Giants Are There To Explain The Landscape

Giant stories attach to terrain rather than to communities. Where a landscape has an unexplained feature, there is often a giant who put it there.

The features that attract them

Isolated boulders sitting on unrelated rock, causeways of regular columns, notches in ridgelines and single standing stones all draw the same class of story.

These are exactly the features that look placed rather than grown. Something that appears deliberately positioned invites an account of who positioned it.

Many of the boulders were in fact carried and dropped by ice, which is a genuinely strange process, and the giant explanation is a reasonable inference without that knowledge.

The vocabulary of throwing and dropping

The stories are remarkably consistent in their verbs. Giants throw stones at each other, drop what they were carrying, or lose material from an apron or a load.

That framing explains scattered distribution neatly. A single dropped load accounts for a cluster of boulders across several fields without requiring separate events.

Competitions between two giants across a valley are a recurring device, and they conveniently explain features on both sides of it with one narrative.

Giants as former inhabitants

A common strand treats giants as an earlier people who lived in the area before the current inhabitants, and who were larger, cruder and eventually displaced.

This often attaches to visible remains. Old walls of very large stones are frequently explained as the work of a race that could lift them.

The displacement is usually credited to cleverness rather than strength, with a small ordinary person outwitting the giant, which is the standard resolution of the type.

Boundaries and the giants who mark them

Giant-associated stones frequently sit on boundaries, and it is likely the association ran the other way, with a notable stone being adopted as a marker and acquiring a story afterwards.

A boundary stone with a memorable legend is more likely to be respected and remembered, which gives the story a practical function in a landscape without maps.

Where such stones have been moved or destroyed, the associated stories usually fade within a generation or two, since the anchor for them has gone.

Why the type is so stable

Giant stories require little cultural context, since the explanation is simply a larger version of an ordinary person doing an ordinary thing.

That makes them easy to transmit and easy to attach to new features, which is why the same episode appears with different names across wide areas.

It also makes them durable in a way more elaborate legends are not. The story survives even when the tradition that produced it has otherwise been forgotten.