Gogmagog (giant)

Later tradition expanded on this story, with Gogmagog described as a descendant of Albina, and the chieftain and largest of the giants found by Brutus and his men inhabiting the land of Albion.

The effigies of Gogmagog and Corineus, used in English pageantry and later instituted as guardian statues at Guildhall in London eventually earned the familiar names "Gog and Magog".

The name "Gogmagog" is commonly derived from the biblical characters Gog and Magog;[1] however, Peter Roberts, author of an 1811 English translation of the Welsh chronicle Brut Tysilio (itself a translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae), argued that it was a corruption of Cawr-Madog ('the giant or great warrior Madog'), supported by Ponticus Virunnius' spelling of the name as Goermagog.

The Historia details the encounter as follows: Gogmagog, accompanied by twenty fellow giants, attacked the Trojan settlement and caused great slaughter.

The Trojans rallied back and killed all giants, except for "one detestable monster named Gogmagog, in stature twelve cubits, and of such prodigious strength that at one shake he pulled up an oak as if it had been a hazel wand".

[10] Some expanded on the Historia, such as John of Hauville's Architrenius (c. 1184), which describes how "the towering height of Gemagog's twelve cubits, rushing upon them, was enough to terrify the Trojans, until he was overthrown by the strong limbs of Corineus"[11] and goes on to say that before the time of Brutus: [Britain] provided a home only for a few Titans, whose garments came from the damp bodies of wild beasts, who drank blood from goblets of wood, who made their homes in caves, their beds out of brush, their tables from rocks.

The whole land complained of these mountain-dwelling monsters, but they were for the most part the terror of the western region, and their mad ravages most afflicted you, Cornwall, uttermost threshold of the west wind.

In a Herculean struggle he lifted Gemagog, twelve cubits tall, on high, then cast his Antaean enemy from a rock into the sea.

[18] Raphael Holinshed also localises the event of the "leape of Gogmagog" at Dover,[19] but William Camden in his 1586 work Brittannia locates it on Plymouth Hoe, perhaps following Richard Carew's Survey of Cornwall.

[22] Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion preserves the tale as well: Amongst the ragged Cleeves those monstrous giants sought: Who (of their dreadful kind) t'appal the Trojans brought Great Gogmagog, an oake that by the roots could teare; So mighty were (that time) the men who lived there: But, for the use of armes he did not understand (Except some rock or tree, that coming next to land, He raised out of the earth to execute his rage), He challenge makes for strength, and offereth there his gage, Which Corin taketh up, to answer by and by, Upon this sonne of earth his utmost power to try.