The Giant Hero in Medieval Literature

Dead Sea Discoveries 21 (2014): 313-46

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Arthuriana, 2017

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Edited by Robin O'Bryan and Felicia Else, Amsterdam University Press, 2024

Not since Edward Wood’s Giants and Dwarfs published in 1868 has the subject been the focus of a scholarly study in English. Treating the topic afresh, this volume offers new insights into the vogue for giants and dwarfs that flourished in late medieval and early modern Europe. From chapters dealing with the real dwarfs and giants in the royal and princely courts, to the imaginary giants and dwarfs that figured in the crafting of nationalistic and ancestral traditions, to giants and dwarfs used as metaphorical expression, scholars discuss their role in art, literature, and ephemeral display. Some essays examine giants and dwarfs as monsters and marvels and collectibles, while others show artists and writers emphasizing contrasts in scale to inspire awe or for comical effect. As these investigations reveal, not all court dwarfs functioned as jesters, and giant figures might equally be used to represent heroes, anti-heroes, and even a saint.

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Dead Sea Discoveries, 2018

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*Contact author for full offprint (https://www.mohr.de/en/book/ancient-tales-of-giants-from-qumran-and-turfan-9783161545313). The giants of the Hebrew Bible received very little independent scholarly attention during the twentieth century, and only within the last decade have these figures begun to attract serious focus. This situation is at least somewhat surprising, given the immense popular interest in giants for many readers of the Bible—though it should come as little shock to see that again biblical scholars have neglected those things most important to the readership of the church, synagogue, or general public. Indeed, the popular or even cartoonish appeal of giant or monstrous beings may have actively repelled the academy in the past, as the sheer popularity of conspiracy theories about burials of giant bones or fantastical creatures does not lend scholarly gravitas to this field of study. To put it bluntly, giants can be embarrassing. From time to time, scholars have succumbed to the lure of explaining stories of giants in the Bible through historicizing or medicalizing interpretations. One may find, for example, attempts to analyze a character like Goliath (1 Samuel 17) on the basis of hypopituitarism or other physical pathologies. Even scant examples of larger-than-normal physical remains in the Levant provoke speculation about the origins of giant stories, and Adrienne Mayor’s fascinating study of ancient folk science in The First Fossil Hunters gives a plausible etiology for at least some tales of the monstrous and gigantic: fossils of extinct animals appeared to ancient observers as “real” monsters or giants that must have once interacted with human heroes in the distant past. To be sure, along these lines the ruins of the Late Bronze Age urban centers in Israel/Palestine, whose giant walls and inhabitantless structures were visible during the Biblical period, could have appeared to later Israelites as evidence of some bygone Canaanite race. Well into the modern period, giant structures and mysterious monuments captivated romantic travelers in the region, proving the allure of the giant over millennia. One example of such a traveller, the Irish Presbyterian missionary Josias Porter (1823–1889), ornately wrote of the “memorials of…primeval giants” that he saw “in always every section of Palestine,” ranging from enormous graves to massive city architecture. Porter identified the “wild and wondrous panorama” of the Argob region in southern Syria as the site of past giant activity, and felt certain that the remains he saw there were “the very cities erected and inhabited by the Rephaim.” Neither the historicizing/medicalizing nor the fossils/ruins approach can go very far toward explaining the power these giant traditions came to have in the Hebrew Bible and in so many other literatures over such a long period of time. When taken to extremes, these interpretations can obviously become fantastical or problematically reductionist, and at best the medical-gigantism and fossil-inspiration approaches could only account for the initial motivation for giant stories in selected cases. In this paper, I would like to attempt a very broad view of the giant in the Hebrew Bible, with the goal of tracing the appearance of giants through several lenses: the giant as divine or semi-divine figure, as anti-law and anti-king, as elite adversary and elite animal, as unruly vegetation, and as the defeated past. It is precisely this kind of thematic overview that has been lacking in the literature, as giants have more typically been treated piecemeal, as mere footnotes or oddities in their narrative contexts. The very rubric of the “biblical giant” could automatically obscure the variety of gigantic figures and their roles throughout time, but it is still the case that giants appear prominently and repeatedly in the Bible, forcing us to consider whether there is something unique or uniquely “biblical” about the Bible’s giants. Though the giant has recently and justifiably received more attention from those working with the Enochic corpus and the Qumran traditions, as well as from those studying the medieval engagement with giants, we ignore the Ursprung of these later materials in the Hebrew Bible to the detriment of the field of giants in Judaism conceived as a whole. Thus, this essay is an attempt to organize the Bible’s giants by category and to continue to elevate these figures as a rightful object of scholarly attention.

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Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015

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2024

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2020

This dissertation argues that the monsters in Statius’ Thebaid and Silius’ Punica both embody and reproduce dynamics of Flavian culture. These poems are taken together as exemplars of the culture during the reign of Domitian specifically. I conduct close, sustained, textual analysis of instances wherein monsters adjoin the dynamics of otherness, literary tradition, mytho-historical past and imperial ideology. I begin with a discussion of Statius’ potential clustering of Epicurean elements around representations of Hippomedon as a Centaur. As with other discernments of Epicurean hints in mythological epic I assess this as an exploration of the consequences of placing these elements in the text. By using a Centaur for this examination, Statius reveals how monsters are often good spaces for exploration in Flavian epic. I then show that Statius’ depictions of hybrid monsters (Centaurs, the Minotaur and Arachne) reveal and reinforce tension around ‘otherness’ in this time period. At the ...

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