reveal his outline in the chalk below. To see his feet from heel to toe requires a person to swivel their head to take them in. His body stretches away up the hill, this time in simple outline – no facial features, nipples, ribs, or exciting features like club and penis, as in the Cerne figure – his head near the top, facing out over an impressive landscape into the distance.
He is even bigger than the Cerne giant – 226 feet from head to toe – and holds a staff in each hand. His feet are positioned as if walking towards the viewer – perhaps he is facing out from the doorway entrance to his home inside the hill.
In local legend the Wilmington giant had a counterpart at Firle Beacon, a hill about three miles away across the Cuckmere Valley. When the two giants quarrelled, they tore enormous boulders from the ground and began to hurl them at each other. Where the stones had been ripped away the holes caused the flint mines and quarries on Windover Hill to be formed. The Firle Giant eventually killed the Wilmington one by hurling his hammer at him, crushing his skull. Perhaps, like the Cerne giant, the outline of The Long Man of Wilmington, as he is called, marks his burial mound under the hill. It is a place where legend is manifested in the physical landscape.
In ancient Teutonic myth, giants and trolls were often personifications of natural elements in their most terrifying forms – in the later Norse literature, the giants and trolls were often responsible for the crashing rockfalls and cascading waterfalls, growls and roars in river chasms, for landslips, flashing lightning and rumbling thunderstorms. The awe-inspiring colours in the sky near the North Pole, called the Northern Lights, were reckoned to be caused by fire giants; and avalanches, glaciers, ice-caps, freezing seas and rivers by ice or frost giants. The elemental forces embodied by these ents constituted the very fabric of the world we inhabit.
Sometimes giants turned nasty and could be vicious towards people. Aegir and his wife Ran were violent Norse giants who lived in the sea. Their underground great hall glowed with gold objects plundered from wrecked trading boats. Ran stirred up the waves and lashed them against boats, and cast her vast net over the ocean, trying to ensnare every fisherman who dared venture out onto the grey swells of the sea.
Thor Challenges the Giants
The legends of the people of the historical Middle-earth captured the nature of this elemental wisdom of the giants. When the cosmos was formed, say the Norse tales, the giants were eventually pinned back in a huge, mountainous kingdom over the sea, and on the very edge of Middle-earth. From time to time they threatened to return and battle the gods, and overturn the forces of balance in the cosmos. The ancient Norse god Thor, who was called Thunor in Anglo-Saxon England, was as a huge, bushy-eyebrowed, red-bearded god of thunder. He wielded a mighty, magic-forged hammer as his weapon. It was called ‘Moljnir’, which meant ‘The Destroyer’. When he threw it at his enemies, it never missed its mark. Afterwards it would return of its own accord to his hand. Many of the legends from the historical culture of Middle-earth feature Thor doing battle with the giants. His role was to keep the giants in their lands beyond the sea, and dissuade them from invading the realm of the gods.
At the very edge of the realm of Middle-earth, across the ocean, loomed Jotunheim, the land of the giants. It was one of the nine worlds of knowledge on the World Tree, constructed on an enormous scale, as befitted its residents. The landscape was dominated by towering forests, plunging rivers, vast caverns, soaring mountains and mind-boggling distances. The ancient Norse book of legends, the Prose Edda, recounts that one time when Thor went to Jotunheim, he and his companions saw soaring high above them a castle set in the middle of an open plain. Even though they pressed back the crowns of their heads onto the napes of their necks they still couldn’t see its battlements.
Thor banged on the doors. ‘I admit to my hall only those who are masters of some trial’ boomed an immense giant from inside. He peered through a crack in the door, saw Thor, and his lips curled into a sneer. ‘What can a puny individual like you hope to achieve against my giant warriors?’ Thor was big, but seemed a dwarf next to the giants.
Thor could not resist such a challenge, though he knew he would be up against it. His brow furrowed in thought for a moment, trying to find a challenge he dared issue against these enormous beings. ‘There is no one in your Hall can eat faster than I!’ he retorted, pulling himself up to his full height. At full stretch, he almost reached the kneecap of the giant.
Chuckling, the giant admitted Thor to his hall. The giants gathered round to watch the sport. They called for an immense trencher of meat to be brought in. Thor sat down at one end, a giant warrior at the other, and they both ate as fast as they could. Thor crammed the meat into his mouth and swallowed without chewing. The two met face-to-face in the middle of the trencher and Thor thought he had at least matched the giant in the contest. But then he saw that while he had left only the bones of his meat, the giant had eaten all his meat, bones and his side of the trencher as well. Thor had lost the contest.
Thor was fighting mad. Heroically, though some would say foolhardily, he challenged any giant in the hall to a drinking contest. This he was really good at and fancied his chances. The giants stopped laughing long enough to drag out an enormous ale-horn, filled it, and challenged Thor to empty it. He put it to his lips and took three immense draughts, until his eyes popped and he thought he would explode. But the horn was not emptied. The giants were helpless with mirth at Thor’s efforts.
Thor stood up to them, his eyes blazing, feet astride: ‘Now I am really angry!’ he shouted above the uproar. ‘I will show you how strong I am. I challenge any of you to a wrestling match.’ When he heard himself say this, Thor felt a slight twinge of doubt. But he quickly conquered it. He had a mighty heart, full of optimism and self-belief. He would try his utmost. As he pumped himself up as big as possible, the giants seemed to be dithering over who should wrestle with him. But then an old crone shuffled into the arena, and the giants roared their approval; Thor would wrestle with her. He tried to object, furious that the ents would impugn his dignity so. But as he was remonstrating with them, the crone suddenly started grappling with him. She was surprisingly strong, and although Thor tried with all his strength, he could struggle only evenly with the old woman and eventually she threw him to the ground.
Thor felt humiliated. Slowly he climbed to his feet, and crept toward the door, his head hung in shame. But as he reached for the latch, the Mighty Giant called him back.
‘Wait! Noble One, had I known you were so powerful I would have never admitted you to my hall, for I would have been afraid of you.’
Thor thought the giant was mocking him, but when he turned he saw that all the giants were regarding him with a new respect. ‘How can that be?’ he asked. ‘I lost all three contests.’
‘Yes,’ said the giant, ‘but you did not realize who it was you were contesting. You first competed for eating speed with Wildfire itself, which can consume entire forests at one sitting.’ Thor took a step back into the hall. ‘And the enormous drinking horn had been connected to the oceans, and in each of your three draughts, you managed to lower the level of the sea by one inch.’ The giants were nodding their huge heads and smiling in approval.
‘But the old crone?’ said Thor. ‘She threw me to the ground.’ The mighty Giant laughed. ‘She was your most formidable opponent. She who threw you to the ground was Old Age herself. She defeats us all eventually!’
To the people of Middle-earth, the giants were beings who understood elemental truths. They saw the unfolding of events against a timeless backdrop. Their questions were always big ones. For the people of Middle-earth, the giants reminded them that human life existed within a universe of immense forces.