Book of Howth

The Book of Howth is a sixteenth century collection of manuscripts on the history and legends of Ireland comprising handwritten folios by various unknown individuals. It had been in the possession of the Barons of Howth until passing into the hands of the admiral and member of parliament Sir George Carew (c. 1504 – 1545), who made additional notes and emendations. The following passage is an incomplete essay on the history of giants. Its heading was added by Carew, but the text itself is in another, unknown hand. Based on textual references, the section on giants had to have been composed sometime between 1485 and 1540. The passage on giants has a unique mixture of erudition and ignorance, suggesting a copyist who did not entirely understand the source text(s). I have reproduced the text from the 1871 edition of J. S. Brewer and William Bullen, to which I have added notes identifying as many of the giants discussed within as information would allow. Many, sadly, are too vaguely described for me to locate the source.

Of Giants

I did read and hear of many giants and great men of noble race in Ireland and other wheres, as in Greyk, Hercules and Authens (1). In England, Eormes and Gomagot (2). Moses declareth that before the flood there were giants (3). A city was builded by Cham, called Henock, wherein dwelled giants (4). Uge was the last of the giants (5). In the time of the last of the children of Israel, 9 cubits in length and 4 in breadth, Galiath (6). The width of his jeacke was 312 [sic]; his spear was like a weaver’s beam; his spear head was weighed 37 pound of iron, and was 6 cubits and a half broad high. There were giants 4 that had 24 toes and fingers. This was after the flood 2800. Saint Augustine saith he saw a tooth of a giant that would have made a hundred of his own teeth (7). Bockes saith there was three teeth of a man found that weighed 8 lb. and 4 ounces (8). Pallas’s corpse was 20 foot in length, and was companion with Enyas (9). There was found in England a carcass 50 foot in compass, and was found in Wales 14 foot in length, and another was found in Scotland named Little John, that was 12 foot in length (10). One Talliola, daughter to Ciceyo, was higher by many feet than the common sort of jury (11).

Now of days a carcass was found beside Paris that was 20 foot long, beside the neck and head, ways them was not found. A carcass was found in England almost 14 foot in length. Another was found in Scotland; of incredible bigness was his bones. Another that had a shin bone six foot long, and his skull would contain 5 pecks wheat; so he was thought to be in height 28 foot. The body of King Arthur was longer by two foot than any man (12). The carcass of William Conqueror, the body of Arthur the giant aforesaid. Another was found whose corpse was 50 cubits long. Another giant was 30 cubits in length. The body of Exioe was found, and was 46 cubits long (13). One Macreswys’s body was found to be 10 cubits long (14).

Another giant’s body was found to be 20 foot in length, and having a double row of teeth. A rib of a giant was found to be 16 ells long, and his body was judged to be 64. Parris of Find, and those of that country, which was in King Alexander’s days, was 5 cubits in height (15). A corpse was found that in his head was teeth that contained 12 inches in compass, one of them. Ternus threw a stone at Enyas that 12 men could not move it (16). This much of these giants I find written in a credible . . . .

Notes

(1) Traditionally, the Greek Heroes were thought to be giants.

(2) The British mythic giant Gogmagog (Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae 1.16).

(3) Genesis 6:4, traditionally thought to be authored by Moses himself.

(4) Genesis 4:17. The author has confused Cain for Ham (Cham) as the builder of Enoch. Genesis is silent on the giants’ habitation of Enoch, which the author appears to derive from Genesis 6:4.

(5) Og, the king of Bashan, and last of the giants (Deuteronomy 3:11; Joshua 12:4, 13:12). He was also known in Greek as Ogias the Giant, identified with Ohya in the Manichean Book of Giants. Ogias appears in the apocryphal Liber de Ogia nomine gigante as well.

(6) Goliath, in 1 Samuel 17:4. The modern text gives his height as 6 cubits and a span (9-foot-9), but the Dead Sea Scrolls’ text of Samuel and the Septuagint give it as 4 cubits and a span (6-foot-9).

(7) St. Augustine, City of God 15.9.

(8) Giovanni Boccaccio, Genealogia deorum gentilium 4.68.

(9) Pallas and Aeneas. In the Aeneid Pallas was killed by Turnus, whom Aeneas slew in turn (see note 16). A gigantic body supposedly identified by a funerary inscription (in Latin!) as Pallas was uncovered at Berne during the reign of Emperor Henry III in the early 11th century (William of Malmesbury, Gesta regum Anglorum 2.13; Martinus Polonus, Chronicle, ch. 95; Bocaccio, Genealogia deorum gentilium 12.60; John Capgrave, Chronicle of England, entry for 1038; and Athanasius Kircher,Mundus subterraneus 8.4.2.).

(10) Hector Boetius, Scotorum Regni Descriptio, Preliminary Remarks sec. 18 (folio 9r).

(11) Tullia (or Tulliola) Ciceronis, daughter of Marcus Tullius Cicero. A tomb believed to be hers had been discovered in 1485.

(12) Giraldus, Liber de Principis instructione, Distinctio I, folio 107b. When Henry II ordered the (fictitious) grave of King Arthur at Glastonbury opened, the monks who uncovered it in 1190 allegedly found within the bones of a giant.

(13) Probably the giant Echion (Claudian, Gigantomachia 104), possibly confused with Pliny’s report of the discovery of 46-cubit-long bones thought to belong to Orion or Otus (Natural History 7.16).

(14) Probably a references to Maugys, a giant from the Arthurian romances.

(15) King Porus of Paurava in India, described by Greek writers after his defeat by Alexander as being five cubits in height (Arrian, Anabasis 5.19, though Plutarch gives his height as four cubits and a span).

(16) Aeneas threw a stone at Turnus to kill him in Vergil, Aeneid 12.887ff.