Giants in Folklore: Why Is It Always the Smallest Hero Who Defeats Them?

By Fire Pud the Dragon (Mythical Creatures Expert and Part-Time Castle Historian)

I can still remember the fear from being read Roald Dahl's 'BFG' as a 7 or 8 year old dragon pup. Yes dragons get scared too and I had to move my bed as far away from the cave entrance as possible, just in case I was eaten by one of the less friendly giants in that book.

It left a lasting scar and the impression that all giants are bad (apart from the ones who do 'whizzpoppers' and eat snozzcumbers).

Giants have appeared in stories for as long as human beings have been telling them. Nearly every culture has them. Ancient Greece had them. Norse mythology had them. Britain absolutely had them, often wandering around Cornwall throwing rocks at people for reasons that now feel difficult to defend historically. There's the Giants Causeway in Northern Ireland, which I have to say is one of the most incredible sights that I have ever flown over.

Which raises the obvious question: Why are we so obsessed with giants?

Where Giants Come From

The word giant comes into English through the Old French geant, which itself traces back to the Latin gigas and the giants of Greek mythology, the Gigantes.

But the giants of mythology were not quite the same as the giants of fairy tales. The Greek giants were enormous cosmic beings associated with chaos and destruction. They fought the Olympian gods in a catastrophic mythical war called the Gigantomachy. These were not fairy-tale giants guarding castles and shouting “fee-fi-fo-fum.” These were world-ending monsters.

The fairy-tale version came later.

These giants are usually more local, more chaotic, and considerably less intelligent. They live in castles above the clouds. They steal livestock. They threaten villages. They hoard treasure. They grind bones into bread for reasons nobody has ever properly explained. And medieval people genuinely believed giants might once have existed.

Partly because giant stories were already embedded deeply in folklore, but also because people regularly discovered enormous bones and prehistoric monuments they could not explain. Don't forget that the first scientific description of a dinosaur wasn't made until 1824. If you lived a thousand years ago and dug up a dinosaur bone without any understanding of extinct animals, “giant” would honestly feel like a fairly reasonable conclusion.

The same was true of ancient stone structures. Stonehenge, massive earthworks, strange standing stones, these places felt too enormous and too mysterious to have been built by ordinary people. So legends grew around them. In Britain especially, giants became attached to the landscape itself.

Britain seems to have had a GIANT problem

British folklore contains a frankly alarming number of giants. There is Gogmagog, the giant supposedly defeated by the warrior Corineus in medieval legend after the founding of Britain. According to the story, Corineus threw him from a cliff during a wrestling match because apparently this was considered a normal way to settle disagreements in early mythology.

Versions of Gog and Magog still survive today in London pageantry, where giant figures appear in the Lord Mayor’s Show. Which means Britain remains one of the only countries on Earth where ceremonial giants occasionally parade through the capital in full public view.

Then there is Cormoran, the Cornish giant associated with St Michael’s Mount. Cormoran was enormous, unpleasant, and apparently had a habit of helping himself to local livestock, which eventually led to a young boy called Jack digging a giant pit trap to defeat him. This matters because Jack the Giant Killer became one of the defining English folk heroes.

Not because he was strong. Because he was small. That is the pattern that appears again and again in giant stories everywhere.

As I mentioned the Giants Causeway earlier, its famous 40,000 interlocking basalt columns were according to legend built by the mythical Irish giant Finn McCool as a path to fight his Scottish rival, Benandonner!

Why small always wins

The giant is almost never defeated by somebody bigger. The giant is defeated by somebody cleverer.

David defeats Goliath with a sling. Odysseus escapes the Cyclops through trickery rather than strength. Jack outsmarts the giant at the top of the beanstalk. Even in Norse mythology, where everyone seems enormous and heavily armed, intelligence matters as much as brute force.

That is probably why giant stories endure.

The giant represents the thing that feels impossible:

• fear

• danger

• chaos

• unfairness

• the enormous problem standing directly in your way

And the hero represents the part of us that hopes small people can still make a difference. Children understand this instinctively. Adults sometimes forget it.

The entire point of giant stories. Not that the hero is fearless, or is even the strongest, but they opt to not run away and face something far larger head first. That is why giants remain in stories and always will be.

Every child eventually encounters something that feels too large to face. And every child deserves stories that whisper back: “You might be smaller than the problem, but courage makes you bigger.” And that emotional principle will always remain sound and something that every child understands through stories about giants.

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