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GIANTS. 555
received the by-name of yityatya (Nilsson 4, 32). The Indian
x
Mahabharata also represents Hidimbas the rakshasa (giant) as
a man-eater, misshapen and red-bearded : man s flesh he smells
from afar, 2 and orders Hidimba his sister to fetch it him ; bat
she, like the monster s wife or daughter in the nursery-tales,
pities and befriends the slumbering hero (see Suppl.).
Our own giant-stories know nothing of this grim thirst for
blood, even the Norse iotunn is nowhere depicted as a cannibal,
like the Greek and Oriental giants ; our giants are a great deal
more genial, and come nearer to man s constitution in their
shape and their way of thinking : their savagery spends itself
mainly in hurling huge stones, removing mountains and rearing
colossal buildings.
Saxo Gram. pp. 10. 11 invests the giantess Harthgrepa with
the power to make herself small or large at pleasure. This is a
gift which fairy-tales bestow on the ogre or the devil, and folk
tales on the haulemutter (Harrys 2, 10 ; and Suppl.).
It is in living legend (folktale) that the peculiar properties of
our native giants have been most faithfully preserved ;
the poets
make their giants far less interesting, they paint them, espe
cially in subjects borrowed from Romance poetry, with only
the features common to all giants. Harpin, a giant in the
Iwein, demands a knight s daughter, hangs his sons, and lays
waste the land (4464. 4500) :
3 when slain, he falls to the ground
4
like a tree . (5074)
Still more vapid are the two giants intro
duced at 6588 seq. Even in the Tristan, the description of giant
Urgan (15923) is not much more vivid: he levies blackmail on
oxen and sheep, and when his hand is hewn off, he wants to heal
not a
1
Tevetat s second birth (Keinhart cclxxxi.) is a rakshasi, giantess,
beast.
2
Mightily works man s smell, and amazingly quickens my nostrils, Arjuna s
Journey, by Bopp, p. 18. The same in our fairy-tales (supra, p. 486). Epithets
of these Indian daemons indicate that they walk about by night (Bopp s gloss.
91. 97).
3 One giant is hagel al der lande, hail-storm to all lands, Bit. 6482.
4
N.B., his bones are treasured up outside the castle-gate (5881), as in Fischart s
Garg. 41 a : they tell of riesen and haunen, shew their bones in churches, under
town halls. So there hangs in a church the skeleton of the giantess struck by
lightning (p. 531 n.), the heathen maiden s dripping rib (Deut. sag. 140), and her yellow
locks (ibid. 317) in the ; castle is kept the giant s bone (ibid. 324). At Alpirsbach
in the Black Forest a giant s skeleton hangs outside the gate, and in Our Lady s
church at Arnstadt the riesenribbe, Bechst. 3, 129; conf. Jerichow and Werben
in Ad. Kuhn, no. 56. The horns of a giant ox nailed up in the porch of a temple
(Niebuhr s Horn. Hist. 1, 407),