Latest / Mythmakers / What about the stone-giants? A user's guide to the giantic in Tolkien and elsewhere - Part 2

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What about the stone-giants? A user's guide to the giantic in Tolkien and elsewhere - Part 2 · Mythmakers

• 0:00
  Have I mentioned the mole? Have I missed a giant?
• 0:11
  There's a rumblebuffin, Wimbleweather, Stonefoot is another one that's mentioned by name, so there
• 0:17
  seems to be, and this is interesting, because CS Lewis isn't as meticulous in his world
• 0:23
  building as Tolkien is. He kind of jams everything in there, but that's part of his methodology
• 0:31
  is being open to the gathering of a number of different myths and putting them all together
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  in a little kind of play pen to have fun with. To say that all of that is imbued, all of
• 0:44
  these are essentially coming from the same great capital M myth when it comes to it. He
• 0:49
  felt free to pull from everywhere and keep those explicitly distinct in their original
• 0:55
  forms. But Lewis, I don't know if he's intentionally or unintentionally, he had almost sets up
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  a few different categories of giants. You have the Narnian giants who are the ones that
• 1:09
  seem to be native to and live in Narnia are kind, generally speaking, but just not very
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  right. But you have a few rogue giants that are part of the Witches Army in that initial
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  fight that we have between those groups in line, Witch and the Wardrobe. But then once
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  you get into silver chair, which is going north, then you have those, you know, the Etten's
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  more, the Etten, these large, you know, they're huge. They seem to be, you know, unintelligent
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  or violent, terrible aim, like you mentioned. But they, it's said, you know, they could
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  have like additional heads and arms sometimes. They seem to be kind of more monstrous creatures.
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  We're not told if they're speaking any sort of language. If they, if they are speak Narnian,
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  something else or nothing at all. Whereas when you get to Harfeng, these, those giants
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  appear to be kind of smaller in scale. Certainly, they seem different because they have a government
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  system, a social structure, hierarchy, and they're not as massive at least. Right, right.
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  They've been massively, they're civilized. Yeah, they're civilized. They have, they have, they
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  have cookbooks. And so they're, so you have kind of, I don't know if it's, these are social
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  distinctions between giants or if they're, you know, biological distinctions, these are
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  different trajectories. But what's happening in Harfeng, a Harfenger is, is clearly kind
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  of different from what's happening on Edons more, you know, when they're running from,
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  from those, from those giants. So they're, they're, they're a little bit smaller, more civilized
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  and they're devious, right. So they're, so they're intelligent. And you get kind of a wily,
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  like you were mentioning, Julia with the green night where he's not a, a giant in the sense of
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  the kind of o-fish, bumbling, just large size is kind of, size and strength being its largest,
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  you know, largest defining feature. But rather, he's kind of this blend of, of cunning, right.
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  And, you know, of, of intelligence, sometimes hyperintelligence in the way that they're
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  strategizing. And you do have that more with the giants specifically that are in that castle
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  in Castle Harfeng. So you have those, but then you have father time that they see sleeping
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  underground there in Silver Chair. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on, on father time there.
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  And what, what you think is happening there in terms of him being referenced as a giant and
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  what, if they're shifting or what you think Lewis is doing with that.
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  Yeah, so that's the kind of giant you don't want to wake up. Because he is, he's woken up,
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  isn't he in the last battle and it's yet at the end of, that's the end of time. And that
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  reminds me of some of the more folkloric giants. It's later, but there's a fantastic book called
• 4:06
  the Giant Under the Snow, a children's book by, I think it's John Gordon, which has this idea of
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  there is a giant, they, they looked at the old earthworks, the Iron Age earthworks and thought
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  this looks like human, a shape. And so the idea is that if you rouse the sleeping giant,
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  you cause the end of an age or some sort of cataclysm. And I think that's what's going on there,
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  the sense of, it's like the world started with the Norse god who was turned into the world. Well,
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  it sort of ends with one as well, calling time, literally calling time. So I thought that's a sort
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  of folkloric, northern giant, creeping into the world of Narnia there.
• 4:58
  Yeah, he, yeah, the father time was fasting. So when I first read Silverture, that's
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  what I, I stopped on that. You know, sometimes, you know, there's certain ideas that you just
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  kind of like stop and chew on for a minute before you kind of keep going. But then this idea of,
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  you know, father time personified and that he'd, you know, once, you know, the, as the children
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  are asking, you know, who is, who is this? What is that? And then you get this kind of quick snapshot
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  of a backstory of where he ruled the kingdom somewhere in early Narnia and then eventually kind of
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  sank down into the underland and put to sleep. And you have all these birds and bats and dragons
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  and lizards there. But he's, you know, clearly massive and held in respect, which you don't have
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  that sort of respect is, I think it does it, we're describing almost as like a chapel that he's
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  kind of sleeping within the room is is there seems to be some sort of care that's that's given
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  to him as an individual this kind of father time. And so that that like I that arrested me at first
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  and then when it when that same character comes back in the last battle, just all of those sections,
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  I had to you kind of keep reread each of those just the description of him. So it's clearly different
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  in a different category from these other giants, right? So his face his description in last battle,
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  his face was not like a giants, but noble and beautiful, right? So the assumption is that
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  giants are ugly, right? Or hideous hideous creatures, but this one wasn't, right? He's noble.
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  He's got this, you know, huge snowy beard and then a pure silver light rested upon him, though no one
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  could see where it came from. So he's kind of illuminated from some unknown source. He's kind of
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  this, this, this sense of kind of, I don't say a holiness, but certainly it's kind of like a mythic
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  weight to him, even in the way he's lit is kind of sets him apart. And he, right, he ends up,
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  like you were saying, it's really fascinating parallel between the Norse myths where the world
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  is created from the body of this giant. And then here it's this giant that ultimately ends
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  Narnia, right? And that particular world by squeezing squeezing the sun like an orange
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  and brings an end to that. And presumably, right, he dies outside. He's left outside of,
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  you know, the world as it dies, but then presumably he's kind of brought into the other,
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  the true Narnia. Yes, but he also represents the physical, the physical property of time,
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  doesn't he? So that the world that they go into in the last battle is a place outside of time,
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  it's eternity. Yeah, so the question is yeah, so we don't. This is where we get into the philosophy
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  of it. And also you reminded me that of course, of the biblical roots of giants and the idea of
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  huge creatures that are sort of, as in the book of Daniel, there are lots of very large,
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  we wouldn't call them traditional giants, but large prophetic creatures that are sort of
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  instruments of God's power. So I feel that father time feels like a kind of instrument of
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  asland's power in that world in a more almost biblical way that sort of fits with the revelation
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  film feel of that last book. That's yeah, that's that's really interesting because yeah, you do have
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  right in Daniel this figure seen in vision that you know, different parts of, you know, clay and
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  you know, iron and all right, there's the different types of metals all representing successive
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  kingdoms. And so that is yeah, so it's this person is a personification of time. And perhaps
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  yeah, that you have, because Lewis is playing so fast and loose. And I think that's the fun of Lewis
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  is that this creature could be an actual moving creature that can squish a sun in its hand,
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  in its mass in hand, but also can serve as the embodiment of time itself, of linear time itself.
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  And so there's kind of this interplay that is very mythic, right? So he's writing in that mode where
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  you can be both and and it's not necessarily one specific creature, but it's playing with ideas
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  as well as kind of reality with like more concrete realities. And you see this and where I think
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  where I saw this when I saw this when I was thinking about giants in Lewis outside of Narnia
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  thinking about the great divorce and that surreal kind of closing chapter where the narrator
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  sees these giant creatures specifically, right, a great assembly of gigantic forms that are around
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  these like it looks like a chess board and they're moving these little pieces on the chess board.
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  And what the narrator is told talking with George McDonald, right, this is kind of psychopomp spirit
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  guide is that the people, these these gigantic figures are actually human souls, right, they're the
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  spirits, they're the the lived reality and that these kind of tiny ponds are like the physical
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  manifestations of people so that each each person is so much larger and grander and it's part of
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  something larger outside of time and that this board that's representing time, these people,
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  these you know tiny small figures are just kind of being moved about but that's a separate realm
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  and the experience that those people are involved with is different from the kind of transcendent
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  reality outside of that kind of plane of time. So I absolutely agree with that. I'm not going to
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  earn some bonus points here because what you just said reminds me of the place of the lion, the
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  fascinating Charles Williams novel which had the idea of the platonic archetypes which are
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  gigantic versions of so a lion is the essence of lion, a huge lion and the butterfly is the essence
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  of butterflies and beauty which sucks everything, it sort of threatens the world, this giant, these
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  giant creatures, a giant snake as well, they threaten our reality by sucking everything into them,
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  that's sort of the dilemma of that fascinating novel. So there seems to be a philosophical level
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  here which the giant form is working on in both Lewis and Charles Williams which I think
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  I'm going to have to think about a bit more but there seems to be a connection.
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  Certainly the sort of the idea of ending having the power to end reality seems to be a
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  quite a strong correlation there. Okay so we've done quite a deep dive into giants in Tolkien,
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  giants of CS Lewis dip into Charles Williams. Where do we think giants have gone now? We've seen
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  them and it's a gauvin in the green night, we've seen them in and we can mention other Arthurian
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  tales and just wave at them in passing. We'll see seen them in Gulliver's travels.
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  I'm trying to think if there's any connecting hopscotch we can do here, I mean obviously there
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  was fairy tales and the whole era of fairy tales that came along with Grimm and Hans Christian
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  Anderson and others. But we have had an explosion of giants in contemporary culture if we think
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  about it. So have at the idea of I've got one big franchise in mind. I'll leave the
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  wizarding world to you then. Well done. I completely forgotten that. Yes let's do that. So we've got
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  JK Rowling giants. Obviously we've got Hagrid as our fairy tales. Half giant, right?
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  But we do have a connection here to the dim giants, don't we? The dim and vicious giants
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  because they do tend to be on that end of the scale with the honorable exception of the head
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  mistress of Bobaton school, which seems quite refined. But the others all seem quite persuaded by
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  Voldemort. Right, yeah, that they're dull, right? Yeah, they grow up the Hagrid's half brother that's
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  full giant is clearly dim and with that you see until kind of how giants can back to our point
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  about how giants can be used symbolically and sometimes morally in a sense as we saw with the
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  Greek myths giants kind of being used morally in a sense or philosophically. You have prejudice
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  in the wizarding world against giants where they're treated as second class citizens. So there's
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  kind of metaphor of being used again like the other and the you know our favorite, you know,
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  Maxim the head mistress when Hagrid is talking to her and confiding, so it's finally nice to
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  find somebody who is also kind of has the same heritage. She gets really upset and says like,
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  are you suggesting that I'm giant in essence, right? So she yeah, so is she and this is something
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  that I'm talking about this with with my wife who's who knows the Harry Potter books better than
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  anyone. I know she's saying you know, she's saying that in a sense she seems to be trying to pass
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  as non-giant and so once she's kind of called out as having that heritage. So there's then then
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  then she gets very upset. She's extra defensive about that and so you have that almost giant kind
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  of being used as a social metaphor for, you know, social classes that are seen as, you know, secondary
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  citizens and that comes across in how giants are spoken of by other people in the wizarding world,
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  Cornelius Fudge for instance. So anyway, so there's yeah, so wizarding world, you have those ones,
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  other ones that I was thinking of, never ending story, Michael Enda, the rock bider, so kind of,
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  I was thinking about that, especially in light of the, you know, our listeners
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  referenced the stone giant, you know, this literally giant made out of stone who eats rocks.
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  And that that creature, again, this like kind of more cosmic massive who dies, who's end up,
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  you know, we see fleeing from the end of reality as we know it within this world of the story of
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  the never ending, the titular never ending story. So that's another one that came to mind is one
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  that, especially in the film version of that because I saw that film so many times when I was younger,
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  that was kind of the quintessential massive cosmic giant was a stone, the rock bider from
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  never ending story. So your turn. Okay, I'm going to just do one more stone giant. My absolute favorite
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  is in galaxy quest, which also happens to be possibly my favorite film, it's certainly my desert
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  island film, because there is a literal rock giant, which is used for great comic effect because the
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  hero has to fight this stone giant and everyone's giving him advice and he's basically saying,
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  well look he's rock, what am I supposed to do? It's a very, very funny sequence and it seems to go
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  right back to the very origin of a rocks that become a giant, nice and simple, very funny,
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  and has a great twist, I'm not going to spoil it for those of you haven't watched it yet, but
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  put it on your, you know, to watch this, has a great twist in how it's used in a brilliant way
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  as the plot unravels. Okay, no, the franchise I was going to suggest is the biggest
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  pun intended of giant franchises is the transformer one, because the transformers, which also
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  connect to toys and children's imagination and manipulation of vehicles, big trucks and things
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  like that into robots, seem to me to be a huge, it always astounds me how the transformer movies
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  make so much money every time they come up, but there must be something incredibly appealing
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  in that very concept of something mechanical that is sentient and obviously got the good ones
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  and the bad ones, but they can change and disguise themselves, and then you've got the problem
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  of a big creature in a small space, so I think the one I watched most recently was the one that
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  was called Bumblebee, which is one of the smaller of the transformers. The fun is most fun
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  seen in that one is when the car kind of is inside the house trying to do things but doesn't have
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  the fine motor skills and everything just gets trashed, like the worst kind of teenage nightmare
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  where your house is trash while mom and dad are away, so the transformers have a lot of fun with
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  playing on a sort of technological giant. That's good, yeah, I hadn't even thought of that when
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  you mentioned that earlier that transformers as kind of a contemporary giant, but there's clearly
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  yeah that there's something not all children, I can't say that, but I know with my own child
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  of two-year-old and he just gravitated towards big trucks and cars, we don't teach him, we're trying
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  to raise him on classical literature and he's just like obsessed with garbage trucks, so it's
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  hard to feel like I'm succeeding as a parent when they're discarding Alice in Wonderland for dump trucks,
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  but there's something, but I think there's something that to children's minds that's
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  something that's large and I think why perhaps one of the reasons why vehicles in particular is
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  because they're moving, they seem to be moving, they seem to be living in some way,
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  shape or form that the child can't understand, they're not people, but they're large and they're
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  moving around, and so there's something to be fascinated with, perhaps terrified and fascinated
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  with at the same time, but then giving those a greater personification in the transformers,
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  which again was one of my childhood, that's what I was raised on was transformer cartoons and toys,
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  and that was my world, and so think about that as they become more anthropomorphic
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  with the toys themselves and the creatures, because it's easier to relate to something that has
• 20:23
  ahead and arms and legs than it is to a four-wheeled vehicle, right? So I think that's one of the
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  things you're right that like maybe tapping into something deeper with children that they're
• 20:34
  fascinated with that could account for the success of transformers, so bravo for thinking in that
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  and that too. And you also, I feel like we're playing pinball and just little
• 20:46
  ideas are sort of flashing up with extra bonus points here because you just mentioned Alice in
• 20:50
  Wonderland, and I was saying oh what happens about perspective, Alice does this, she grows and she
• 20:59
  shrinks and she spends part of Alice in Wonderland being too big and that's a problem as she has to
• 21:06
  get small again. So that is another, I suppose that feels like the gull of a travel or experience
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  brought forward into a famous, really the granddad of fantasy literature here in Oxford,
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  so it's a wave to Alice in Wonderland as we go past, but we would be remiss of us if we didn't
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  mention the sort of DC and Marvel universe of all of this. The one that I immediately thought
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  of was the Hulk, because obviously that is a transformational thing of a human sort of relatively
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  weedy, not really weedy, but a sort of normal man who then becomes this enormous giant and that's
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  the giant fueled of rage and it's all clues into that idea of it's a primal side of us that is
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  released, the kind of Mr Hyde version of us when we're doctor, when we spend most of our life as
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  Dr. Jackal. So that was the, that seems to be a connection to those primal giants we mentioned,
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  though of course what they've done with him since in things like Thor Ragnarok, you know,
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  they're always changing in these comic series, so it's a moving target we're talking about.
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  And that's what I think I think is fascinating with the Hulk in particular is starts out as,
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  yeah, like you're saying this dimension of humanity, this just kind of the brutish,
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  you know, unintelligent, you know, speaking, you know, monosyllabic creature and
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  whereas then you have in the movies you have, right, this kind of fusing of the intelligence,
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  you know, hyperintelligence of the scientist that the Hulk, you know, grows into to become as
• 22:56
  charmingly brutish, large green self, but in the comics you have different versions where
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  you have this green Hulk and then you have a second iteration that's this gray Hulk where he has
• 23:07
  the Hulk size and strength, but retains the intellect of the scientist. So he's this hyperintelligent
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  massive creature and that's kind of what they're kind of melding those traditions in the comic
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  together in the films where you're current, you know, in the contemporary present day marvel
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  timeline, you have this hyperintelligent large, you know, hulking creature. So Hulk is a great
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  example, I think of playing with different dimensions of the giant trope. There's, you also have
• 23:40
  that with the sting of the Fantastic Four in Marvel looking at Marvel specifically, who's, you know,
• 23:46
  this brother, he's British. Yes, he's got right, he's right. Exactly, yeah, yeah, so good
• 23:54
  another connection to rock related elemental kind of creatures, but he's still, he's in his
• 24:01
  intelligence because he's a, you know, originally a football kind of beefy athlete, a college athlete
• 24:09
  who then develops this, you know, super strength and super rocky skin. So you have other, so, and
• 24:17
  you also have it bringing in both the comic books and the films Ant Man, right? So he's dealing with
• 24:23
  size. Again, when you when you mentioned Alice in Wonderland, the growing and shrinking, you have
• 24:28
  that same sort of trope in Ant Man, where he's, he can change his size, right? This is one of
• 24:32
  perspective. So he's, you know, tiny can go inside individual molecules inside human bodies,
• 24:39
  but then also can blow, you know, can become, you know, 10 stories tall, 20 stories tall,
• 24:47
  and completely massive, and it's one of perspective and size. So you have the creep, the, the superhero
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  who is originally kind of as Ant Man in the comics becomes Goliath because he kind of reverses
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  the process for becoming small, and then it lives as a giant for a while, and then you have that
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  variance of size and perspective, and it seems like Marvel compared to DC is paying greater attention
• 25:12
  to the large skate issues of skin size with, with, here's the art. Most of the giants in DC are
• 25:23
  lesser known characters, not only of the kind of headliners, like you can say with Marvel, with Hulk
• 25:29
  and thing, and Ant Man slash Goliath, who he is in the comics at least when he's, when he's huge,
• 25:37
  but you have Giganta, who's this giant woman, Adam Smasher, Antimonitor, but they're all, they kind of like
• 25:44
  be, at the risk of offending fictional characters, they seem like B and C list, super heroes and
• 25:51
  super villains that get the, the giant card who draw that in their kind of creation. But one of
• 25:58
  the things that you did that kind of connects us back to, I feel kind of thematically to Tolkien
• 26:05
  and Lewis, Tolkien particular is DC's swamp thing, who is a creature that's made out of
• 26:14
  vegetation, right, who's this kind of embodiment of, who, who, who originally was kind of this horror
• 26:19
  creature, who is, you know, a human that became a walking tree, walking plant creature. But then
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  in the comics itself, themselves, they become, he becomes this kind of avatar for
• 26:35
  the world of vegetation and trees, right? The green itself is this realm that he kind of inhabits,
• 26:41
  and he's kind of the go-between between the natural world and the world of humans. And this creature,
• 26:47
  he can change sizes as well. Sometimes he can be massive, there's one spot where he actually visits
• 26:52
  Gotham City to rescue someone and he grew up swells and sized to dwarf the buildings beneath him,
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  but also can be smaller. It's variable because he's a plant at heart, but it's, I think it's very
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  similar to the tree beard, right, as this kind of avatar, in a sense, a spokes tree. Is that the
• 27:17
  right word? A spokes tree for the natural world and the go-between, a go-between between the
• 27:25
  world of humans, right? We're talking with Mary and Tipin. Treebeard is kind of the, you know,
• 27:31
  our go-between our psychopath, if you will, helping them. In some ways, understand what's at stake
• 27:37
  for the natural world in these larger battles that are happening. That's what I think is,
• 27:42
  that you see that happening more thematically in DC with the swamp thing character and they're
• 27:47
  the parliament of trees that functions with its own mythology, but it's more evocative to me of
• 27:54
  talking and what he was doing with the giant tree figures than anything else. I bet a number of
• 28:02
  people listening to this are shouting Groot, Groot, because there's another character who seems very
• 28:09
  entished. So it's impossible obviously to mention everybody's favourite giant, but I think we should
• 28:14
  just do a quick nod to, there's a role dial world of giants, the big friendly giant.
• 28:24
  And that's a world where you've got giants as quite benign figures. So it's a picture books,
• 28:31
  for example, which my children, the one about George the giant who gives away his clothes. I don't
• 28:37
  know if you know that story, it's a wonderful. So he starts off finally dressed and he's the
• 28:42
  kindest giant and he gives away his clothes and he's able to close an entire village as a result.
• 28:49
  So there are those sorts of sweet benign giants as well, which may be a nice place to end up having
• 28:56
  seen some horrors on our journey. So we always have a wear in all the worlds. And the obvious question,
• 29:04
  Jacob, is which fantasy world is it best to be one of these giants? By the way, I also noticed there
• 29:12
  is a definite lack of female giants. I mean, the end wives are missing. Next to what we've been
• 29:18
  doing, there's sort of neutral sex or I mean to be fair Lewis has a whole castle of mixed gender
• 29:28
  giants. On the whole, it seems to be a masculine place to be a giant really. Anyway, where would you
• 29:35
  like to be a giant? It seems like the place with the least amount of underlying prejudice against
• 29:47
  giants is Narnia. That seems to be the place that seems most accommodating or open to
• 29:54
  dealing with giants in at least a semi-civilized way. So if I was a giant, that's probably
• 30:01
  where I'd have to land. Yeah. I hate to see that because I want to come up with something better.
• 30:08
  But like, well, it just seems, for my sake, purely selfish for purely kind of logistical
• 30:16
  reasons. Narnia seems like the only thing I can think of. I think I'd probably go quite old school.
• 30:23
  I think I'll go for the worlds of Sagoin in the Green Knight because he does have a whole castle
• 30:30
  that I call and sort of mystic powers. So I think I'd quite like to be, and also you've seen
• 30:38
  pretty eternal because you get your head cut off and you pop up again. I think that might be
• 30:44
  a good option. But on the whole, I think fancy worlds are pretty rough on giants.
• 30:49
  Yeah, they don't seem so they're typically right. So you rarely, I can't really think of many
• 30:54
  where you have giants held up as symbols of virtue, nobility, right, that they're true.
• 31:01
  Yeah, the Pilgrims Progress is the giant of despair. I mean, they really get a poor
• 31:08
  poor billing in that book too. I think that's a challenge for
• 31:14
  yeah, no exactly. And I think that I think that'd be a challenge for those of our listeners
• 31:19
  who are also authors and storytellers to come up with a scenario. I would love to read a story
• 31:25
  that kind of turns that tendency and trope on its head of a heroic, a giant who is held up,
• 31:34
  whose virtues are held up in some in some way. It'd be hard to do, I think just because of the
• 31:40
  kind of overwhelming cultural weight that's placed on giants. But I think that'd be worth seeing.
• 31:46
  I'd love to see it. Okay, that's the challenge. That's the homework. And a female and a female giant.
• 31:51
  A female, so this would be a female giant whose held up as a symbol of virtue, nobility, honor.
• 32:02
  I have actually done this in one of my books. So I've written a couple of books called
• 32:11
  the Mel Foster series. A Mel Foster teams up with E. Frankenstein, who is the author of Frankenstein.
• 32:21
  They sort of have an almost graphic novel feel to it these books. And she is the virtuous,
• 32:26
  she is the good guy in this. I only make her about seven or eight feet tall. So her logistical
• 32:34
  problems are not too big. Because otherwise you spend all your time working out how you get
• 32:40
  someone in a building. But she was my attempt to both correct the gender imbalance and also give
• 32:46
  giants a better billing. And I'm embarrassed that I haven't read that yet. So I would say yeah,
• 32:53
  so like that, where can we get, where can we find that? You can find it online, you know,
• 32:58
  in books. But that was my attempt. Anyway, what's the titles? Yeah, what are the titles of those?
• 33:09
  The first one is called Mel Foster. Well, the series is the Mel Foster's monsters.
• 33:17
  And the second one is very HD Wells inspired. It's Mel Foster and the Time Machine.
• 33:22
  So the first one is Mel Foster and the Demon Butler. That's it. Because that's about an evil
• 33:30
  Butler takes over Queen Victoria. And the second one is Mel Foster and the Time Machine.
• 33:36
  Yeah, I just struggle to remember. I've written over 16 novels, so sometimes get my titles a
• 33:40
  bit muddled. But they don't all have giants. That one does. Okay, good, we'll check it out.
• 33:47
  Thank you so much, Jacob. And yeah, that was really fun. I think we covered the
• 33:53
  cover the territory on giants. But I'm sure other people will have more suggestions about
• 33:59
  themes that we could tackle and we'll happily return and have a go at something else.
• 34:05
  Because we didn't even touch on giant creatures. King Kong, Godzilla. I mean, there's a whole
• 34:11
  other world of fantasy creatures out there.
• 34:19
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• 34:23
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