Another comment that intrigued me from Ralph O'Connor's glossary:
"Modern Icelandic folklore sometimes distinguishes risar, jötnar and
þursar by their unusual height, strength and stupidity respectively.
Medieval sagas sometimes draw a distinction between the fair-looking
even tempered risar and the ugly, surly þursar." But he doesn't give
references to specific examples of this distinction in sagas. Are
there grounds for believing or discounting the etymology that relates
jötunn and þurs to "eat" and "thirst"? It looks as if the similarity
between 'risi' and the verb 'rísa' "rise" may be a coincidence, cf.
Old Saxon 'wrisilîc giwerc', apparently parallel with Old English
'enta geweorc' (and OE 'ent' appears as a gloss for Latin 'gigas').
Bárðar saga Snæfellsáss makes a distinction between 'risar' (er þat
vænna fólk ok stærra en aðrir menn) and 'troll', the latter being more
malevolent. King Dumbr, who is descended from both has the following
trollish characteristics: "hann var bæði sterkr ok stórvirkr ok
umskiptasamr ok illskiptinn, ef honum eigi líkaði nökkut." But this
isn't an entirely typical saga, so maybe the distinction was just an
invention of the author.

http://www.dur.ac.uk/medieval.www/sagaconf/armann.htm

Ármann Jakobsson: "In the Edda of Snorri Sturluson, there seems to be
no clear distinction between giants and various other beings,
including humans. There is confusion about where the giants live, what
their size is, and the terminology used is vague, to say the least.
What stands out is the giants' strangeness. They are different and
therefore hard to fathom, and it is very hard to find any source that,
like Bárðar saga, is able to confidently divide the giants into groups
and elaborate on their differences."

I always thought it was quite evocative, Þrymr sitting out 'á haugi'
trimming his horses manes and plaiting collars for his dogs. I think
Grimm refered to it along with the decription of Hymir as 'barnteitr'.
Grimm's idea was that Þrymr too was taking a kind of earnest childish
delight in his animals.

Another late legendary source, Kjalnesinga saga, describing the beings
at the table of King Dofri: "Hvárrtveggi bekkr var skipaðr af fólki ok
váru þeir margir heldr stórleitir." Big-faced? Is that a roundabout
way of saying that they were big altogether, and therefore not quite
human, or just that they were ugly after the way of mountain-dwelling
monsters?

> There is actually some evidence that they
> may at one time have been thought of as related to the
> giants - for example, "áttniðr Suðra" occurs as a kenning
> for a giant.

There's an Old English spell "against a dwarf" (wið dweorh), which
describes the dwarf as causing some sort of malady (in this case
affecting the neck); and the Old Norse 'þurs' causes illness in the
rune poem. And just as the female "giants" in legendary sagas and
later folktales are sometimes helpful to humans, the Old English charm
says that the dwarf's sister will heal the ailment and bring protection.

> Also, we should keep in mind that "giant" is not a very
> good word for "jötunn", as "jötunn" does not mean "huge
> person". Do we really think that the "giants" were bigger
> than the "gods", for example? Wouldn't the amourous liaisons
> of Æsir and "giantesses" be rather awkward, if this were
> the case?

Unless the Æsir grew...? They also *liaise* with humans, so I guess
it can't just be a matter of the Æsir being gigantic too. Actually,
this makes me wonder if maybe the size of all these mythological
beings depended a lot on context, and both gods and giants could
change size according to necessity or mood? The whole world is made
out of Ymir, but shaped by the Æsir; Fenrisúlfr and Jörmungandr both
reach cosmic proportions, but are fought by the Æsir using their usual
weapons. Snorri describes an incident when Þórr goes to visit
Geirrøðr and finds his chair rising towards the ceiling, and when he
pushes himself back down he crushes his hosts daughters; which I took
to mean that they were growing taller underneath the chair to lift him
up. All these beings can change their shapes (even that
disease-bringing dwarf in the Old English charm is said to come in the
form of a spider), so why not size too? Maybe size and shape were
fluid in the mythical realm to some extent as they might be in a
cartoon or a dream.

That said, even if the differences in size between dwarves and
"giants" have been exaggerated in later folklore, could it be that
some tendency already existed at an early time? If we could find
evidence that cognate terms in the various Germanic languages were
already being equated with Latin words like 'gigas' or 'nanus' in the
earliest records... Well, that's enough for now, but I just had a
look at the OED entry for 'ettin'. No definite references to size,
only strength, hostility, thievery and (according to a Wycliff sermon)
cannibalism: "No man is an etene to fede him þus bodili of Crist."

LN