HE THONG'S GIANT STUDIES

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Size differences made plausible

To many, because of the possibility of close interaction between human beings of not-so-disparate sizes, plausible size-difference fetish is the preferred chapter of macrophilia. Much fantastic literature is devoted to the relation between humans of normal (or below normal) height with people from 7 to 10 or more feet tall (210 to 300 cm). Plausible size-difference is also a classic in image morphing and montages.

Sometimes, however, it is surprisingly difficult to imagine in comparison the right proportions between people of normal and larger sizes. What would you find at your eye level, for instance, in front of a nude man 8 feet (240 cm) tall? The following pictures help answering such kind of questions. They feature a series of nude photograph sessions including normal height men (~5.9 feet ~180 cm) and giants from 7 to 10 feet (210 to 300 cm).

7 feet (210 cm): Brian Schwarz, highschool rugbier from Atlanta, USA

8 feet (240 cm): Bela Dvornik, factory manager from Debrecen, Hungary

9 feet (270 cm): Myogo Dwaliogo, Swahari warrior from Rwanda

10 feet (300 cm): SEX2030, sexual-pleasure android prototype

Friday, November 18, 2011

Goliath

Goliath of Gath is one of the few giants in the Jewish-Christian tradition. This Philistine warrior is mentioned in the Bible, 1 Samuel Chap. 17, during the narrative of the war between Israelites and Philistines in the Valley of Elah. According to the story, during forty days in a row, Goliath challenged the Israelites to send a champion to decide the war in a single combat against him.

Saul promised a reward to the man that would defeat the giant and, famously, David -then still a child- asked to face the challenge. To the combat, he only took his sling and five stones. Invoking God's help, the child hurled a stone with all his might, and hit Goliath in his forehead. As the giant fell on his face, David took Goliath's sword and cut off his head. The Israelites won the war, and David later became their king.

Regarding Goliath's height, the oldest manuscripts give it as "four cubits and a span", about two meters or six feet nine inches. Later texts, however, increased the giant's height up to "six cubits and a span," the equivalent to three meters or almost ten feet. Obviously, we prefer this, more modern estimation...

A well-built Goliath would have weighted the same as about five normal men. The following image shows the giant and five other Philistine warriors in a break during training.

Though not mentioned in the Bible, we are allowed to imagine that Goliath had a boyfriend among his fellow soldiers. Here we have a few pictures of the couple.

Goliath made many slaves of his defeated enemies. He used them in several ways, as shown in the images below.

Monday, October 25, 2010

Hercules and the killing of Antaeus

Although not among the famous Twelve Labours of Hercules, the killing of the giant Antaeus was one of the most formidable adventures of the mythological Greek hero. Antaeus, the son of Poseidon and Gaia, lived in the deserts of Libya. He killed by-passers and collected their skulls, to build out of them a temple to his divine father. Antaeus was immortal while touching the Earth -his mother- but lifted into the air he became as vulnerable as any ordinary man. Hercules discovered the secret of the giant's power and, holding him aloft, crushed him in a bearhug.

According to the Greek-Roman historian Plutarch, the giant Antaeus was 60 cubit (26 meter, 80 feet) tall. Plutarch reports that the Roman commander Quintus Sertorius discovered Antaeus's bones during an expedition to Tingis (Tangier, Morocco) in ca. 81 BC.

Nothing is said in the legends on how a normal-height hero as Hercules managed to hold Antaeus into the air in order to kill him. We may assume that by virtue of some prodigious transformation -probably performed by command of the hero's almighty father Zeus- Hercules temporarily acquired a height similar to Antaeus's.

The following images portrait Hercules in his newly acquired height, and his lover Iolaus... who in the meantime remained just a normal man.

Thursday, October 14, 2010

Giant Greek Heroes

It is not well-known that classical authors attributed gigantic heights to ancient Greek heroes.

In his work Heroikos ("On Heroes", ca. AD 230), the sophist Philostratus the Lemnian addresses the general belief that ancient heroes averaged more than 10 cubits -equivalent to more than 4 meters or 12 feet- in height. Philostratus mentions, as an empirical evidence for giant heroes, the findings of enormous bones in the places where the heroes' tombs were traditionally assumed to lie.

On the basis of the sizes of those bones, Philostratus states that, for instance, Orestes -one of Agamemnon 's children- reached 3 meters or 10 feet; Ajax -king of Salamis and a principal character in Homer's Iliad- was not less that 4.5 meters or 15 feet tall; and Achilles -the greatest warrior of the Trojan war, according to Homer- was a colossus 10 meter or 33 feet in height.

The following figure shows a comparison of the height of these three heroes with each other and with a normal modern man (1.8 m or 6 ft).

From a normal man's perspective, the three giants should have looked as shown below.

It is now believed that Philostratus's accounts should have been inspired by the discovery of fossil bones of big Tertiary mammals -such as mammooths or extinct rhinoceroses- which are still frequent in several locations of the Greek Mediterranean. This historical explanation doesn't prevent us to imagine some scenes featuring Philostratus's giant heroes and normal men, as in the following pictures.