Literary-Historical Giants: Writing the Deep Past From Poly-Olbion to Paradise Lost

Trojan Brutus and the indigenous giants he brought to extinction at the founding of Britain remained key figures in prose and verse histories of the seventeenth century, even as many prominent historians had begun to express doubt about the possibility of reliable knowledge of ancient Albion. Modernizing historiographical standards that championed material evidence and eye-witness testimony prompted a cull from the historical record of narratives that had come to be considered too fanciful or legendary for inclusion. Yet the presence of giants in stories from the Bible and classical epics lent the myth of ancient Albion's gargantuan creatures far more credibility than that extended to fairies or magical wizards.¹ In what follows I examine the standard of conjecture that was developed to sustain the historiographic reality of giants, and I demonstrate the implications of such a standard for our understanding of early modern historical verse. I argue that the flickering of giants between the modernizing categories of history and literature in the decades surrounding the turn of the seventeenth century prompts critics to re-assess the plausible subjects of non-fiction and to register more fully the representational challenges facing early modern historical poetry from Poly Olbion to Paradise Lost.

In the popular imagination and literary criticism, the figure of the giant occupies a legendary or mythological space. These outsized creatures appear most commonly in fanciful narrations as captors of distressed princesses, villains vanquished by knights errant, or predators lurking atop beanstalks. Popular associations concede the fabulous nature of giants, dismissing out of hand the potential of a narrative home for these threatening beings outside of the fairy tale, romance, or children's fable. Accounts of giants often take place in the hazy time of the non-distinct and distant past, a loosely medieval setting in which knights wander rural landscapes in search of adventure and tests of valor. Yet in early modern chronicles the race of giants occupied ancient Albion until the arrival of Trojan Brutus and his followers. Early seventeenth-century historians like William Camden affixed a specific date for this moment of contact, claiming it had occurred in the Year of the World 2855, 334 years before the first Olympiad, and 1108 years before the birth of Christ.² These less fanciful seventeenth-century genres featuring giants, including the chronicle and the topographically-inflected history known as chorography, take a different approach to narrating accounts of the notionally extinct and colossal bipeds. Given the difficult task of constructing credible accounts of the remote history of the British Isles in a period witnessing a rise in the importance of verifiable evidence and a nascent fidelity to fact, writers of these texts were forced to grapple with the proper methods for representing accurately a past that could be discarded as legendary.

The first songs of Michael Drayton's Poly-Olbion bear out the consequences of this uneasy pairing of popular belief and historiographical skepticism. Though the project as presented to the reader in 1612 and subsequent printings does not announce its collaborative authorship on title pages, the historian John Selden supplied the poem's elaborate philological "illustrations" that annotate the first eighteen songs.³ Drayton waxed poetic about the geographic features of ancient Britain; Selden complemented and corrected with officious rigidity. The title of the work lays out the complications of writing this kind of history and poetry in an era increasingly skeptical of the non-factually verifiable. Its full title reads, Poly-Olbion. Or A Chorographicall Description of Tracts, Rivers, Mountaines, Forests, and other Parts of this renowned Isle of Great Britaine, with intermixtures of the most Remarquable Stories, Antiquities, Wonders, Rarityes, Pleasures, and Commodities of the Same: Digested in a Poem. Announcing its participation in the trending genre of chorography, Drayton's poetic project adopted representational strategies popularized by historiographers like William Camden in his prose chorography Britannia and infused such descriptive geography with euphuistic verse.⁴ Descriptions of the land, rivers, and forests, the common subjects of chorography, are interlaced with entertaining stories, the title goes on to specify, and ultimately "digested in a poem...