The Giantess's Hand, the Land She Gave, and the Wyrd
Welcome to this round of That’s About the Size of It! In this issue, the cosmos and the earth collide. I’ll cover the misinterpretations of Betelgeuse and how part of Sweden was carved out to become part of Denmark, and “Tattoo” continues as a series of pontification and poorly veiled sexuality. Whether you’re stargazing or plunging into the depths of mythology, there should be something here to hook your imagination.
Giantess News
The Bracelet of the Giantess
I was all excited because I thought giantesses were getting some representation in the celestial firmament. But me being me, I had to go do my research and disprove yet another thing I wanted to believe in.
Whether from Beetlejuice or The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, most people are aware of the star named Betelgeuse (α Orionis). And this Science Alert article (I’ve never heard of them, can’t vouch for them) says astronomers have discovered it has a binary twin, a small star named Siwarha, which will probably be absorbed in 100,000 years when Betelgeuse goes supernova.
What’s interesting is that the article claimed Betelgeuse comes from an Arabic phrase meaning “hand of the giantess.” See why I was intrigued? But this is just one landmark in a long stretch of misinterpretation around the star.
Where did it get this information? All I could find to corroborate the “giantess” claim was in a Reddit post where someone said that the German Wikipedia cites the name as "yad al-ǧauzā" or "hand of the #giantess." That’s why researchers named its binary twin Siwarha, “her bracelet.”
The original Arabic astronomical name for Betelgeuse was yad al‑jawzāʾ (يد الجوزاء), “hand of al’Jawzā,” and al-Jawzā was the old Arabic name for the constellation the Greeks called Orion. Itself, al-Jawzā likely means “the central one,” a title applied to Gemini then reapplied to Orion.
But when medieval scribes transliterated yad al‑jawzāʾ into Latin, they misread the first letter yā (ي with two dots) as bā (ب with one dot). This turned yad- into bed- and spawned forms like “Bedalgeuze” and “Beit Algueze.” Worse, Renaissance scholars saw Bed-al- and assumed it was from Arabic bait (“house”), further corrupting the name to “house of the giant” and then ʾibṭ al‑Jawzāʾ, “armpit of the giant.” However, some recorded descriptors of the star entitle it mankib al‑Jawzāʾ, “shoulder of Orion,” which is a little better than an armpit.
If anyone wants to quickly write to Steve Howell, astrophysicist at NASA Ames Research Center, and inform them of their error, I think you’re now prepared to do so.
Attack of the 50’ Harley?
Look, I don’t follow gossip and tabloids and rumor mills, but word’s been getting out that Margot Robbie (The Wolf of Wall Street, Suicide Squad, Barbie) is going to produce—and star in—Tim Burton’s remake of Attack of the 50-Foot Woman. Will it be a serious adaptation? Will it be another tongue-in-cheek farce? Will it even happen at all?
Having been burned by his experience with Superman Lives, Burton’s stated he’s unwilling to confirm or deny anything until filming begins, on any project. Probably a wise decision. But how do we even know this? Some gossip blog, The InSneider, broke the news but you can’t read it unless you want to pay some rando a bunch of money for one measly article.
I don’t, so you can also read about it on Dark Horizons and World of Reel, who just repeat the sentiments from the “premium” outlet. But if true, what could this possibly look like?
and we all forgot to breathe.
Scandi Giantess
Gefjon
This is a complex topic. This is one of those topics where, whenever you state anything, you have to backtrack and shrug broadly and mutter, “look, things were different back then. A lot of unrelated people were telling these stories.”
Gefjon’s name (Gefion, Gefjun) may come from the Old Norse verb gefa, “to give” or “to bestow.” The giving aligns with her ties to agriculture and fertility, and the bestowing directly speaks to her land-creation myth. She represents agriculture itself, the labor of working the earth and the crucial, life-giving rewards it imparts. In parallel, her jurisdiction is life and human fertility. Her name is cited in other texts in kennings to do with plowing and the fertile earth. She is considered to be of the Ásynjur (Æsir goddesses) and likely derives from the Germanic Gefn, another fertility goddess.
Along with implanting things and growing new life, Gefjon is also considered the patroness of virginity. When people die, Óðínn gets the valiant warriors, heroes who died in combat or sacrificed themselves for noble causes. Freyja receives half of all dead, including those who were valiant but not enough for Óðínn’s purposes. She claims those who possess qualities of love, sensuality, and emotional depth, like tragic lovers, as well as powerful women, queens, and cultural rulers. The other deceased are parceled out to other goddesses and giantesses (please don’t mind the math) for sundry reasons: Gefjon gets the maidens and virgins who did not marry in their lifetime. She is also one of Frigg’s handmaidens, who is served by these maidens.
This is where it gets complex: The patroness of virginity does not necessarily need to be a virgin herself. Even better, we can dance back and forth between what virginity actually means, in the practical and abstract. A fresh field, waiting to be tilled and seeded? That can be virginal, even if you farmed it the year before. And to give away or exchange one’s virtue, what does that really mean, anyway? It could just represent the sacrifice of one aspect of self to ascend to another state of development, whether social, physical, or spiritual.
So it seems Óðínn dispatched Gefjon from Odense on the island of Funen to go “north over the sound to seek for land” (Prose Edda). Why couldn’t he use his throne Hlidskjalf, which allows him to observe all nine worlds? Makes him feel more like a man to boss a giant woman around on a tedious errand. To this end she indulged legendary King Gylfi of Sweden in “merry-making.” Did she bed him or simply regale him with stories and song? The texts are ambiguous, and scholars interpret it with their own agendas.
Remember: Old Norse myths do not adhere to chronological timelines. The most important thing was telling an interesting story, so events happen up and down what we’d consider the continuum. If Gefjon made love with King Gylfi, her four sons would’ve had to grow up awfully fast for the next part of the story (which isn’t unheard-of); otherwise, Gylfaginning suggests she already had these sons with an unnamed giant. Again, it’s frustratingly unclear, but it kinda doesn’t matter.
As a show of gratitude, but with a little cheek, King Gylfi gifted her with as much land as she could plow with oxen. This is a common folktale theme, in which a person—usually a woman—is challenged to earn as much land as they can walk or ride around in a limited period of time. What else could she do but turn her sons into giant oxen, carve out a huge chunk of Sweden, and drag it out to sea? She created the lake Mälaren (likely Vänern), and the land became the island Zealand (Selund, Sjrelland), and Gefjon turned right around and gifted it to Denmark.
Is that where he’s from?
Interestingly, in Landnámabók (“the Book of Settlements”), it’s stated that this is the recognized way for a woman to claim her own land: “she might not possess more than she could encircle in this way between sunrise and sunset on a spring day.”
This accomplishment, however, makes Gefjon the only agriculture-associated “deity” in any world myth to not only cultivate land but create it and give it to humans. And let’s not overlook that this (ostensible) union with a king produced an island. Researcher Hilda Ellis Davidson notes that Zealand is the most fertile region of Denmark.
In the Lokasenna, where Loki crashes the gods’ party and turns it into a ritual insult contest, he alleges that Gefjon “gave herself for a jewel to a fair lad.”
Gefjon spake:
Why, ye gods twain, with bitter tongues
Raise hate among us here?
Loki is famed for his mockery foul,
And the dwellers in heaven he hates.Loki spake:
Be silent, Gefjon! for now shall I say
Who led thee to evil life;
The boy so fair gave a necklace bright,
And about him thy leg was laid.Odin spake:
Mad art thou, Loki, and little of wit,
The wrath of Gefjon to rouse;
For the fate that is set for all she sees.
Even as I, methinks.
The fair lad could be King Gylfi, merely a lad in the eyes of the deities, or someone else with a necklace. The thing about the Lokasenna is that a lot of insults were bandied back and forth, but none of them were ever denied: this may be taken to mean that the slander is true, at least to some extent. It also refers to a lot of mythological events that appear nowhere else in any known Icelandic texts. Couple this with how inflammatory the rhetoric is against women, and some scholars theorize the Lokasenna was composed by a Christian scholar who was independently well-versed in Old Norse mythology and wrote this all out—think of it as fanfic—to summarize and show off what he knew, making sure to denigrate strong women in the process.
How, then, is Gefjon the patroness of virginity after “merry-making” with King Gylfi? Gylfaginning asserts that, like the goddess Fulla, she’s a virgin. It’s true that giantesses do have the power of virgin birth, and it’s never definitively stated that Gefjon had sexual intercourse with the legendary king. Loki’s allusion could be nothing more than a personal sacrifice the giantess committed, in her other role as patroness of agriculture, to find new land for Óðínn and bestow it upon the people of Denmark. When was Gefjon ever interested in jewelry, anyway? That probably represented some other prize (like a plot of land). Odds are it’s a reference to some other lost myth that the Christian scholar heard about in his research but which no chronicler wrote down in its entirety. We may never know what that particular sacrifice was, and again, it may not matter.
Lastly, Heimskringla (“The Circle of the World”) reports that Gefjon married the legendary king Skjöldr of Denmark, a son of Óðínn, and they resided in Lejre, about 45 km west of Copenhagen.
Note that “legendary” and “mythological” are discrete: the myths have to do with gods and giants, and only the legends or sagas incorporate humans as characters. “The legendary king” doesn’t mean that he was especially good at his job, only that he was attested in a saga.
Flash Fiction
Tattoo, cont.
Listen to “Folkvangr” by Danheim.
Any breeze felt a little brisk on the promontory, washing away the warmth from the morning sun building around Thrand’s body. Puncturing the ink into a hemisphere of flesh wasn’t laborious, that is, the tools weren’t heavy and he didn’t have to go very deeply. It just required some awkward positions to hold, sometimes for several minutes.
The runes themselves were simple, and chopping them into a log would have made up for in labor what they lacked in finesse. Puncturing the butt cheek of a giantess required greater care, even with the simple warning message, and he could give himself a headache with double- and triple-checking that his spelling was correct. To rely exclusively upon the patience and grace of these wolf-riders was a foolish policy.
“They came at me like usual,” Vargrygr said, staring out over the valley. “Screaming, waving their swords. I suppose everyone has their first time, you know, charging into the unknown without experience or education.” Her lips tightened, and the conflicting thoughts in her head made it rock slightly. “But after you step on the first two or three, you’d think the others would know better. When they can see I can’t be bluffed, that I’m not impressed, and they hear the ribs of their brethren crackle like a stalk of leek … why would they continue? If I crush three of them, why would the fourth still come at me?”
Her heavy sighing compelled the little man—littler than her butt, anyway—to step back and let her huff and puff her frustration away. He set his sharpened poles down and took a breather, looking out over the valley as well. “I can’t explain our kind to you. I don’t understand it myself. Some of them think that if they die valiantly, if pointlessly, they get rewarded in Valhǫll, or fall into Freyja’s arms as a consolation prize. Others, they have to put up a front of bravery. Yeah, you crush some of them under your foot, but the others can’t turn and run. They can’t, it’s just not allowed.”
He frowned, watching tendrils of smoke wind up from the hovels of this village or that, far away. “Maybe there’s something noble in that, or disciplined. Completing an action, once started. You know? Even if it’s ill-fated, you have to see it all the way through, or what do you stand for.” Yeah, the headache was coming on. He patted the colossal thigh beside him, rolled his shoulders, took up the poles and returned to the second line of runes. The first had to be low enough to be read by tiny (to her) people, so the successive lines called for kneeling, craning, and reaching to place them. It wouldn’t have worked to have the gýgr lie down: kneeling on her would have been easier, but the fat of her ass would’ve given way and danced all over the place. Impossible to work with. No, having her perch on the edge of the cliff created the necessary tension in the surface of her ass, taut and firm skin that would hold up to this process of punctures.
He tried lying down behind the abundant swell of her butt: crinkly stalks of dead grass bit into his shoulder, and it was a strange angle, but all he had to do was follow the runes he’d already painted. Her buttock rumbled with the first few stabs, so to distract himself from visions of an avalanche he scrambled for conversation: “What’s the valley look like to you?”
Her huge buttock pulsed with with a gust of laughter, and his heart skipped a beat. “Same as to you, I expect. The distance is far enough that it should look basically the same to both of us.”
“Really? When you look out at the human settlements, three houses growing to five and to nine, you see the same thing I do? When there’s a new settlement in a new clearing of woods?”
His wooden mallet tapped the end of a pole during a long silence, impregnating Vargrygr’s flesh with black. “That’s one reason I asked for you, Thrand. The Sisters know you don’t think like the others. In some ways, you see as far as a jötunn … though your thoughts are better, obviously.”
“Þakka þér, Systir.”
“You’re right, though. I don’t see them the same way, and I’m honored you guessed that. It’s like your rune, Kaunan.”
Thrand paused, frowning. “Ulcer is fatal to children;
death makes a corpse pale. So, we look like an infection to you, upon the body of Urðr? I suspected as much.”
“You don’t want the same things we want, your kind doesn’t. There’s some good ones”—the massive butt bounced and swayed playfully for him—“but you have to see it from … you already do. From our position, from Jötunheimr, all the worlds work in a balance. Some rise, some fall, but they always find their level. And I don’t always see that balance, but I am absolutely convinced, down into my bones, that my Sisters and I can do nothing else but uphold it. There is nothing else we can do. Do you understand that?”
The way her butt ground into the earth, he assumed she was twisting her body around to look down at him. He rolled out from under her and lay upon the gravelly dirt, peering up at her silhouette in the morning sky. “I understand the Wyrd. I understand fighting it and embracing it, and neither of them make a difference.”
High above, her eyes locked onto him for a long time, a hard and dark glare unbroken for many breaths. In its way, he knew, this was an expression of affection. “Wish you could teach that to your kind. The fucking gods can’t change their Wyrd, but you tiny little hubris-driven mice, you think you can do what they couldn’t.” Her massy head hove away to regard the broad gash in the land and the infection that spread throughout it once more.
Thrand stared up at her, the sinuous shadow of her spine, the smaller arcs of shadow indicating every single muscle from her neck to her pelvis, and the brutally vibrant health of her skin. Beside him, larger than him, was a gorgeous pair of buttocks that could have crushed him as easily as escorting him into a heaven of pleasure. He drove the heels of his palms into his eyes, controlled his breathing, and rolled over to reload some ink in the small iron tip of his pole.
After some more quiet minutes of permeating the runes into her flesh, she spoke again. It was frankly startling to him how talkative Vargrygr was today: gýgras could go weeks without saying a word to anyone, even among themselves. “I feel strange things from you, Thrand. There’s a heat coming off your body, not like a fire, but not unlike it. What is that?”
He blushed deeply. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.” Tap, tap, tap. She jostled, and his linen wraps chafed the head of his cock.
“There it is again. What is that, lítill maðr? Are you ill?”
He sucked in his breath. “You don’t have to worry about me infecting you. You can’t catch anything the little people have.”
“I’m not worried about that.”
“Well, I promise you I’m doing the best job I can, and a better job than anyone you could find in a day’s walk.”
“I’m not worried about that either. We all know you’re skilled. But this heat I get from you, I’ve felt it before, from others. It ended badly.” Her long torso twisted again and he felt her gaze like a cloud over the sun. “It will end badly.”
“I’m not going to try anything with you, gýgr. I would never dare.”
“So it’s that? That’s what it is, that weird little rutting-instinct you hairless mice have?”
Thrand paused mid-stroke, drew a long breath, then rolled out from beneath her buttock and slammed his pole and mallet down. “And I suppose gýgr never feel that? Of course not, you can have babies without a man around, whenever you need to.” He strained to rise to his feet, brushing small rocks and dust from his arms and the back of his apron. He stepped some paces away from her bulging, succulent buttock and radiant, golden thigh. “Yeah, we do, we have that rutting-instinct. Like any other living organism in the world, we have it coded into us to make more of us. And worse? We’re built so that it feels fucking fantastic when we try to make babies. Maybe you don’t get that, I know you gýgr can reproduce without anyone even looking at you, but we’re different.”
The gravel roared as her thighs and buttocks shifted, and she turned more fully to face him. “No, we love fucking. We love it. We do it to ourselves, and we use you little guys for it. It’s fun.” Her expression darkened. “And then the gods come down and condescend to lay with us, but only because they want something. A potion, a magic item, secret knowledge. That’s bad enough, but then they tell you stories about how they left us breathless and wanting more. And you fucking believe them. Do you know how insulting that is?” Her fist pounded the ground, unrestrained. “We didn’t want them in the first place, and then they make up stories about how we’re lovelorn over them.
“No, I figured something like that was going on,” the littler man said, watching the cracks her knuckles forged in the earth. “But we people, we little people, we’re built to want it more. Just looking at someone, a strong pair of legs, an even pair of eyebrows, large breasts, smooth skin, that’s enough to stir that longing in us. And some of us can question why that is, and some of us never question it but act on it, incessantly. Shadow of Hel, they even worship it, make it a way of life.”
Vargrygr snorted, staring down at him. “Is that what you’re feeling, tapping away on my butt like that? You can just look at my butt, my skin, and that makes you want to bed me?”
Thrand’s head wavered, he looked around for the words, he shrugged and waved his hands and finally cried, “Yes. Yes, that’s all it takes. Just to look at you, to be near you like this, it’s arousing. I’m really trying not to act on it, I’ve got a job to do, and I respect you enough to want to do it well.”
“And I’ll kill you if you fuck it up.” The giantess straightened up, inadvertently thrusting her ripe breasts into the morning light, from Thrand’s perspective. “So, all this time, you’ve been wanting to fuck me?”
He held up his hands, straining for the words again, then threw his hands down. “Yes, Vargrygr. I’ve been trying really hard not to think about it, but from my angle, by my standards, you are particularly toothsome. Being this close to you, watching your body move the way it does, yes. I want to put my penis into some of your places. I want to crawl into some of your places. But I promise you, I’m trying really hard not to think about it until your tattoo’s done.”
“And then what? When it’s done, are you going to invite me into your bed?”
“What? No. When it’s done, I’m going to crawl into my own bed and take care of this in my own time, by myself.” He shadowed his brow, looking up at her. “Just because I want you doesn’t mean that you want me. It doesn’t even mean that I should have you. It’s just … a remnant of an urge, an echo of an instinct. I’m not going to inflict it on you. Stop looking at me like that.”
“If you wanted me, you could just ask for my bed. You’re a good-looking man, and you have good thoughts and a good soul. My Sisters say so. Don’t you know this?”
He didn’t, and it wasn’t the sun that warmed him now. “I don’t want to die.”
“The ones who died never asked, minn lítill vinr.”
He stood there for a while, holding that. Of course. These were women the gods themselves couldn’t control. More than selfish, more than inhuman: how thoroughly stupid would a man have to be, to try to steal something like that from one such as her?
Stupid enough to keep charging when you were fifth in line behind four corpses.
“Svá skalt þú,” he barked, taking up the sharpened pole with vigor. “Let’s get this finished first, Vargrygr. I want to do my best job for you, and then you can decide if you want to stain your body with me.”
Her mammoth ass danced with giggles around him as he crawled beneath it and resumed the hundreds of disciplined stabs.
Thank you for your patience! These won’t come more frequently, but nor will I shorten them for any reason. I gotta say what I gotta say, the way I gotta say it. It looks like the links were broken in the previous issue, so if you’ve got any commentary or questions, you can email me at buttondown.com.acuteness761@passmail.net or through my home website. It would mean everything to hear from you.
In Her Shadow,
Aborigen
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