If legendary tradition is only a distant vibration of the bell of history, where must we go and look for traces of the real existence of giants? Must we believe the Edda or Holy writ itself? Afterwards the great fossil skeletons of mammoths, mastodons, and other antediluvian animals only revived the {336}memory of gigantic men. The Apocryphal Books tell us that in the days of Enoch, a number of angels, amounting to two hundred, had conceived a desire for the daughters of men and came down to Mount Hermon in order to be near them. Some of the principal ones are even mentioned by name; there were Urakabaramiel, Sanyaza, Tamiel, and Akibiel. Is it a wonder, then, that credulous people should have believed that devils also, who after all are but fallen angels, have acted in the same way towards the descendants of Eve. The Killecroffs, we have seen, were the offspring of a union between devils and earthborn women; in like manner giants were the offspring of marriages between women and angels. Women are evidently capable of setting heaven, earth, and hell on fire. Germany, which was the last part of Europe to enter the great Catholic Church, and was to be the first to leave it again at the time of the Reformation, kept up the belief in giants longer than any other country. Perhaps this was one of the results of the right of free inquiry. The giant Einheer lived in the days of Charlemagne and even served in his army. Several centuries later there were gigantic burgraves (Burggra-fen), living all along the banks of the Rhine. They have a well known story there of a young and ingenious giant’s daughter, who had been jealously {337}guarded in her father’s castle, and when she got out into the fields for the first time in her life, brought back in her apron a peasant with his plough and his two horses, whom she had picked up on the way. She showed them to her father as being all three little animals of very curious shape. [Illustration: 357] After a while, however, the giants became smaller and smaller, until there were only a few left in the highest mountains, in dark forests, and in the romances of chivalry. After that they disappeared altogether. The report is, however, that a single couple, man and wife, are kept alive by magic art in an isolated part of the Hartz Mountains, to serve as a specimen of the lost race. {338}At first the giants had produced universal terror. The god Thor was blessed because he had driven them, armed as he was with his famous iron mace, all across the Hercynian forest. But as people became better acquainted with them, their fears subsided. They turned out to be far from cruel, to eat human flesh only in cases of dire necessity, and to act generally not only kindly, but even like simpletons--a misfortune common to most men, who are too fully developed in length or in breadth. This latter weakness is well supported by a popular German tale.