Kind and Evil Giants in British, Welsh, and Irish Folklore
Source: Katharine Briggs & Fee Greening, Briggs's Dictionary of Fairies (Monoray, 2025)
Disclaimer - I'm no folklorist! Just an amateur learning as I go. As with any learning process, integrations and corrections are very welcome. :)
Something that's always struck me about the folklore around giants in England and its neighbouring countries is the recurrent dichotomy in their depiction as either kind protectors or dangerous man-eaters. In either case, evil and good are all-encompassing ontological attributes, seemingly fixed and inherent to their characters. Now, moral absolutes are pretty typical of the folklore of this area. Creatures like witches and giants are particularly prone to this very static characterisation. But this has not always been the case, even in related traditions. Giants appear to be in fact quite complex creatures, which might have been flattened into simpler stereotypes as the tales circulated and evolved over time. In the Germanic Eddas, for instance:
giants are seen as ancestors to the gods, yet as their unrelenting enemies; as wise and powerful, yet often also as outwitted and defeated. Various attempts at probing the significance of this mythical racc have yielded various conclusions: that giants symbolise meteorological phenomena, that they are the powers of untamed wilderness, an older dynasty of gods, demons of nature, swallowers of corpses, agents of death or the dead themselves.
Source: Lotte Motz, "Giants in folklore and mythology: a new interpreation" in Folklore, 93(1) 1982., 70–84.
(To be clear, the Eddas are not products of "folklore" per se; but according to Motz, giants in folklore are related to giants depicted in the Eddas).
So today I thought I'd bring up a couple of cases of evil and kind giants in England, Ireland, and Wales specifically. Perhaps most famous is Fionn mac Cumhaill, the heroic Irish giant who's responsible for the creation of Giant's Causeway, and whose tale is recounted in the medieval narrative known as The Boyhood Deeds of Fionn.
Fionn as recently depicted in a series of folklore-themed stamps produced by Royal Mail (he looks so good lmfao).
Observing the pervasiveness of giants in British folklore, John Matthews has pinpointed their role as the original inhabitants of the island before the coming of man (and here's another connection to nature and to their almost demiurgical power). So, since giants appear to be a vital part of the folklore of the UK and Ireland, let's look a little deeper.
The extracts below comes from the work of Katharine Briggs, a very famous British folklorist who spent her life collecting folk tales around England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. She recounts the story of Bran the Blessed of Wales, "the best and wisest of all giants", and of the kind old giant of Carn Galva (Cornwall), who mistakenly killed a human friend because he could not control his strength. This second story is the saddest for sure:
"One day they had had a great game, and at last the boy threw down his quoit and said he must go home. The giant in great good humour tapped him on the head and said, 'Be sure to come tomorrow, my son, and us will have a capital game of bob.' But as he said the word "bob" his playmate fell to the ground dead for the giant's fingers had crushed his skull right in. The old giant went down on his knees and tried to mend his head with clay, but it was no use, and he picked up the boy and sat down on the logan-stone rocking him up and down and crying and sobbing out, 'Oh, my son, my son, why didn't they make the shell of thy noddle stronger? A' is as soft as a pie-crust, dough baked, and made too thin by half! However shall I pass the time without thee to play bob and mop-and-heed?' After that the poor old giant took no interest in anything, and before the year was over he had pined away and died."
But then of course, there were the evil giants, which seem to have been the overwhelming majority of giants in these folk tales:
"These kind giants were not as common as the fierce man-eating ogres, some of them two-headed or three-headed monsters, who ground men's bones for bread and were the terror of the countryside. These were the kind that Jack the Giant Killer fought with and from whom Jack of the Beanstalk stole his treasure. Some of these kept human beings as servants, but they were chiefly interested in them as food. Most of these giants were stupid and easily tricked, but a few, rather smaller in size, were magicians and could only be defeated by other magic. Often the heroes who defeated these giant-magicians were helped by animals to whom they had been kind, for in fairy stories kindness nearly always brings its reward, and fairy stories, fantastic asthey are, often tell us a good deal about real life."
Source: Katharine Briggs & Fee Greening, Briggs's Dictionary of Fairies (Monoray, 2025), pp. 110-113.
(It's worth mentioning that Jack the Giant Killer was a very popular fairy tale in Cornwall, and that it circulated in many forms, including as a chapbook that appeared in 1711, for many centuries.)
I don't have a wise conclusion to all this - I'm simply interested in the dichotomy. There's obviously much more to learn, so part 2 potentially coming at some point?
