Today, height is generally considered a desireable thing, at least in men, and we have our stereotypes about both tall and short people. But given that people were generally shorter in earlier times, were very tall people seen as freaks or otherwise treated differently from the regular folks? Or were they seen as ubermenschen who could do what others couldn't? What stereotypes about very tall people did pre-moderns have?
One interesting example of this, dating to prehistoric Ireland in c.275 B.C., is the so-called Old Croghan Man. He was a young (20s) and exceptionally tall for the period (6 foot 5 inches-plus, calculated from the span of his arms) man, part of whose remains (which look like this) were found in an Irish bog at the beginning of this century. He had been violently assaulted, had what appear to be ritual wounds inflicted on his arms and nipples, and had been decapitated and chopped in half at the waist. (I wrote about him in considerably more detail here.)
We have no written sources to help us explain how Old Croghan Man came to be a victim of what is generally interpreted as a ritual sacrifice, or what his murder was hoped to achieve, but much of the speculation that has come from the archaeologists studying the case revolve around his high status, which it seems generally agreed may have stemmed in part from his great height.
His size and strength would certainly have made him physically quite different – he must have been, Valerie Hall suggests, “the golden boy of his tribe. Those big, capable hands… even in death, he oozes confidence, status, presence.”
...We ought to note in passing that the archaeologist Eamonn Kelly, who worked on Old Croghan Man and other Irish bog bodies, sees in these clues to high status a key for unravelling the whole mystery of why the remains were treated in the way they were. For Kelly, the Croghan torso and as many as 40 other Irish finds are proof of the existence of a form of sacred kingship in which rulers entered into ritual marriages with the earth goddess in order to guarantee future supplies of milk and cereal, and were then killed if they were deemed to have failed to protect their people. This theory comes perilously close to the discredited ideas of Margaret Murray, the early 20th century folklorist who proposed that, well into the Christian period, Irish and English kings were sacrificed by the members of an ancient fertility cult as part of a seven-year cycle of renewal. But Kelly’s ideas do include one plausible proposal: that high status bog bodies such as Old Croghan Man were dismembered and their parts buried at important points on tribal borders as a sort of protective mechanism to prevent evil from crossing those boundaries. It is not necessary to accept Kelly’s ambitious proposal that Iron Age borders map closely to the ones we know existed between medieval Irish lordships 2,000 years later to see in this last suggestion a neat solution to the perplexing discovery of severed heads, hacked up torsos, and solitary legs in several European bogs.
well in Castiglione's The Courtier which provides advice for courtiers at ruling centres through a fictional dialog one of the characters discusses how the male courtier should look.They say it's better for him to be overly small than giant as if he is too big he will simple be an object of awe and ridicule.He would not be able to exhibit the graceless grace/unnatural naturalness that Castiglione says he needs to succeed as he would stick out.
also look up Philip the Good and his Giant Hans.Unlike dwarfs who could be extremely cherished and important at court giants like Hans were seen as stupid and only good due to their quality as marvels or wonders.