The Giants: Bolster

Contemporary man can be considered a giant. As far as we know the human species has never been taller. We became the giants we fantasized about in legends and fairytales. To find a way out of this predicament perhaps it helps to understand how giants are situated in our collective imagination. What about Gashadokuro or Blunderbore? What did and do fictive giants represent? How do they inform our ideas on our contemporary size? Today we zoom in on Bolster, whose obsession with a girl named Agnes killed him.

Bolster is married, which in itself is already quite unique as giants are often described as loners with no evident ties to family or communities of their own. Much less unique is that he is a bully and a tyrannical husband who makes his wife do useless chores and treats her bad. He also terrorizes the nearby villagers, eats children and cattle, and kills those (men) who challenge him. Then one day he falls in love with a local and saintly beauty named Agnes (who may have been modelled on Agnes of Rome). Bolster starts following her incessantly, proclaiming his love and making the air tremble with his sighs and groans. Although Agnes tries to pursuade Bolster to stop following her because, as a married man, his love is improper, he continues to stalk her.

Agnes decides that something needs to happen. She expresses how perhaps she can be pursuaded by Bolster if, and only if, he fills a small hole in a nearby cliff with his blood. “Sure”, he says. Stretching his great arm across the hole, Bolster plunges a knife into a vein and the blood rushes into the hole. However, it requires much more blood than he thought it would. Hour after hour it flows but the hole remains unfilled until the giant faints from exhaustion and eventually dies. The now not so saintly Agnes knew that the hole opened at the bottom into the sea, and as rapidly as the blood flowed into the hole it washed away. And so the tale ends with the lady getting rid of her stalker, the release of Mrs Bolster, and the district freed from its tyrant. Freedom all around as the giant loses. A red-stained hole at Chapel Porth in Cornwall still retains the evidence of this tradition and Bolster day is celebrated every year offering a possibility to remember that we need to overcome the giant within ourselves before it gets rid of us.

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