Giants in the Renaissance (see my entry in the Sp. Encyc.) were
astonishingly variable in size. Those in the Amadis de Gaul are short
enough to take to bed should you be so inclined, although one woman tells
her daughter that although one does meet a good giant every now and then
one can't count on their families to be *really* OK and so one should
hesitate to marry them. Gargantua doesn't count because he's
comic. Perhaps Ascapart (30 feet, as I recall) is somewhat comic. The
Bible has giants that are bigger than is in fact physically possible for
hominids but not up there with Ascapart. The complexity for Spenserians is
that the histories he would have read or heard about by Berosus the
Chaldean etc. called Hercules and the others "giants" and there were some
who denied there had ever been any giants at all, ever. "Giant," they
said, just means "mighty man." So I'm willing to believe that Talus is a
sort of short giant, say 8 feet or so. At times I have thought that
"giant" usually meant "bad big and mighty person" and that's why Hercules,
say, or Bacchus, or the Libyan Jupiter aren't so often *called* giants
even though they were. A final note: years ago I told Eleanor Rosenberg
(the Leicester as Patron of Letters author) that I had read a tract on
giants suggesting that the big bones found near the Dover coast were not
giant bones at all but the bones of the elephants Caesar brought to
Britain. Nonsense, said Eleanor, everybody knows that elephants don't have
joints; see Pliny. So if they were just thigh bones, say, they have to be
giants and not elephants. I suspect myself that they were iguanodons. Anne
Prescott.
On Tue, 12 Dec 2000, Hardin, Richard F wrote:
> A student in our Spenser seminar is writing a paper on Talus, and in part
> argues that Talus is a giant. There is some interesting evidence on this
> that I hadn't noticed. The student has observed not only the lack of an
> article on Talus in the Sp Encyc., but the minimal reference to him in the
> entry on Artegall. I said I thought that good Spenserians would prefer not
> to think about Talus.
> Dick Hardin
>
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