Description

A BOOK OF GIANTS: TALES OF VERY TALL MEN OF MYTH, LEGEND, HISTORY, AND SCIENCE

169 pages 

Man in his youth was so fond of giants that, not finding them large or plentiful enough, he
created a bounteous supply. He gave them precedence of himself. In the frozen North they
came even before the gods: in the East, after the celestials but before the creation of the
world; in Greece they sprang into being just after the Olympians and fiercely disputed the
sovereignty of Zeus.
Many ancient gods were vast in size: witness, for instance, the colossal statues of Egypt,
China or the South Seas. But the palm for bigness must go to those giant beings whom we find
amid Chaos in the East: like that Tiamat from whom the Babylonian god Bel formed heavens
and earth; and Purushu of the Hindu Vedas, whose severed head was sufficient for making the
sky, his feet for the earth, his eye for the sun, and his mind for the moon.