thumb|This woodcut (c. 1820) was used in numerous chapbooks from various publishers in the 19th century. Cormoran ( or ) is a giant associated with St. Michael's Mount in the folklore of Cornwall. Local tradition credits him with creating the island, in some versions with the aid of his wife Cormelian, and using it as a base to raid cattle from the mainland communities. Cormoran appears in the English fairy tale "Jack the Giant Killer" as the first giant slain by the hero, Jack, and in tales of "Tom the Tinkeard" as a giant too old to present a serious threat.
thumb|This woodcut (c. 1820) was used in numerous chapbooks from various publishers in the 19th century. Cormoran ( or ) is a giant associated with St. Michael's Mount in the folklore of Cornwall. Local tradition credits him with creating the island, in some versions with the aid of his wife Cormelian, and using it as a base to raid cattle from the mainland communities. Cormoran appears in the English fairy tale "Jack the Giant Killer" as the first giant slain by the hero, Jack, and in tales of "Tom the Tinkeard" as a giant too old to present a serious threat.
==Origin== One of many giants featured in Cornish folklore, the character derives from local traditions about St. Michael's Mount. The name "Cormoran" is not found in the early traditions; it first appears in the chapbook versions of the "Jack the Giant Killer" story printed in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Nottingham, and is not of Cornish origin. The name may be related to Corineus, the legendary namesake of Cornwall. Corineus is associated with St. Michael's Mount, and is credited with defeating a giant named Gogmagog in Geoffrey of Monmouth's influential pseudohistory Historia Regum Britanniae, which may be a prototype of the Cormoran tradition.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).