Why Should Medieval Norsemen Be Giants?

3/18/2013

As you know, I’ve been circling back and researching some of the claims I missed during my first pass through America Unearthed. One that has been bothering me is the episode 4 claim that the Norse who allegedly colonized Minnesota in the Middle Ages were giants. Why giants? There are no giant Norse skeletons in Norway, Iceland, or Greenland, so at first blush this claim seems silly.

I’ve seen claims of Norse giants going back to the nineteenth century, and it just doesn’t sit right with me. I’ve been looking into it, and I think I see how this weird story came about. The first thread is straightforward. The Vikings landed in the region of New Brunswick and Labrador in Canada and interacted with the Dorset and their successors, the Inuit. These people remembered the Norse as “invulnerable” because they wore armor (unknown to the Inuit), and their myths also called them “giants” because the Norse were several inches taller on average than the diminutive Inuit, whom evolution had selected to be shorter and more compact to retain heat.

The relevant myth is recorded in Samuel Robinson’s “Notes on the Coast of Labrador” (1843), in which the Inuit are called by their previous name, the Eskimo (retained by Alaska natives), in an archaic spelling:

The Esquimau tradition concerning the Norsemen is clear enough: that they were a gigantic race, of great strength—were very fierce, and delighted to kill people—that they themselves could not be killed by either dart or arrow, which rebounded from their breasts as from a rock. The Esquimaux suppose these giants still to exist, only very far north. (source)

However, other scholars have attributed such myths to either Spanish conquistadors or to poetic fancy.

So that’s the first thread. The second, I think, derives from Norse sources. Snorri Sturluson records in King Harald’s Saga (ch. 104) that Harald Sigurdsson, known as Hardrada, Viking explorer and King of Norway (as Harald III), stood five ells (7.5 feet) tall. He was rumored to have been among the first to travel to Vinland, now known to have been the area around L’anse-aux-Meadows in New Brunswick, according to one reading of passages in the work of his contemporary, Adam of Bremen. Immediately after describing Vinland as a land of “the best” wine, Adam recorded in the Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum of 1076 (4.38, or 39 in some editions) that Harald had recently “searched the breadth of the northern ocean in ships.”

Another island … is called Vinland because vines grow there naturally, producing the best of wines. That unsown fruits grow there in abundance we have ascertained not from fabulous reports but from the trustworthy relations of the Danes. After this island, habitable land is not to be found in the ocean, but all the regions beyond are filled with impenetrable ice and immense darkness. Of this, Martianus [Marriage of Mercury and Philology 6.666] makes reference as follows: “Beyond Thule,” he says, “the sea is congealed after one day’s voyage.” The most enterprising prince of the Norseman, Harald, recently tried this sea. After he searched the breadth of the northern ocean in ships, at last before their eyes lay the darkening limits of a fading world, and by retracing his steps he only just escaped in safety the vast pit of the abyss.

(my translation)

Incidentally, this is also the very first record of Vinland in medieval literature and therefore of great interest to diffusionists.

Other individual Norsemen, like Eric the Red’s son Thorvall, were also accused of being “giants.”

Now is it a coincidence that Scott Wolter asserted that the race of Norse giants were “between seven and eight feet tall”—the exact height Snorri’s saga attributes to Harald, the “giant” who sailed to Vinland, according to Adam of Bremen?

18 Comments

B L

3/18/2013 08:44:39 am

Hey Jason, as to the question you ask at the end of this post....Yes, I think it is a complete coincidence! if you're suggesting that Wolter does any research at all, including finding and actually READING an extremely old text like King Harald’s Saga, then you're giving him way more credit than I do.

Keep up the great work!

Jason Colavito link

3/18/2013 02:10:51 pm

I assume the show got it from some mystery-mongering secondary source or another that summarized the history of "Norse" giants in America. (There have been several published in the last 10-20 years.) I don't for a minute think Wolter has any awareness of primary sources; we know from Scott Dawson that Wolter admits that he never read any primary sources.

L Bean

3/18/2013 11:27:53 am

One wonders why this show's go-to era is the heyday of the professional occultist Victorian writers for their "research" materials, but it's actually very Zen. Any further back or forward, and you'd get eyewitness accounts and proper sciency stuff and we can't have any of that on The History Channel.

Does it go without saying that all things Norse are popular at Stormfront? So many dog whistles, so maybe my ear is off.

Phil

3/18/2013 12:48:11 pm

Seems like the Universe show/series on H2 has somwhat a real sciency feeling to it? Shure they play loose with the thories/facts to spin it their way, but it is a least watchable and interesting. I can not even stand to wath a moment of the very stupid America Unearthed show. This idiot Scott must bask in his moronic drivel!

Michael Compton

3/18/2013 02:04:07 pm

Thank you VERY much for taking the time to break this absurd series down. Many is the time I've shouted at the tv - at this show and others - for egregious misrepresentations of history...science...recent political developments...basic facts of nearly every stripe. Rarely (if ever) have I taken the time to address them thoroughly as you've done here. In most cases, including this one, it's a big job.

Kudos and sincere gratitude.

Please keep up the great work. We need you!

3/18/2013 02:08:13 pm

Thank you for the kind words. Despite my protests, I do find it fun to do the actual research and learn the truth behind cable TV's lies. I've learned more about ancient history looking up what Ancient Aliens and America Unearthed got wrong than I did in school!

John J. McKay link

3/18/2013 03:26:23 pm

Five ells should be over eleven feet. Seven and a half feet would be five cubits, the distance from the fingertips to the elbow. The English ell was the distance from the fingertips to the armpit, or 28 inches. If the Norwegian ell was the same as the English, Harald Hardrada should have been eleven foot eight.

Part of the reason for the belief in giants was a general feeling that great deeds (or great evil) should be manifest in great stature. Thus, when mammoth bones were found in Europe during the Middle Ages, they were usually credited to saints or great (or evil) men of the past. There was also a common belief that people in general had been shrinking since creation. Serious thinkers could push this idea as late as the beginning of the Enlightenment and not be laughed out of the room. The stake wasn't really put into the heart of this idea until the first mummies were brought back from Egypt showing undeniably ancient people as normal sized or even a little puny.

The Other J.

3/18/2013 05:07:12 pm

For what it's worth, Scandinavians are in general pretty large. The BBC reported a few years back that in Sweden, the public buses had to modified because the average Swede was now so tall that they had a hard time fitting in the seats. (That's good food and healthy living for ya.)

There are loads of Scandinavian settlements in Wisconsin and Minnesota, many of which still have street signs in Norwegian and Swedish, and you're almost as likely to hear Norwegian spoken on the street as English -- and many of those people are kinda massive. Like Brock Lesnar big. That's not my ethnic background, and I was absolutely tiny growing up in that part of the country; it wasn't until I moved away that I actually became average to tall compared to the other people around me.

And that seems to have been the case for a long time. In his 2009 book Life, Inc., Douglas Rushkoff uncovered a fascinating bit of social history about medieval England, and the situation was similar in Scandinavia. Settlements were fewer and farther between in feudal England, and agriculture was fairly developed; however because trade was still comparatively underdeveloped and food couldn't easily be stored, trade remained local and food had to be eaten. People were eating what they raised and grew, and very little of it was processed or prepped for long-term storage.

That led to some of the most well-nourished people in England's history up to that point. The proof was that the bodies of medieval English women (from burials) are some of the tallest in England's history. Rushkoff's subject in the book is the establishment of the first corporations, and he shows how once kingdoms incorporated, trade routes to the emerging colonies were established; and as the feudal system devolved, food didn't stay as local as it began to be traded for other goods and services beyond the village. If food couldn't be sent out for trade, it was as likely to go bad as be consumed. The result was that women became less well-nourished, and stopped growing as tall. It's only been recently that English women began achieving the same height as their older feudal forebears.

From what I know -- and I'm sure there's someone here who can correct me or add to this -- that older feudal-type system persisted longer in Scandinavia than it did in England or the rest of continental Europe. The settlements were few enough and far enough between that the food couldn't easily become a tradable commodity, so Scandinavians generally had good, varied, nourishing, healthy diet of food that had to be consumed or it would rot. Going from what Rushkoff shows, it follows that those people would naturally grow taller than other Europeans and hunter-gatherer tribes who didn't have such ready access to a variety of good nourishment.

So it shouldn't be surprising to find that other people in the Dark Ages, who were probably on average around 5 and a half feet tall, would have looked at these large Vikings -- no matter where they encountered them -- and saw them as "giants," even if they were only above-average size by today's standards. Extend that a bit, where people's achievements was reflected by allegorizing their size (as John J. McKay notes), and you have your giants.

But I'm betting the vast majority of those giants would go unnoticed on the street today.

3/18/2013 11:24:45 pm

According to the sources in use in the nineteenth century, when these ideas were proposed, the Norse ell was about 18 inches. Other sources do define the ell as you mentioned, and give his height as about 10.5 feet.

3/18/2013 04:35:55 pm

So, question: Could Wolter be appropriating the other folktales of a race of giants in the Upper Midwest and the Mountain West? Since I was a kid (growing up in the Upper Midwest, not far from Wolter) I've heard these stories; they concern 7 and 8 foot tall skeletons found in Native American mounds. The skeletons are said to have six digits on their extremities, larger skulls with an extra row of teeth, and sloped foreheads. In 1891, the New York Times ran a piece about them, and that's the best evidence conspiracy theorists have to go on (pdf of the article here -- http://tinyurl.com/nyt-giants). They've supposedly been found from Wisconsin to Colorado, but I can't recommend going on a google hunt, because it mainly leads down some wacky roads. (One guy, claiming to have a PhD, links to a National Geographic article he states declares there were once 15-foot tall cyclops on the planet. Go to the article, and it actually talks about a species of extinct elephants whose skulls may have provided material for the myth. Man I love/hate conspiracy theories...)

But the conspiracy surrounding the skeletons echoes something Wolter has brought up before, I think in the first episode; the claim is the skeletons (18 of them) were turned over to the Smithsonian Institute, and were then disappeared and any info about them has been hidden from the public. Shock! Horror! The establishment is hiding history again! So some say. If just one of these skeletons could be produced, even by the cranks who write web pages claiming they've found one, there'd be no debate. Yet there is a debate, and not a convincing one.

The only real difference between these other folktales and Wolter's Norse giants who also supposedly built ancient monuments here is the ethnicity -- and I'm pretty sure the Native American giants is a more popular myth. It just seems like Wolter may be doing a bit of dumpster-diving in the trash heap of conspiratorial folk histories, and changing the names to fit his narrative.

3/18/2013 05:02:18 pm

I'd forgotten about the seven foot redhead skeletons. The same rumor pops up about Tocharian tombs in Central Asia. Since most of us redheads (or former redheads) are kind of stumpy, I've always like that one, even though it's BS. Of course hair, human and otherwise, often turns red after long exposure to certain soils--that explains that part--but no one has yet turned up a seven foot human skeleton.

I take that back. Many, many seven foot skeletons have been produced. When a disarticulated skeleton is reassembled on the ground--without the curves of the spine, the roll of the hips, and tight ligament attachments--a normal sized skeleton appears about seven feet long.

Still, I'm surprised Wolser and his crew haven't picked up on this one yet. Maybe next season.

3/18/2013 05:17:28 pm

You're absolutely right about the suggestive size of a disarticulated skeleton. In Ireland's the National Museum (Dublin), they have the skeleton of a Viking warrior on display, with full battle gear (the Vikings built a lot of Dublin). That skeleton is almost 7 feet tall. But talk to the docent, and he'll explain how large the man really was. He was big, no doubt -- almost a foot taller than the average Celt at the time, but not as large as his remains would suggest.

That's a good point about chemical processes in soil that might change hair color. Didn't a lot of cultures prepare bodies for burial by decorating them with pigments? I wonder what role something like that might play in redheaded giants.

Another thing that hasn't been considered: It's completely possible for a red or blond-hair mutation to have developed and then died out. Look at Melanesia, places like New Guinea or Fiji or Vanuatu; there's a recessive gene there that gives some people reddish and blond hair, and it developed separately from the genes for lighter-colored hair in Europe (i.e. it wasn't the result of intermixing; they were independent yet parallel evolutionary developments). Who's to say that couldn't have happened in the Americas, and that recessive gene eventually died out? Just a thought.

The Cimmerian

3/21/2013 09:03:03 am

I'm in total agreement about the show, but as a point of fact, the red hair of the tarim basin mummies is very likely natural. The oldest population there was genetically west eurasian, and there was definitely a lot of intermarriage. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarim_mummies

This is way more interesting than made up holy grail nonsense, why isn't it on TV?

3/18/2013 11:30:14 pm

There are dozens of Victorian newspaper articles about "Giant" skeletons--and at one point, the Minnesota press was reporting them being found by the HUNDREDS in mounds! When one such cache was allegedly found in Kentucky, the people of Tennessee couldn't let that stand, so they claimed to have found a cave or mound filled with THOUSANDS of skeletons of PYGMIES! The NY Times ran a story claiming that there were so many pygmies that ever well-furnished home would soon have a pymgy skeleton as a living room curiosity. Of course that never happened, and the pygmies were nothing but fancy.

Graham

3/18/2013 11:55:31 pm

The Skeptoid Podcast covered the Minnesota Skulls in their 144th episode.

The transcript can be read at:

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4144

cora

3/20/2013 10:41:39 am

Occasionally large size skeletons are or were found in Native American graves. They are chalked up to an individual having a disease or just the normal bell curve effect of an outlier.

Some skeletons are being returned. The NAGPRA database lists in brief what was found and what is being returned. When I was tracking cranial deformation, I found a lot of entries that mentioned cultural deformation of skulls in Colorado. Perhaps if a "giant" was being returned, that would be mentioned too.

3/20/2013 11:00:10 am

Thanks for sharing that great resource. Apparently you need Microsoft Access to view the databases. If anyone has that and wants to check it out, I'd be interested to know if any "giants" are in there.