Gargantua

Across rural France, standing stones and strange rock formations carry his name and, more precisely, the names of his belongings. His quoit. His distaff. His skittle. His chair, his armchair, his bowl, his gravel. Sébillot, Dontenville and their successors catalogued more than four hundred such place-names, under regional variants including Grand-Tua, Grand-Tuard, Guergintua, Jergantua, Gargountoun and Gargantoua.

This is the megalith tradition at its largest recorded scale anywhere. Not a vanished race who raised the stones, but one named giant who left his things lying about.

The case that he predates literature was made by the palaeographer Félix Bourquelot in 1844 and settled by the Breton ethnologist Paul Sébillot, who in the 1880s sent a questionnaire to mythographers and local scholars across the country and published the returns in 1883. George Sand had already said it plainly: Gargantua is the work of the people, and Rabelais, like every great creator, took his material where he found it.

Then the Church took the landscape back. The places, the chasms, the rock chaoses and the standing stones called Gargantua's were rebaptised as the devil's, and the giant was set against Christian figures. The stones did not move. Only the owner's name changed.

He grew so large in the popular imagination that he absorbed the local giants around him, and anonymous or half-remembered figures across France ended up with his name attached. A few escaped: Roland in the Basque country, Hok Bras and Rannou in Lower Brittany.