There’s a geomythological theory that the larger-than-life men in this poem—Hygelac, mentioned in other texts as a giant; Beowulf; Grendel—came into the poetic imagination due to medieval discoveries of fossilized mammoth bones, which, when incorrectly reassembled, look like nothing so much as tremendous human skeletons.9 The theory is tempting in a variety of ways, among them the notion that these giant men were literally made of monsters.
