As Swift worked on the first two books of Gulliver's Travels his friend Alexander Pope, having translated Homer's Iliad, proposed a new translation of the Odyssey, the first of all the voyage narratives of the marvellous. In Bk IX Odysseus and his crew are imprisoned by the one-eyed giant Polyphemus, the size of a mountain and with a voice like thunder. This barbarous shepherd eats several of Odysseus’ seamen before the remainder manage to put out his eye with a stake and regain their ship. Even then the ship is nearly sunk as the giant flings rocks after them into the sea in his blind fury. Pope's wonderful translation of this episode may be compared with the terrifyingly factual manner with which Swift makes Gulliver tell how he is abandoned by his shipmates on the shore of Brobdingnag as ‘a huge creature’, a ‘Monster’, wades after their boat into the sea (I. 1). In the second century AD the True History of the Greek Lucian takes the marvellous voyage further into the fantastic, so much so as to achieve a satiric effect widely imitated in the Renaissance.

In the Christian Middle Ages the marvellous became the property of the romance, whether in verse or prose, whether narrative of land or sea. During the long European Renaissance the tale of the marvellous underwent more or less concurrently several overlapping or interlacing transformations. It could be made over into more explicit and systematic allegory in which (for example) giants, dragons and enchantments embodied moral or theological concepts, as in Spenser's Faerie Queene or Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. It could, retaining some of its original wonder, survive in the popular form of chapbook romance, stories meant for the relatively uneducated and for children. The end of this particular evolution might be found in Swift's Tale of a Tub where he tells how the brothers Peter, Jack and Martin, in their early adventures, ‘encountered a reasonable quantity of giants, and slew certain dragons’. This not only reveals Swift's fascination with popular story, but captures exactly the late Renaissance critical spirit as it plays upon romance.