More Mythology, Good and Bad
I haven’t done one of these in a while, have I. Well, things have been busy. After I plowed into analysis on Norse giantesses, I actually started attending a course on Scandinavian myth. I know the instructor, Anatoly Liberman, who writes the etymology blog for Oxford University Press, and that’s also why I know him. He granted me permission to sit in on the course.
How nice to discover his assistant is Ari Hoptman, whom a couple of you might recall from his walk-on role in A Serious Man. I knew him as a supreme storyteller at a weekly variety show called Ball’s, way back in the day. Well, apparently he also specializes in German language and linguistics and apprenticed under Anatoly. Thus, I’ve been able to shake both Anatoly’s and Ari’s hands and tell them how important they are to me.
The course is fascinating. The topics are far-reaching and meandering … if you haven’t read the course material. There’s a book students have to read, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe by HR Ellis Davidson, and Anatoly’s lectures expand on the why and how of Snorri Sturluson’s storytelling. Like “why did we stop the action to list the names of three clans of dwarfs who never come up in the story” and “why does Oðinn have a hundred fucking names.” The class is a living footnote that explains how the rite of initiation generated dozens of these names to create a sense of exclusivity, and how everything, every animal and object, had to have a name or it wasn’t considered to exist.
Anyway. I appeared in an interview for indie authors, and I submitted a Size story to two magazines. If I get accepted, I’ll certainly let you know.
The State of the Fetish
What’s the most popular sexual fetish lookup on Clips4Sale in your state? I’m heartbroken to report that Minnesota is no longer leading the way for the giantess fetish; however, it’s good news that this love is spreading to Arizona, Indiana, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, and Washington DC. Maybe we’ve got some representatives on the Hill looking up what the big deal is. And maybe they’re finding artwork and literature by the Size community. And maybe something’s waking up in their hearts.
The only other thing I have to say is … wtf, Wyoming? I don’t even want to know how CPR’s a sexual kink. Everything else, weird as it is, is familiar to me. I’ve never heard of the CPR kink before, and that conversation ends here.
Malevus: Giantess
Avoid this site if you detest AI. It’s a good example of what to hate.
People are using AI art and text generators to create websites on any topic you can think of. I think it’s safe to use giantesses as a litmus test for this.
All the articles on Malevus are generated by an LLM, and the artwork is generated by AI. The text is a dog’s breakfast (I love any excuse to use that phrase) of misinformation, getting basic facts slightly or widely wrong, so there’s zero human fact-checking involved in its creation. Someone’s cranking this shit out just to bulk up their site, making it look slick, but it’s entirely useless for legitimate research (an unpopular view: read on).
I don’t know what model they’re using, but they produce attractive art that doesn’t appear to struggle with the concept of giant women.
But the hazard of AI-written copy isn’t just finding a junk website, or even four identical junk websites, as I’ll talk about later. The author of the “Giantess” article, improbably named Hrothsige Frithowulf, receives his own checkmark on the Malevus website and publishes several unrelated articles in a day. Red flag. And with a name like his, it should be easy to find what else he’s done.
I was surprised to see that name come up in several hits on historical research … until I looked at that research. Legitimate websites were simply citing his articles on Malevus without critical examination.
“Costume in Egypt” on ResearchGate cited Hrothsige as a reference, calling into question the legitimacy of any coauthor for this paper.
Martin Sherlock’s “Knowledge Management” presentation for National Highways UK cited a photo of Albert Einstein as being copyrighted by Hrothsige.
Rethinking the Future, a website by Bengaluru architect Vikas Pawar, presented an article on the “Cultural Significance of Japanese Architecture.” It incorporated an AI-generated image of the Industrial Revolution (a horizon of smoke coming out of steamboats rather than factories) attributed to Hrothsige’s article on Malevus. So, is anything on Rethinking the Future legitimate?
When up-and-coming cli-fi writer Claudia Befu Ibarra in her Substack nonfiction piece “The Great Dying and the Little Ice Age” cites Hrothsige among her resources, you have to wonder how many of the other resources are real, or even whether Claudia is (and, consequently, whether her LinkedIn account is just an extension of a bot).
The Wikipedia article on the Roman gladiator called “scissor” cites Hrothsige no fewer than seven times.
Once this shit gets out there, everything is compromised. Everything is called into question. Dead internet theory leads us to suspect that the only reliable source of information is in print … and that, only before a certain year, thanks to bespoke publication.
Viviann the Giantess
The Irish myth of Viviann the giantess is a tragic one indeed. It’s one of the many adventures of the hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill and his compatriots of the Fianna. They were resting after a hunt when a gigantic woman approached them and asked for their help. She was a beautiful young woman, bedecked in jewelry; they gave her rest and food as she told her story. She was being forced to marry someone she didn’t love and fled her country, now being pursued by her former suitor. I’ll let you read the rest, it’s too sad for me to recount here.
Thor Versus Geirroð
Here’s a fragment of Scandinavian myth from the Skáldskaparmál, the second part of Snorri’s Prose Edda. Loki has been captured by the giant Geirroð, and to earn his freedom he has to induce Þorr to visit the giant, but without his magical gear. Regardless, along the way they visit the giantess Grið—a consort of Oðinn—who gives Þorr more magical gear. [nelson-laugh.wav]
As they get closer to Geirrödargardar, Geirroð’s home, Loki and Þorr are waylaid by giantesses. The giant’s daughter Gjalp sought to block their path by flooding the river Vimur … either by her urine or her menstrual fluid, based on interpretation. Regardless, Þorr stopped her up with a well-aimed boulder and they continued on their way.
It’s interesting to me that Grið lived on in kennings: a wolf was “Grið’s steed,” as it was understood giantesses often rode on wolves into battle.
Spittle-Flecked Rambling
I appreciate it when someone goes deep into research to resolve a question or prove a point. I just wish some people had paid better attention in school, particularly to writing and composition, because when they crank out a manifesto that resembles Dr. Bronner’s “ALL-ONE ALL-ONE MAGIC SOAP” screed, it’s counter-productive. (Regardless, Dr. Bronner’s soap is freakin’ amazing.)
Dee Finney has done a massive info-dump on attestations of giants in a few versions of the Bible. You can sift through it here if you like. I mean, information is information, however it’s presented.
Sansuna, the Maltese Giantess
Malta is an archipelago, a cluster of islands, just south of Sicily and across the Mediterranean Sea from Tunisia and Libya. There’s a myth about a giantess named Sansuna who traveled across the islands carrying her child on her hip and a large stone on her head, eating nothing but broad beans (fava beans). While she was bathing, her daughter was kidnapped by fishermen from another island.
Due to the oral traditions of the Maltese, there are dozens of variants on this story. Sometimes the story starts with her mating with a tiny man. Sometimes she builds the temple Ggantija (“giantess”) in the town of Xaghra, a UNESCO World Heritage site you can visit by 360° virtual tour. Sometimes she has a son (kidnapped by the Mosta on the next island) and a daughter (stolen by the Gozitans). Sometimes she swims out to rescue them and they chop off her hands; sometimes she starves because her broad beans fall on infertile ground.
Dutch cultural anthropologist Dr. Veronica Veen performed painstaking work in preserving the spoken-word tradition of Malta’s elderly community, racing against time to record the stories while their tellers were still alive. In her book, Female Images of Malta (review), Veen shares dozens of variations of the legend while underscoring the differences in storytelling between men and women. Spoiler: Men do not represent themselves well.
And the Bad News
All I have to do is say “in researching this story” and you know where this is going. I’ll sum it up for you.
The History Channel, now a fever-dream of paranoid conspiracy theory and breathless “what if it’s true” documentaries on mermaids, et al., put out a crappy video on Ggantija, attributing it to aliens.
My derailed plunge into the dead internet turned up that some jackass in Eastern Europe grabbed the transcript from this video, fed it into his LLM, and built a webpage based on it, replete with two ugly and irrelevant AI-generated illustrations. This went onto his website that covers history, mythology, the paranormal, etc.
Then he purchased a series of similar domain names and replicated this website across three other websites. Now we’ve got four mostly identical websites with mostly the same content: the structure is the same (the Sansuna article is always labeled by the same five-digit number, sitting in the same path of subfolders) but the copy is slightly paraphrased from site to site. All four Sansuna pages retain the same two shitty illustrations and a link to the History Channel video. I’m not sharing the links here, not wanting to supply clicks to this jackass, but with everything I’ve told you they’re not hard to find.
All I can do is scream “why.” It’s bad information, replicated four times. It’s junking up the online space, contributing nothing, getting in the way of research. Is he subsisting on clicks and visits? There aren’t any ads on these sites. Is he creating proof-of-concept for website building? The content is shit. Is it just the unhinged pet project of a bored and lonely guy?
Well, I can relate to that.
Palate Cleanser
Please to enjoy the world of Slinkachu, a photographer who specializes in miniature street art.
And there we are! Thank you so much for your patience. I haven’t forgotten about my newsletter, even as I develop my giantess-worship spirituality, Gygratru. Rest assured that even though I like to create increasingly complex giantess stories with ChatGPT, anything and everything you see by me, online, is hand-written with my own brain. I deleted my early LLM-storytelling experiments from my blog, because they’re shameful. I keep my AI shit private, because of my despair over the dead internet. I don’t want to contribute to that.
The next issue will probably be a series of corrections of my misunderstandings about Scandinavian myth, as presented in previous newsletters, and I look forward to it.
In Her Shadow,
Aborigen
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