#giant folklore

[gawrkin]

(Source: Popular Romances of the West of England, by Robert Hunt)

Giants being reincarnated into Spriggans. Interesting.

Maybe there is a way for Galehaut and others to persist after death...

[gawrkin]

(Source: Culhwch and Olwen)

(Source: The Battle of the Birds)

There's this interesting idea that I've been playing in my head for while about a potential magical ability that could ascribed to giants: the ability to warp and distort space - size, distance, mass/volume, etc.

In the images above, we see a couple of examples of what I'm trying to conceptualize:

a huge fortress that you can clearly see but seemingly can't get closer even if you were traveling towards it for days.

the ability to take something as large as entire buildings and put them in a pouch for convenient carry

Other folktales describe giants (or ogres) owning a particular magical object called the "Seven league boots" - a pair of boots that allow its wearer to cross a distance of seven leagues in a single step, as if the wearer's footstride was that long. In many stories, these magic boots end up in the hands of normal humans, who are strangely able to wear them without issue.

Arthurian Legend itself has some examples of supernatural space-warping, usually in the form of size-shifting. Sir Kay is a known size-shifter in Culhwch. Amr, son of King Arthur, has a grave that seeming shifts in size everytime you try to measure it. Another myth has Arthur place the head of a giant in a river which causes it to grow and swell.

Taken together, perhaps giants aren't actually physically huge but somehow able to twist reality and perspective in ways that make them seem massive and superhuman in relation to others but still be able to live amongst mortal humans like normal people, such as wearing the same clothes as humans or interbreed with them to produce half-giants (because physical copulation would be... difficult otherwise).