andflattens the cloak. The Narts tell him that he has killed a man, which
pleases him greatly.^67
The Foawr of Manx legend are another group of stone-throwing giants.
In an Eddic poem Thor recalls how he was in the east (where Giantland
was located) and was pelted with stones by the sons of Svárang. The giant
Hrungnir, whose story was mentioned in the last chapter, used a whetstone
as a missile. In certain German and Lithuanian folk-tales giants throw stones
and stone tools over great distances.^68 Many of these stories presumably
served to account for particular rocks and boulders lying about in the
landscape.
The Germanic giants are known to us largely from Eddic mythology,
though the Norse words io ̨tunn and þurs have cognates in Old English and
continental German, so that the concepts they denoted must once have been
common to the whole or a large part of the Germanic area.^69 The io ̨tnar live in
their own province, Io ̨ tunheim. They appear as a somewhat backward people,
physically powerful, insensitive, and unruly. They are the prime target of
Thor’s hammer, which kills them off at a sufficient rate to prevent their taking
over the world.
Multiple heads and limbsSometimes the giants are represented as having three or more heads. In the
cosmogonic account in Vafþrúðnismál (33) their ancestor is a six-headed
son of Ymir. In Hymiskviða Týr is disconcerted on meeting his giantess
grandmother, who has nine hundred heads (8), and later in the poem (35)
a crowd of giants is called ‘an army of many-headed ones’. Thor slew these,
and in another episode the nine-headed Thrivaldi (Bragi, Ragnarsdrápa 20).
When the giantess Gerðr refuses Freyr’s suit, his page Skírnir pronounces a
series of choice curses on her, including ‘with a three-headed þurs you shall
ever live on, or else be husbandless’ (Skírnismál 31). A þurs is basically a
demon rather than a giant, but the distinction is not sharp.^70
Multiple heads are a characteristic of grotesque beings in many traditions.
In the last chapter we passed safely by the three-headed Indo-Iranian dragon
(^67) G. Dumézil, Légendes sur les Nartes (Paris 1930), 146; a variant version in Sikojev (1985),
282–4.
(^68) J. MacKillop (as n. 37), 211; Hárbarðzlióð 29. 5; Skáldsk. 17; Grimm (1883–8), 543–6, 1443;
Greimas (1992), 139 (two giants, sometimes identified as Perkunas and his brother).
(^69) See Grimm (1883–8), 519–22 (and for other Germanic terms 524–6, 1438 f.); de Vries
(1956), i. 243, 252. On the Germanic giants cf. Grimm, 518–57, 1436–48; de Vries, i. 241–52.
(^70) See further Grimm (1883–8), 527 f., 1440.
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