Eight-foot giants were also created by Leicester at the 1575 Kenilworth
entertainment: at the Queen's arrival "...hee (L.) cauzd his Trumpetoourz
that stood upon the wall of the gate thear, too soound up a tune of wellcum:
which, byside the nobl noyz, waz so mooch the more pleasaunt for too
beholld, becauz theez Trumpetoourz being six in number, wear every one an
eight foot hy, in due proportion of parson besyde, all in long garments of
sylk sutabl, each with his sylvery Trumpet of a fyve foot long...These
armonioous blasterz...walking upon the wallz...had this muzik maynteyned
from them very delectably..." (Robert Langham)
Roger Kuin
-----Original Message-----
From: Anne Prescott <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: December 13, 2000 6:05 PM
Subject: Re: Talus
>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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