Traditions, Superstitions and Folk-lore

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ojan, Brutus, Britain was "called Albion, and was inhabited by none but a few giants." According to the same authority, Ireland was originally peopled by a similar race of monsters. He asserts that the magician Merlin transported the materials for the building of Stonehenge fro

n built by giants, hence its name, in their languag

three, attributed to Aristotle (B.C. 340). The writer says:-"Beyond the Pillars of Hercules is the ocean wh

apping the bow of her gigantic father. The said bow was conveyed from place to place by an eight-wheeled carriage, drawn by eight hundred men! His wife having been carried off through the sky by the demon monarch of Ceylon, "at whose name heaven's armies flee," Rama entered into an alliance with

d of gigantic ape or monkey, has had some little light thrown upon it by the recent expe

if it were not then an island, the Carthaginians, in rambling a short distance from the beach, would see a broad water (the Fernand Vaz) beyond them, and would conclude that the land was an island.... The passage in the 'Periplus,' which I mentioned in 'Equatorial Africa,' is to the following effect:-'On the third day after sailing from thence, passing the streams of fire, we came to a bay called the Horn of the South. In the recess was an island like the first, having a lake, and in this there was another island full of wild men. But much the greater part of them were women with hairy bodies, whom the interpreters called gorillas.... But, pursuing them, we were not able to take the men; they all escaped from us by their great

thing generically distinct from those depicted in Mr. Dasent's trans

we have no record of his ever having passed beyond the wilds of Dartmoor. The giants of Lancashire, and Cheshire, and Shropshire hav

ans, Bolster, immortalised by the pencil and burin of George Cruickshank, who took his six miles at a stride, over a Cornish valley, without discomfort; the trolls and giants of the Norse, who, like their Greek cousins, warred with the ascendant gods; the ogres and huge club-wielding monsters of our nursery days, that in Lancashire, as in other parts of England (Cornwall included), yielded to the prowess of the redoubtable "Jack, the Giant-killer," or "Jack, the Tinkeard," present too many corresponding family features and mental and physical coincidences to permit a serious doubt of their common parentage. The Teutonic giants of the German tales collected by the brothers Grimm, bear unmistakable relationshi

a was peopled by a race of giants. Indeed, I think it was even intimated that these colossi were most probably the bona fide descendants of the supposed mythical monsters of the days of old. Some Spanish officers, in 1785, measured several of these Patagonian giants, and they reported that the greatest monster of the lot only reached seven feet one inch and a quarter! I can never remember England being without two or three exhibited giants, who would look with contempt upon such pretensions to the honours of the caravan, to say nothing of the "reception room" of such "gentlemanly freaks of nature" as Chang, the Chinese Anak, Mons. Brice, or Captain Bates, with his colossal wife, née Miss Swan. But Captain Wallis informs us that, on his carefully measuring several of these Patagonian prodigies, he found that the stature of the greater part of them ranged between five feet ten inches and s

nd seldom or never complain of any soreness in any other parts of the body, so hardy are they, and of so strong a constitution, through the moderate heat of the sun." He likewise talks of a people who, having no heads, stand on their necks. These monsters were said to carry their eyes in their shoulders. He describes the Choromand? as a savage people, without a distinct

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made so hot, however, that the monster's lower extremities became parboiled, he was compelled to desist. He nevertheless mounted the ark, and survived the great catastrophe. He was said to consume daily one thousand oxen, one thousand head of game, and one thousand measures of wine. He was a famous hand at uplifting mountains and other objects of similarly trifling magnitude! He met with a mishap, however, whilst conveying a rock "three miles in extent," with which he proposed to annihilate the Israelitish army at one blow! We are further informed that Joshua, who was ten ells high, perceiving that the rock was crumbling to pieces around the giant's shoulders, struck him on the ancle with an axe ten ells in length, and thus lamed him for life. Sihon was so powerful that no creature on earth could withstand him. It seems, however, that he derived his strength not altogether from his immense physique, but from a demon with wh

e Ph?nicians. He adds, "Syria was inhabited by Canaanites; and it has been observed that the names given in Scripture to that race indicate great stature and physical force, wh

e blocks of stone are described as still in situ, at the height of twenty feet from the ground, which measure each twelve feet in width, twelve feet in depth, and sixty feet in length.

old builders, whose sculpture produced such astonishing effects in coarse rock, resorted to wood and metal for the finish and ornamentation of their work. The stone they used was not Parian marble, therefore they cov

n the middle of the front, and they eat nothing but raw flesh and raw fish." He further adds that they were clothed in the skins of beasts, they drank milk, preferred man's flesh to all other food, and they had no houses to live in. In another Indian island, Sir John tells us he was informed that giants dwelt "of great stature-some fifty cubits long;" but he a

le, according to Dr. Derham, is sometimes employed to signify "violent men," and it is translated by a word carrying such a meaning by several ancient writers. He considers that "monsters of rapine and wickedness" are referred to rather than giants in sta

in the physical existence of this mythic race. Buffon, indeed, describes and figures large bones as

o belong to the great American fossil pachyderm, the Mastodon giganteus. There is a tradition amongst the red Indians, that a race of men, relatively large in stature, existed contemporaneously with these animals, and that both were destroyed by the Great Spirit with thunderbolts. One account says,-that "as a troop of these terrible quadrupeds were destr

natomy at Basle, referred the bones of an elephant, found at Lucerne, to a giant at least ni

ot only of the strictly historical character of Geoffrey of Monmouth's idle romance respecting the landing of Brute and his Trojans in England, bu

scoveries is by old Norden, who says that at Coggeshall "ther were to be seene 2 teeth of a monstrous man or

of a fossil elephant, at Wirksworth, in Derbyshire, which was comm

nwall, such as the hurling of huge rocks, and striding across valleys, are, as I have previously shown, attributed in Lancashire and the north of England to the devil. A tradition yet exists that the Roman highways, which cross each other not far from Fulwoo

e Southern Aryans presents a similar confusion; their tribe of demons, the Rakshasas or Atrins (devourers), Kelly regards as the "earliest originals of the giants and ogres of our nursery tales. They can take any form at will, but their natural one is that of a huge misshapen giant 'like a cloud,' with hair and beard of the colour of red lightning. They go about open-mouthed, gnashing their monstrous teeth and snuffing after human flesh. Their s

lton has imitated in his Paradise Lost, where Satan and his host, formerly angels and archangels, are hurled from heav

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it might be as an example to others, was quite useless to help themselves." Yet he regards them as the embodiment of "sheer brute force," which yields to the "slight and lissom foe" representing virtue and reason. The "upstart ?sir gods," to whom they are opposed, are described as endowed with "that diviner wrath which, though burning hot, was still under the control of reason." The trolls, on the contrary, are subject to wild paroxysms of merely brutal animal rage, which discloses their true parentage. The fact that their enemies, the ?sir go

ted by the malevolence of demons, who were jealous that such men should be sent to bring back the Britons to the faith. They raised storms and darkened the sky with clouds." Their efforts were fruitless, nevertheless, as the piety of the bishops prevailed against them. The Old Nick of the English, literally the devil, is but one form of Odin d

ignant than the giants, and with the term were bound up

But when Christianity came in and heathendom fell; when the godlike race of the ?sir became evil demons instead of good genial powers, then all the objects of the old popular belief, whether ?sir, giants, or trolls, were mingled together in one superstition, as 'no canny.' They were all trolls, all malignant, a

icate. The wheel and axle, however, is an Aryan sun emblem, and one type of the "chark" or "fire-bringing" instrument, invented, according to the Greeks, by Prometheus. This unquestionably demonstrates its descent from the ancient solar myths. Conquered men driven to the caves and mountain fastnesses, and addicted to violence and

ich adored Odin and the ?sir soon engendered a monstrous man-eating cross-breed of supernatural beings, who fled from contact with the intruders as soon as the first great struggle was over, abhorr

tradition that the English were giants, with wings, who could kill wi

athers were some two or three thousand years ago, we should have had a similar class of mixed myths resulting from their warlike contact. Indeed, we hav

in the Straits of Messina, which cause no special alarm to modern navigators, created so much terror in the minds of ancient sailors, and made such havoc of their frail craft, that they became regarded as malicious demons, and were named Scylla and Charybdis. The noise of the furious waves, dashing upon the rocky cavernous coast, fancy likened to the howling of dogs and wolves. Hence the fable that a female monster, surrounded by troops of such animals, prowled about the neighbourhood, awaiting the opportunity of devouring mariners wrecked on the coast. The celebrated basaltic rock in the north of Ireland was called the "Giant's Causewa

ng mist. He says:-"This terrible being may be seen drawn with wonderful fidelity to the spirit of the old myth in Turner's picture of the overthrow of the troops sent by Cambyses to the shrine of the Lybian Ammon; and they who see the one-eyed monster glaring down on the devoted army, where the painter was probably utterly unconscious that he was doing more than representing the simoom of the desert, will recognise at once the unconscious accuracy with which the modern painter conveys the old Homeric conception of Polyphêmos. In this picture, as in the storms of the desert, the sun becomes the one great eye of an enormous monster, who devours every living thing that crosses his path, as

moon, or, in default, the royal saint himself. When the immense structure was nearly completed, Olaf wandered about in sore dismay, wondering how the giant's demand could be met. Suddenly he heard a child crying in the inside of a hill or small mountain. On listening attentively, he overheard a giantess say to the child these words:-"Hush! hush! to-morrow, Wind and Weather, your father, will come home and bring with

s. False Report, a dwarf, deceives him, but he slays a giant with three heads, named Imagination, Falsehood, and Perjury. John Bunyan, too, has his Giant Despair, etc., and others will readily occur to the reader's mind. In the Arthurian romance of Sir Gawayne, that hero is said to have bee

ch the sinews of kings, their revenue and authority, are cut out; yet not so but by mildness of address and wisdom of edicts, as it were by stolen means, the minds of subjects within a short time are reconciled, and the power of kings restored to them. Or when he hears that in that memorable expedition of the gods against the giants, the ass of Silenus became by his braying an instrument of great value in dispersing these giants; must he not clearly see that this was imagined of those vast projects of rebels, which are mostly dissipated by light rumours and vain consternation? There is also another not unimportant an indication of the existence of a hidden and involved sense; namely, that some of the fables are so absurd and senseless in their outward narration, that they seem to show their nature at first sight, and cry for exposition by means of a parable. Above all, one consideration has been of great weight and importance wit

ossa and others, to lie entranced in the recesses of more than one mountain. He was attended by the magician Merlin, and he and his followers performed superhuman feats. He slew many giants of prodigious size,

lays the two giants, Passamont and Alabaster, and converts, or rather acc

tion around. He is described as holding "the moors, the fen, and fastnesses." Professor Morley, in his English summary of the poem, says,-"Forbidden the homes of mankind, the daughters of Cain brought forth in darkness misshapen giants, elves, and orkens, such giants

re left on or near the stone by the country people, and that the towns-folk deposited the understood price in one of the holes containing the vinegar, which was believed to render the coins innocuous as plague conductors. Sir Lionel of Liones, the first of the brothers of Sir Lancelot of the Lake, who succumbed to Tarquin's prowess whilst endeavouring to rescue the three captives referred to, tells us, "He never beheld so stout a knight, so handsome a man, and so well accoutered a hero." He lived in a plain, surrounded by a dense forest. His castle, John Whitaker says, was formed out of the ruins of the Roman fortress at Castlefield, Manchester. Sir Ector de Maris, another brother of Sir Lancelot, rambling in search of adventures, and hearing that "within a mile was a castle, strong and well ditched, and by it, upon the left hand, a ford; and that over this grew a fair tree, on the branches of which were hung the shields of the many gallant knights who had been overcome by the owner of the castle; and at the stem was a basin of copper, with a Latin inscription, which challenged any knight to strike it, and summon the castellans to a contest. Ector came to the place, saw the shields, recognised many that belonged to his associates at the Round Table, and particularly noticed his brother's. Fired at the sight, he beat violently on the basin, and then gave his horse drink at the ford. And immediately a knigh

ed to be the porter of a neighbouring castle, inhabited by "two great giants, well armed save their heads, and with two horrible clubs in their hands." Lancelot, nothing daunted, with his shield, "warded off one giant's stroke, and clove the other with his sword from the head downward to the chest. When

Henry VIII. to Charles of France, is due to them. This table is, I believe, shown in what are the remains of the ancient chapel or church of St. Stephen, Wincheste

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Hall. The decorations of the table indicate a date not later nor much earlier than the reign of Henry VIII., and the figure of Arthur has been repainted within the time of living me

Mens? Rotund?." Wace makes mention of the Round Table of Arthur in his metrical romance, but Geoffrey of Monmouth has no reference to it, either in his pretended "History," or in his "Life of Merlin." Nevertheless in the romance, the "Morte Darthur," it is expressly stated that Merlin made it "in token of the roundness of the world." It is evidently, like other circular forms, a sun type, or phallic symbol. Ellis, in his "Specimens of the Early English Romances," on the authority of the metrical one of which Merlin is the hero, says,-"The Round Table was intended to assemble the best knights in the world. High birth, great strength, activity and skill, fearless valour, and firm fidelity to their suzerain were indispensably requisite for an admission into this order. Th

nd the Duke of Lancaster." If Arthur ever lived at all, he lived in the fifth and sixth centuries. Geoffrey of Monmouth says, after being mortally wounded, "he gave up the crown of Britain to his kinsman, Constantine, the son of Cader, Duke of Cornwall, in the five hundred and forty-

ds as the equivalent of, and as fatal to him as the treasures of the Argive Helen were to Menelaus. Referring to the "San Gr?al," he says,-"This mystic vessel is at once a storehouse of food as inexhaustible as the table of the Ethiopians, and a talismanic test as effectual as the goblets of Oberon and Tristram. The good Joseph of Arimathea, who had gathered up in it the drops of blood which fell from the side of Jesus when pierced by the centurion's spear, was nourished by it alone through his weary imprisonment of two and forty years; and when, at length, having either been brought

rien. He is the great hero of the bard Taliesin. Amongst his other great qualities, the poet enumerates the following:-"Protector of the land, usual with thee is headlong activity and the drinking of ale, and ale for drinking, and fair dwelling and beautiful raiment." Llywarch Hen, or the old, another Keltic poet, born about the year 490, incidentally mentions Arthur as chief of the Cymry of the

Carlion," in Wales, was, according to Sir Thomas Malory's "Morte D

spirits," and he was enabled, by "their assistance, to fortel future events.... He knew when anyone spoke falsely in his presence, for he saw the devil; as it were, leaping and exulting on the tongue of the liar.... If the evil spirits oppressed him too much the Gospel of St. John was placed on his bosom, when, like birds, they immediately vanished; but when that book was removed, and the History of the Britons by Geoffry Arthur was substituted in its place, they instantly reappeared in great numbers, and remained a longer time than usual on his body and on the book!!" William of Newbury, too, some half a century after the publication of Geoffrey's work, repudiated it in the following emphatic manner:-"A certain writer has come up in our times to wipe out the blots on the Britons, weaving together ridiculous figments about them, and raising them with impudent vanity high above the virtue of the Macedonians and the Romans. This man is named Geoffrey, and has the by-name of Arturus, because he cloaked with the honest name of History, coloured in Latin phrase, the fables about Arthur, taken from the old tales of the Bretons, with increase of his own.... Moreover, in his book, that he calls the History of the Britons, how saucily and how shamelessly he lies almost throughout, no one,

ense tunneling, and the miles of underground canal in connection with the Bridgewater Trust collieries, and other results of Brindley's engineering skill, may have influenced the relatively modern vulgar mind in the transfere

n, in Lancashire, for the purpose of inspecting what h

hand at the time he threw it; but I own I could not find out the resemblance which was noticed to me. It appears, however, to have long excited attention; for, though it is a hard grey moor-stone, a rude mark of a cross, of about seven inches by six, hath, apparently, at a very distant period of time, bee

ts term the "glacial drift," are especially regarded as débris resulting from giant warfare or amusement. Many rocks of this class lying to the south of Pendle Hill, near Great Harwood, I am informed, are still looked upon by the vulgar as

lept in it. The tradition, moreover, further informs us that at some very remote period a huge giant occupied the same fortress, and that he and a colossal rival, on the Rother or Mersey at Stockport, carried on a long desultory warfare by throwing stones an

he Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, as it now separates Lancashire from Cheshire. Or, as John O'Gaunt is mixed up in some way with it, may not an old legend have become confounded with events attendant upon some of

y are presented, they quite as much partake of the character of the nursery tales about champions and ogres of the "Jack, the Giant-killer" type, as modern gentlemen do of their savage aboriginal ancestry. Hallam, referring to the plundering barons of the "middle ages," and the legends engrafted upon their ferocious deeds, says:-"Germany appears to have been, upon the whole, the country w

ve furnished nuclei around which the older myths may be said to have re-crystallised themselves. Hallam, again, when discuss

lers in his dungeon, though neither a giant nor a Saracen, was a monster not less formidable, and could, perhaps, as little be destroyed without the aid of disinterested bravery. Knight errantry, indeed, as a profession, cannot rationally be conceived to have had any existence, beyond the precincts of romance. Yet there seems

of the heroes of the Greek solar myths, whose toil was always undergone for the benefit of others rather than themselves. The knight-er

g of the kind may be found in connection with their corporeal antitheses, the dwarfs. T

cter are analogous to those of Tom Thumb. He, too, was not originally a Brahmin, but became one by adoption, like some of the worthies in the Ramayana. Compare the multiplicity of Tom Thumb's metamorphoses with those of Taliesin, as quoted by Davies, we shall then see that this diminutive personage is a slender but distinct thread of communication between the Brahminical and Dru

e famous boon of three paces from Bali, the conqueror of the gods. According to the Ramayana, then "the thrice-stepping Vishnu assumed a miraculous form, and with three paces took possession of the worlds. For with one step

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n, thirty-eight feet six inches long, with a head six feet in circumference. Where is Barnum?" I suspect, however, that even Barnum would fancy this story is a little "too good to be true." The mend

Bramham Crags," are not situated in either a parish, township, or hamlet of that name. Does the appellation Bramha-m throw any additional lig