Not a pagan god, certainly not a cartoon of Oliver Cromwell and certainly not a prehistoric fertility symbol. No, the 55-metre-high drawing of a naked giant with his distinctive club and large penis on a hill in Dorset, England was almost certainly made in the eighth, ninth or tenth century to mark a mobilization point for the army of Wessex.
Depicted is the classical hero Herakles (Hercules in Latin), a figure who was quite popular among the elite in those centuries. When a Benedictine monastery was founded nearby at the end of the tenth century, the gigantic white figure was soon identified with Saint Eadwold, whose relics the monastery possessed. This is all evident from a major analysis of the Cerne Giant by historians Thomas Morcom (University of Oslo) and Helen Gittos (University of Oxford). published in the historical magazine Speculum. It is the historical effect of a date from 2020 of the Hercules figure by the British National Trust which manages the national monument.
Cerne's Giant is one of the best-known 'geoglyphs' ('earth drawings') in southern and central England, along with the (possibly sixteenth- or seventeenth-century) Long Man holding two sticks in Wilmington (Sussex) and the a prehistoric horse from Uffington, in Oxfordshire. All are clearly visible from neighboring hills and were formed by removing grass and digging into the white, calcareous subsoil. So visible are these tens of meters tall figures that during the Second World War at least the giant of Cerne was covered up to prevent German pilots from helping with their navigation over England.
If the figures are not maintained, the drawing can disappear within a hundred years due to overgrowth and sediment. A horse that was cut into a hill in Berkshire around 1865 and never maintained afterwards was still visible in 1922, but disappeared completely in 1949. In 2008, for example, there were even alarming reports about the survival of the Cerne giant because there were too few sheep were available for the annual clearing session of a few weeks, during which the approximately 60 centimeter wide lime lines were cleared of weeds. The National Trust then had to keep the lines straight by adding fresh lime.
Tens of centimeters deep
Reliming is a trusted maintenance technique, as is also evident from the recent dating research by the National Trust: various lime layers up to tens of centimeters deep can be found beneath the surface at the bottom of the lines, the first from just after formation, the last recalcification dates from 2019.
The dating of the drawing is based on so-called OSL measurements (optically stimulated luminescence) of quartz in the lower layers of the lines in four places in the elbows and in the feet of the giant. OSL can be used to measure when (buried) quartz was last exposed to light. In the case of the giant, it turned out that the first work on the lines took place in the period 700 to 1100, with a most likely period around the year 980. An important confirmation of this OSL dating in the first half of the Middle Ages comes from the find in the lower limestone layers of the houses of a tiny species of snail that only arrived in England with trade in the early Middle Ages.
With that date in hand, Morcom and Gittos were able to better place many other clues. For example, the round face of the giant fits particularly well with the style in which faces were depicted in this Anglo-Saxon period, such as a face on a scepter from a well-known seventh-century grave at Sutton Hoo, an archaeological site in Suffolk.
It was already clear that the figure depicts Hercules: the club with knotted ropes alone is an unmistakable symbol of this Greek hero. But the historians are now catching up Speculum It is clear that Hercules was also a well-known figure in England in the early Middle Ages. In writings such as those of an eighth-century bishop of Sherborn (barely 15 kilometers from Cerne) he is described in all kinds of ways, as a bloodthirsty monster but also as a fighter against monsters and of course simply as a 'strong hero'. The figure also regularly appeared in letters in the ninth century.
Morcom and Gittos deduce from various indications that the figure was probably used to indicate an army assembly point. The royal family of Wessex owned a lot of land in the area, the giant is clearly visible from the area, an important army road (herepath) runs close to it, Cerne was close to the front line in the battle against the Vikings in the ninth and tenth centuries, and on the hills surrounding the figure there are a number of heavily weathered marker stones from the same era. One of those stones can even be honked at, and according to historians the name also seems to indicate 'honking' to gather an army, the Bellingstone, in which the Old English word bellan sits: roar, bellow.
Humility and holiness
In the eleventh century, the figure was renamed Saint Eadwold by monks of the then new monastery in the Valley of Hercules, whose relics were venerated in the monastery. At the time, nudity was no objection to such an image of a saint, it was even considered a sign of humility and holiness. According to Morcom and Gittos, the club was seen as the hermit's staff of Eadwold. According to an eleventh-century text, Eadwold once stuck that staff into the mound and from there he would have looked down at the place where his grave would be. Exactly as you could look at the monastery from the Giant of Cerne. According to Morcom and Gittos, this text could therefore even be the oldest reference to the giant.
In passing, historians are making mincemeat of the idea that the giant is actually the god Helith. Morcom and Gittos meticulously explain that the first reference to Helith, in a thirteenth-century chronicle, goes back to a reading error by the author of that chronicle. In his source for this passage about Cerne, the prophet is called Elijah, 'Helias' in Latin, but the chronicler changed that to 'Helith' and, based on all kinds of contextual information, he also makes him a demon, a pagan god. Then that reading error was copied by other writers.
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