the House of Fame, where he finds ancient writers and poets such as Orpheus and Simon Magus still living. The eagle then takes Geoffrey to a strange building built of "twigges" that revolves so frighteningly that the poet fears that even the eagle will have difficulty landing him safely into it; the building flies through the air like a stone ball from a siege engine. But the eagle carries Geoffrey safely into this revolving house and the poem ends in an ellipsis. Modern literature The acclaimed German (later naturalized Swiss) writer Hermann Hesse wrote a short story in 1915 in which a young man is carried by a giant bird across a mountain range to a distant plain that is to him like another world. Strange News from Another Star tells of the horror experienced by this youth who has volunteered to go to find flowers to bury the dead from an earthquake; flowers that are required during the ceremony of the burial of the dead, in this young man's world, to ease a smooth transition into the next life. In order to speed his journey, he is carried across the mountains by this giant bird, but finds himself in a land where war has left the dead unburied and uncared for, a brutal world, perhaps like that of the trenches of World War I, a world that he can only believe is from his distant past. Hesse later went on to write the acclaimed novel Siddhartha, exploring the life of Buddha. Giants The first task that the earl gives to Sir Eglamour, in order to win the hand of his daughter, is to defeat a giant far to the west. Giants are commonplace in medieval romance. Florent kills one that has been leaning over the outer wall of the city of Paris, taunting its inhabitants, in the medieval romance Octavian. King Arthur kills one that lives on the top of Mont Saint-Michel, on his way to defeat a Roman army in the Alliterative Morte Arthure. Sir Yvain kills one in Chrétien de Troyes' Arthurian romance Yvain, the Knight of the Lion. Sir Gawain encounters one in the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Carle of Carlisle. Giants also abound in Greek mythology and in medieval Scandinavian myth and saga. The Icelandic outlaw Grettir encounters a giant behind a waterfall in a 13th-century Icelandic tale. Odysseus encounters many giants,