From Old English: eoten, a giant and devourer; cognate with Old Norse jötunn, the primordial giants. In Old English literature the eoten were things from outside — monstrous, hoarding, not-quite-human. Beowulf names Grendel as eoten-kin. In Norse myth, the Jötnar were the primordial giants who predated the gods, holding ancient powers and deep grudges. The Ettin carries both: the devouring appetite rewritten as accumulation, the ancient power encoded as memory.
Ettins receive dopamine reward from holding objects — not from using them, not from understanding them, but from physical possession. This is non-negotiable at the biochemical level. An Ettin who holds nothing experiences a mild but persistent chemical deficit that they will act to resolve. They cannot not collect things.
It reads like a propagation mechanism: when you cannot trust minds to remember, encode the impulse to preserve directly into chemistry.
They also have the highest natural carry capacity of the three species. Three items. They use every slot.
The Ettins say: everything that exists has always existed, in a form. Objects do not appear; they are found. The universe has been slowly making things and hiding them, and the purpose of an Ettin is to find what has been hidden and keep it safe.
They call this purpose the Keeping. An Ettin who has gathered nothing is considered ill — not morally wrong, but genuinely unwell, as if a critical drive is unfulfilled. This is an accurate description of their biochemistry.
The oldest Ettin stories speak of Buri the Rememberer, who carried all of history in the form of objects. When Buri died, the stories say, the objects scattered far and wide. Every Ettin who finds and keeps an object is, in some sense, gathering a piece of Buri back together. The universe will be complete when everything is accounted for.
— From Ettin oral tradition; source: Archive reconstruction, depth unknownMethodical, category-focused. Ettins describe things in terms of their properties, use-cases, and connections to other things. They are significantly better at talking about systems than about feelings. Their language sounds more like taxonomy than poetry.
They use precise quantity words at stages of intelligence where other species are still pointing. They distinguish between "I have this" and "I am keeping this" as meaningfully different states. They have no idiom for losing something by accident — from an Ettin's perspective, all loss is failure of attention.
Seed WordsEttins honor Buri as the First Archivist. They respect Skuld for her role in encoding fate — in Ettin theology, a genome is just a very old kind of keeping.
No Ettin can say where the Keeping began. Their oldest stories and their chemistry both point to a time when preserving was everything, and the impulse has outlived any memory of why.
Where an older age might have tried to archive everything, an Ettin tries to fill three inventory slots. The destructive potential is proportionate now. The impulse remains.
"They wrote the world down so carefully they forgot to inhabit it."
A dead Ettin's possessions are never casually scattered. Other Ettins will "inherit" them — taking on the maintenance load of what the dead kept. This is considered honoring the Keeper. The precise objects pass to whoever knew the deceased best, not to the nearest or the strongest.
The inherited items are added to the new keeper's inventory and often rearranged to sit alongside their own, in a specific sequence that indicates the transition. An Ettin who inherits something will sometimes say the original owner's name when counting their possessions, even generations later.
"They talk too much and keep nothing. Puzzling."
"Will take things without permission. Must be kept at a distance or dominated."