What exactly 'are' the Giants that roam the plains of Skyrim?

The Nords make deals and sometimes offerings to them...so obviously they've been around for a long time.

However I can't seem to find any books, or any NPCs that give me a history of where they came from.

Also why are their no female giants.

Any help would be great.

Maybe they are creatures of Malacath, who knows.

I am going to agree with the above poster. In Oblivion the Ogres were creatures of Malacath. I think people don't want to know about the giants because there normally not hostile and choose to leave them be unless the giants choose to become a problem.

Their toes are delicious.

Especially when you add some mammoth cheese.

I was just curious because they seemed to have a large presence in the game.

They have unique markers for their camps, and seem to have some small bit of lore (the farmer taking the painted cow to them).

Also they are large and humanoid, so i find it odd that you can't find out about their culture and ways.

I was just curious to see if I could find more about them.

Arena had a dungeon dedicated to them, not sure if it was the same giants though.

i think they are true nords or nord elf hybrids if you ever killed one of them and looked at them the have blue eyes and have scar tattoos like real nords and the have horn type things and if you look around there camps the have actual nordic symbols on the rocks maybe they are the 1st nords or something like dat

Fight Six, the 911th cow, to be specific:

Here is why: the Giants came from Old Atmora, up there across the Northern Ice back in the gone-to-twilight-now age of myth... and settled here in the Skyrim, and all along the mountain ranges of our coasts. (Yes, they are our true ancestors-- do not believe your aunt from the university-- and, yes, we were once as big as them-- as tall as THIS-- but that is another story)... [text lost]... and after [the Great Calamity] happened [the clan-things (peoples? tribes? Text seems to indicate mankind as a whole, though that is debateable)]... we were of a kind disrupted... and we Nords fell into fighting and drove our Giant-kin up unto the mountaintops [and we were a wicked-folk for many years]... [until all] things had changed forever. Once the Moot resumed [(unspecified) years later] things got back to a new semblance of normalcy and borders were redrawn and agreed with in beer-talk, and raidings of the merethlands took everyone's mind off old feuds, and pretty soon (well, not pretty soon but whatever) the Giants began to come down from the mountains again. And they were a bit different than we Nords remembered, or perhaps we had forgotten much, but they would not speak to us anymore-- they would only smile in their lazy way, stomp over, and take our stuff.

If we fought them, they roared louder than the Tongues of High Hrothgar, and brave steads would be blasted whole into so much paste, [chickens and all (?)]... [and] eventually we learned that if we left stuff out for the Giants, and painted this stuff brightly and with swirls (they love swirls) and stuck big signs up pointing to it all, they would simply take THAT stuff and not anything else and no fighting would be have to be done (not that what I have described was really fighting-- no one fights the Giants is the point). And that explains the Painting The Cows tradition, for as lazily-smiled as they are, so much that they seem that they wouldn't hurt a soul (ha!), the Giants eat meat and lots of it. Aless (remember her still?) thought to herself, "I am so, so afraid the Dragon will awake and eat the world-- ANY DAY NOW-- that I will paint every cow I see so as to summon all the Giants I can to beat up old Scaly Face, and beat him up really, really hard-- hard enough to knock him out and back to sleep!" (Aless had heard, as you have now, that "no one fights the Giants" and took it a little bit too much to heart.)

From:
Seven Fights of the Aludagga


This is ALL I've found, folks.

I can't kill them...I don't know what it is about them but.

I just can't kill them.

I give them a respectful distance, when I see them, on the road or out in the field.

Cant kill giants??? What difficulty are u playing, master?
I was like lvl 5 when i killed giants, maybe 4 (adept difficulty)



I used to kill 10 giants in 1 hit... but then i took an arrow in the knee.

Where do giants come from?

And where are the little giants?

He's talking about not having the desire to kill them, not the ability.

I *think* Aldmeri means he's not willing to kill them, as they're mostly peaceable - and very "nord-seeming"....

Well besides the nord story of creation, there's three main stories of how the world and all the races came to be and I think the Yakudan creation story might be the most likely to explain the giants. Interestingly the Yakudan story also possibly agrees with the "closer to the true ancestors" aspect of that excerpt posted above (not actually from any game text but from the Imperial Library site) and also the speculation about them being sort of half-elves.

Yakudan

The Yakudan view is that all life came from the decendents of the degenerate offspring of a giant divine spirit called Ruptga (Tall Papa). He had learned to free himself from the endless cycles of creation and destruction that the divine realm went through - symbolized by an oroborous. After each cycle these spirits would forget their place, their friends, and themselves and have to start from scratch - until Ruptga (Tall Papa) and other spirits learned of ways to stride between cycles and avoid losing themselves each time the snake consumed itself and started again. This way of retaining themselves and remembering themselves through each cycle became a place, the "Far Shores." Since there were too many spirit offspring to help himself, he created a being from one of the skins of one of the previous oroborous/snakes (past cycles) and asked it to help the lesser spirits learn to reach the "Far Shores."

This being, called Sep (a synthesis of Lorkhan and Sithis with Sithis being the hunger and only presently surviving part of the original), was consumed with the same kind of insane hunger that compelled the oroborous on which the spirits existed to eat itself to death - but to a greater extent. It was effectively empty (created from hollow skin) and had the collected hungers of the skins that came before it. It didn't want to help the spirits and would rather just eat them so it tricked the weakest and laziest of them to gather up the detritis of the past cycles into a ball and convinced them that this was the Far Shores (way to the new world/avoid death of the old.) Eventually they found they were trapped and begin to die because it wasn't the living "new world" or the way to it (the Far Shores) but made of dead hollow skins of reality. They either died off and vanished then or had to live on through their children. These eventually became all the races that exist - though some had later stories of how they changed or were changed (orcs and dunmer for example) and others were created or introduced later.

Being that one of the most important of these gods is called "Tall Papa" and the Yakudans beleived the descendents of his children formed species as diverse as argonians to orcs and elves and humans. Giants then resemble some of the descriptions of this teacher-god (that he was giant) more so than other mortal races but, being degenerate descendents of his laziest stupidest children as all species are, also possibly retain some of those spirits lack of sophistication. According to them all the races are either descended from divine spirits, were created by Lorkhan, or are descended from degenerate barely divine mixing of the two with themselves most resembling their divine ancestors and the other mer/elves being further from the divine due to straying or being cursed/changed somehow.

That they resemble both man and elf also makes as much sense as them being huge does in this story - as all the races of men and mer are just distant decesndants of the same divine spirit. Giants, being potentially the least changed from that spirits unsophisticated offspring would retain the common features those races each retain from their ancient ancestors. Giants would then be the less evolved common ancestors of men and elves. Whether that would mean they are closer to divine or just closer to the original spirits who were the ones too unsophisticated to avoid being tricked by Sep is hard to say.

Others

In the Aldmeri traditionalist view (the one the Thalmor harken back to) the giants would be just another of the descendents of the lesser beings that were created by Lorkhan or whom he bred from the weakest and least divine spirits that survived the creation of the world. In this view the giants might be the closest things to half-elves - but not related to THEIR divine ancestors but the weaker fragments of other ones gatherd up and used by Lorkhan. So in this view they'd also probably be distant cousins to man and elf. Note that despite being referred to as traditional, this isn't exactly the oldest Aldmeri view on the origins of the various sentient races. The older tradtion is the one held by the Psyjiic Order and does not include the parts which are used by the Thalmor to justify their racial supremacist view.

In the Imperial Cult view they'd probably just be one of many of the many mortal races created from the singing of Schezarr - the song which prevented creation from being a complete waste and created the mortal races. That they resemble giant versions of man and have features that might look elven in this view would be the same reason that bears resemble giant dogs and have some non-dog-like features; they sprung forth from the same song just but at a different part.

Interestingly, the idea that they are related in to both man and elf in some distant fashion is common to all of them.

What I've said above is paraphrasing "The Monomyth" by trying to phrase things with less metaphor.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:The_Monomyth

They are ingredient of enchantment and alchemy.