Imps and Ogres
Marina Warner, 6 June 2019
Big and Small: A Cultural History of Extraordinary Bodies
by Lynne Vallone.
Yale, 339 pp., £20, November 2017,978 0 300 22886 1 Show More
by Lynne Vallone.
Yale, 339 pp., £20, November 2017,
“... the celestial sphere. Here is the partly divine Gilgamesh, hero of the earliest poem extant, in Andrew George’s translation: Eleven cubits was his height, Four cubits his chest, from nipple to nipple. A triple cubit his feet and a rod his stride, A triple cubit the beard of his cheek. When Polyphemus rails against Odysseus from the clifftop, Homer asks us ... ”