The Cerne Abbas Giant

On a hillside above the English village of Cerne Abbas, in Dorset, there is an outline of a gigantic figure.  He is naked and carrying a huge club.  The outline is done with white chalk, the rock underlying the region.  Little ditches dug into the soil are filled with pieces of chalk.  An informative sign erected along the highway below the hillside explains that the giant is 180 feet tall and goes on to give the dimensions of his club and several other aspects, though on one point the sign is strangely silent.

Understandably, people have long wondered who might have created this figure and what he is supposed to represent.  Most commonly he is considered to be a depiction of the Roman demigod Hercules, who too was often pictured naked and carrying a large, knotted club.  Hercules was usually seen holding a lion skin, and although the Cerne Abbas giant certainly has no lion skin, his outstretched left hand might have been draped with something in the past.

Incidentally, Christian Europe was perfectly comfortable with a pagan figure like Hercules, who was treated like a myth or fable.  The throne in Rome on which Emperor Charles the Bald sat in 875, after being crowned emperor by the pope, was decorated with ivory plates depicting the life and deeds of Hercules.

The question of whether the giant might once have been holding a lion skin gets to a fundamental issue, that there is nothing permanent about this giant.  Unlike a statue, which once carved stays (relatively) the same, the giant is chalk lines surrounded by grass.  Grass likes to grow over gaps, as anyone who sets stepping-stones into a lawn knows.  Because the giant is on a hillside, it is easy for silt to wash down over the chalk  The local people have long gone out every few years to clear away grass and renew the chalk lines, usually by adding more bits of chalk.  Over the years lines can move or, if not renewed, disappear.

After all, the people working on the lines wouldn't be able to see the big picture, being too close to it.  A vague shape intended to depict a lion skin, hanging from the left arm, might have seemed like a mistake, something to quietly ignore.  The so called White Horse of Uffington, another hillside depiction done in chalk (not far from the giant though done far earlier), seems to have moved considerably over the years, based on old drawings; it might not even have been originally intended as a horse.

 

But when was the Cerne Abbas giant originally created?  Dates have been suggested ranging from the Stone Age to the seventeenth century, when churchwarden accounts note a payment of three shillings "for repair of the giant."  Most recently however it has been argued that the giant was from the Anglo-Saxon era, the early Middle Ages.  Hercules was a well known personage in medieval art, so a gigantic masculine figure might have been made to look like him, even if not specifically intended to show a Roman demigod.

The most recent arguments, in an article in the new (January 2024) issue of the medieval studies journal Speculum, written by Thomas Morcom and Helen Gittos, propose that the giant, visible from far away and projecting a strong manly aura, marked a place where armies would gather. Archaeology of the layers of chalk added over the years suggests that the giant was originally created around the time the Anglo-Saxons were fighting the Vikings.

An intriguing reinterpretation of the giant seems to have taken place in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  An abbey located at Cerne (why it is called Cerne Abbas) claimed to have the relics of Saint Eadwold, a holy man supposedly from an Anglo-Saxon royal family who became a hermit.  The monks appear to have sought to depict the giant on the hillside above their abbey as their saint—a saint whose pilgrim staff sprouted buds and twigs when he found his appropriate hermitage site—though even scantily clad hermits usually did not get as naked as Hercules.

One final note:  The most recent scholarship dispenses with the notion that the giant was a depiction of a pagan god named Helith (who is mentioned nowhere else).  A sixteenth-century antiquarian, reading a thirteenth-century rather confused account of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons five centuries earlier, said that in ancient Dorset a god named Helith was worshiped.  In the eighteenth century it was suddenly announced that the giant was this god.  This is all very implausible.

I myself have always been struck by the tradition established locally, from Anglo-Saxon times through Normans and Tudors and all the changes that have affected England over the last millennium and a half, to go out regularly and tend to the chalk images.

© C. Dale Brittain 2024

For more on the Anglo-Saxons and medieval monasteries, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in print.