Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Giants gathers three figures from Norse and Old English tradition that this label fits imperfectly, since size is not what defines any of them.

The Jotnar are the other family of powers in Norse myth, set against the Aesir and the Vanir and living outside the fenced world in Jotunheim; the sources are more interested in their age, knowledge and claim on things the gods want than in their stature, and the two families are not simply enemies, since Odin's own mother is a jotunn, Loki is a jotunn's son, and several gods take jotunn wives, even as the same sources have Thor killing jotnar in numbers and Surtr and the sons of Muspell burning the world at Ragnarok. Ymir is the primordial frost giant formed at the meeting of fire and ice in the void of Ginnungagap before earth, sky or any other being existed, ancestor of the jotnar through a being grown from his sweat and a son from his legs, and the source of the entire physical world after Odin and his brothers killed him and built earth from his flesh, sea from his blood, mountains from his bones, sky from his skull and clouds from his brains. Grendel, the night raider of the Old English poem Beowulf, is described as a descendant of Cain and kin to giants, elves and other monsters exiled from human company, attacking King Hrothgar's hall for twelve years before Beowulf tears off his arm in bare handed combat, a wound Grendel dies of.

The three sit together for a shared kinship and scale rather than a shared role: an entire rival family of powers, the primordial giant whose body becomes the world itself, and a solitary monster whose own poem ties him to both.