The time came when men became so sophisticated that they lost faith in the giants, even the work of their own minds. Only the children still believed.

In many lands the old people still tell to the simple of heart of all ages such tales as these that follow.

For more than two hundred years practically every English-speaking child has read, or been read, the stories of “Jack the Giant-killer” and “Jack and the Beanstalk,” which are full of echoes of Thor’s adventures among the Frost Giants, and other misty myths of earliest times. The famous “Fee, fi, fo, fum,” speech of the giant seems to come down from a couplet spoken by a giantess of old in the Arabic story of “Sunebal and the Ogress."

While the present tales are not so well known, they doubtless have a similarly ancient pedigree. Thus the Serbian tale comes largely from the “Arabian Nights”; and it is our old friend Polyphemus from whom the Korean seaman escaped.

Even Gulliver’s Travels in the land of Brobdignag has a close parallel in faraway Japan: a man of Nagasaki, Shikaiya Wasōbiōye by name, after marvelous adventures among the Three Thousand Worlds, comes to the Land of Giants.

He rides on the back of a stork through total darkness for five months, and at length reaches a country where the sun shines again, where weeds are as large as bamboos, trees so great that it is a journey to walk round them, and the men some sixty feet in height. A giant picks him up and feeds him on single grains of huge rice. When the traveler tries to question the Tall Man upon the ways of his people, the giant laughs and declares so tiny a person could not possibly have intelligence enough to understand such great matters.