#welsh giants

[gingersnaptaff]

My friend made me a meme. :3

[gawrkin]

So, I've been messing around with HeightComparison.Com (LINK) recently in order to get a feel for my own headcanons about the Arthurian character's heights, as well as help visualize the scale of the Arthurian giants.

The following is an experiment and a mix of both hard info from the texts and my own imagination. For the latter, I've tentatively set up a couple of assumptions:

King Claudas will be my yardstick, being described as 9 ft. tall and not directly referred to as giant, merely as a very tall man. A male (in red) of average height at 5 '9 ft. will also be shown for scale.

Mixed-blooded giants and half-giants do not go above 12 ft.

First, King Arthur and Queen Guinevere will be placed at 8' 8 ft. and 12 ft. respectively. I personally want Arthur to be tall - taller than Lancelot - in respect to the folk myths that portray him as a giant but also not wanting him to exceed Claudas. I also headcanon Uther Pendragon as being around the 8 ft. range as well. Guinevere's height is set at the max for what I feel is the tallest a half-giant(ess) could be, just for an amusing height difference between her and Arthur. Assume Guinevak is also at this height.

[...]

Now here are two giants King Arthur fights in the Vulgate, with Gwen and an average man for scale. Already, we can see how crazy the dynamics are for Arthur's battles (as well as the other giant slayers). Arthur is already impossibly tall for a man but he is still basically a little kid next to Rion and Caelenc, albeit a little kid armed with a functional lightsaber but still...

Next, we get into the love triangles. Lancelot-Guinevere-Galehaut (plus Arthur) and Tristan-Iseult-Palamedes. Galehaut, Palamedes and Iseult are known half-giants, so I've assigned them some numbers close to Guinevere's. Galehaut is described as "six inches taller than any knight", so I gave him the advantage over Palamedes. Lancelot and Tristan, as I visualize it, I've decided to be around a foot taller than Gawain, who I made pretty short by comparison (see below). So they're seven footers here. This is comparable to Yao Ming of NBA fame (7' 6 ft.) This still leaves both Tristan and Lancelot as the shortest members of each of their respective love triangles. XD

Here is an ensemble of male characters to compare Gawain with. One of the interesting descriptions about Gawain (in Vulgate) is that he is "neither too tall or too short" and is physically balanced compared to his brothers. I haven't hammered down the other Orkney brothers yet, so they're not here. As a result, I hilariously made Gawain the shortest of this roster at a measly... 6 '9 ft. So yeah, even though he's the shortest, Gawain is still decently tall compared to an average male, just the most realistic of the bunch.

And here are the ladies. The ex-gfs and their rebounds, plus Nimue Also, sort of a giants vs. fairies thing, with that poor human caught in the middle. Morgan, I feel, just deserves to be the tallest of all the female fairies, just four inches below her brother.

Next, I have a sequence of giants prepped, starting with Galehaut the half-giant and King Rion:

Now we add Gogmagog, the giant from Historia Regum Britanniae, who was defeated by Brutus and Corineus. He is described as 12 cubits tall (18 feet):

Then we factor in Sir Kay and his size-changing powers at max. Supposedly, he can grow "as tall as the tallest tree in the forest". Let's make an arbitrary choice and assume Kay can grow as large as an oak tree (specifically, a Sessile Oak) Which means THIS is Kay's theoretical max height:

And finally, let's bring in Bran the Blessed, the legendary giant king of Welsh Myth, who waded across the Irish Sea and was seen as massive object by the Irish. Which I have calculated here. (Note: the given number of 262 ft. is a lower estimation of Bran's total height)

To wrap up this already long post, here's two more rosters i wanted to show: the first being the regulars of the Arthurian cast in contrast. The second is Arthur, Guinevere and their children, based on how it feels in my conception.

*(Duran is the shortest because he's the youngest in my HC. He would probably be taller had he not died at Camlann. Similarly, my HC Loholt was killed before he was 25. Amhar, on the other hand, can change size)

EDIT: For additional info on Arthurian giants, see my post on known giants and their stated heights.

[ragpicker-and-poet]

[gawrkin]

(Source: Giants of Wales, by Sion Dafydd Rhys)

This line here piques my curiosity: Arthur takes one of the slain giants heads, plants it in a river and speaks a cryptic line, after which the giant head magically grows. This gives the river its name, Afon Tefeidiad, otherwise known as the Teme River.

What I'm wondering is: Did Arthur enchant the head to grow? Has Arthur casted a spell of some kind? Nothing implies the growth of the head was an inherent property and its does so seemingly at Arthur's command.

This could be one of those very subtle moments of "wonderworking" Arthur performs here and there in folklore, like that mysterious cairn Arthur makes for Cavall's pawprint or how Arthur was somehow able to make Gwyn and Gwythyr fight each other every year on May Day 'till the end of time...

[gawrkin]

The Giants of Arthuriana are very tall

Giant of Mont St. Michel: Five Fathoms Tall (30 feet tall) (Source: Alliterative Morte Arthure)

[...]

[...]

King Ryons/Rhitta Gawr: 14 feet tall King Hargadabran: 15 feet tall King Caelene: 14 feet tall (Source: Vulgate Cycle - Story of Merlin)

Maugis: 30 feet tall (Source: Libeaus Desconus) (Note: there are two separate giants earlier in the story, one of whom was described as 15 feet tall)

[.....]

Sir Kay: Upwards to ~130 feet tall (Source: Culhwch and Olwen) (Source: Wikipedia.org)

Gogmagog: 12 cubits (18 feet tall) (Source: Historia Regum Britanniae, by Geoffrey of Monmouth)

The Giant Herdsman: 17 feet tall (Source: Knight of the Lion, by Chretien de Troyes)

[gawrkin]

Bran the Blessed's height

(Source: Mabinogi - Branwen ferch Llyr)

If Bran is tall enough to wade across the Irish sea - and just tall enough that he has to tilt his head to breath - then we may be able to narrow down his precise height range.

The Irish Sea's average depth is 80-275 meters (262-900 feet).

Assuming he started walking from Herlech, Merionethshire in Gwynedd towards Ireland in a generally direct line with no weird detours

And using this Bathymetry from Researchgate.net (LINK)

Bran's height might be somewhere in the area of 80 to 100 meters (from 262 to 328 feet), since he may be wading through the shallower parts of the Irish Sea

Given that height - around the size range of the Statue of Liberty from base to torch - the proportional size of Bran's head would have been as large as a 3-4 story tall building.

[gawrkin]

Carmelide/Cameliard, the Land of Wolves

From The Coming of Arthur, by Alfred Tennyson

From Segurant, Knight of the Dragon

A savage kingdom populated by cinbin, ruled by the cewri...

[gawrkin]

I FINALLY FOUND THIS AGAIN: LLEON GAWR

(Source: Life of St, Werburgh, by Henry Bradshaw) (LINK)

I vaguely knew there was giant that was associated with the city of Chester, but I needed to look for where I got that idea from.

And it's here with this guy, Henry Bradshaw, a Chester-born clerk from Chester who made a chronicle of the patron saint of the city of Chester, St, Werburgh.

It's in this text, Bradshaw makes an offhand comment that the Polychronicon, by Ranulf Higden, claimed the founder of Chester was this supposed giant. And from what I could gather online, the Polychronicon never makes this claim, and seems to have originate solely from Bradshaw's pen.

It's likely that this purported mythical founder of Chester, is probably a back formation, derived from Chester's old Latin-Brythonic Name* "Caerlleon Vawr" meaning "Great Legion Fort" (which was Chester's strategic role for the Romans).

The reason why this caught my attention not only because is this about a giant named "Leo(n)" but also because of Chester's relative closeness to another location pertinent to Arthurian Legend.

Around ~40 kilometers south of Chester, in Shropshire (a day's ride away from Chester in Medieval Travel) is the Old Oswestry Hill Fort, an Iron age settlement that in local folklore is called Caer Ogyrfan/Caer Ogfran - Ogyrfan being the name of Guinevere's father in Welsh Mythology.

Local Folklore also claims that Caer Ogyrfan/Old Oswestry is the birthplace of Queen Guinevere. (Link) (Link)

Here is an excerpt from Giants of Wales, by Sion Dafydd Rhys

It probably helps that, in the French Vulgate, the kingdom of Cameliard has city called "Carhaix/Carohaise" (after the IRL Carhaix-Plouguer in Brittany, in typical medieval grasp of geography).

*(Chester's other name is Deva Victrix - "Victorious Goddess" - after the River Dee, where it was situatedin, and the it's tutelary goddess)