Which was the first fictional work to bring up the concept of giant bugs?

Question

I was playing some video games, and eventually came face to face against giant bugs. When I realised it's a very common trope which I keep seeing in many games, I jokingly told myself: "Giant bugs. Why did it have to be giant bugs?"

But then I wondered: which fictional work first brought up the concept of giant bugs to begin with?

Granted, giant bugs were a things a long time ago on Earth, but I'm asking for fictional works.

By "giant bugs", I mean the kind that is at least as big as an average healthy human-being, such as the antlions in Half-Life for example.

Answer 1

Aristophanes’ play Peace, written in 421 BCE (six centuries before The True History), has its protagonist feed a dung beetle until it grows to gigantic size, and then fly on its back to meet the gods. It’s a farce about ending the then-ongoing Peloponnesian War.

Answer 2

True History by Lucian of Samosata (before 200 AD) has giant fleas, gnats, and spiders.

The giant fleas and gnats are mounts of some of the armies in the battle between the Sun and the Moon:

...these Psyllotoxotans ride upon great fleas, of which they have their denomination, for every flea among them is as big as a dozen elephants...

...In the right wing were ranged the Aeroconopes, of which there were also about fifty thousand, all archers riding upon great gnats...

The spiders form a sort of combat engineer corps. They spin a web connecting the Moon to Venus, allowing the forces of the Sun to attack the Moon, and the king of the Moon is forced to surrender.

...there are many spiders in those parts of mighty bigness, every one in quantity exceeding one of the Islands Cyclades: these were appointed to spin a web in the air between the Moon and the Morning Star, which was done in an instant, and made a plain champaign upon which the foot forces were planted...

Artist: William Strang

Quotes from an edition translated by Frances Hickes, published in 1894, and made available at Project Gutenberg.

Answer 3

Another answer might be Herodotus' Histories (~430 BC), which mention gold-digging ants (not the size of humans though), and are:

...and in this desert and sandy tract are produced ants, which are in size smaller than dogs but larger than foxes,...

You can read the full text on WikiSource. See Book III called Thalia, section 102-105.

It should be noted here that Herodotus was not, and is not, considered to be fictitious in general. This part of his Histories is a tale that he acquired from somewhere, not necessarily something seen/experienced first-hand by him, but overall his Histories are considered largely factual. I will leave it to the reader as to whether this is a fictitious bit or not.

Answer 4

R. E. Raspe's satirical Baron Von Munchausen has several adventures involving large insects, though they aren't major plot points typically. These first of these stories was published in 1785.

In that state of humiliation my daily task was not very hard and laborious, but rather singular and irksome. It was to drive the Sultan's bees every morning to their pasture-grounds, to attend them all the day long, and against night to drive them back to their hives. One evening I missed a bee, and soon observed that two bears had fallen upon her to tear her to pieces for the honey she carried.

Everything in this world is of extraordinary magnitude! a common flea being much larger than one of our sheep.

You can read a modern (1895) edition of The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe, with foreword on R.E. Raspe and The Baron at Project Gutenberg

Answer 5

The book of the dead Published before 1000 BC has Khepri.

Khepri was principally depicted as a scarabaeus sacer scarab beetle

A beetle large enough to push the sun across the sky, much as a regular sized dung beetle pushes dung across the grounds.

I don't know if a God that is sometimes a giant beetle large enough to push the sun across the sky and sometimes a man with a beetle head counts as a giant insect. But if it does, then Khepri from the book of the dead is the clear winner in both size and published date.

Note: this does depend on if the Book of the Dead is considered a work of fiction.

Answer 6

The earliest giant insects appear to be the overgrown wasps from H. G. Wells' novel "The Food of the Gods" (Pearson's December 1903-June 1904), but those insects were less than man-sized. The following passage is from the novel: "When Colonel Rupert Hick came to measure the thing, he found it was twenty-seven and a half inches across its open wings, and its sting was three inches long. The abdomen was blown clean off from its body, but he estimated the length of the creature from head to sting as eighteen inches - which is very nearly correct. Its compound eyes were the size of penny pieces."

Insects of human scale or larger seem to date from Curt Siodmak's 1926 tale "The Eggs from Lake Tanganyika", which appeared in Amazing Stories.

Answer 7

Not the earliest due to the classical examples mentioned in other answers but we see giant wasps (literally brobdingnagian) in Gulliver's Travels (1726).

above twenty wasps, allured by the smell, came flying into the room, humming louder than the drones of as many bagpipes. Some of them seized my cake, and carried it piecemeal away; others flew about my head and face, confounding me with the noise, and putting me in the utmost terror of their stings. However, I had the courage to rise and draw my hanger, and attack them in the air. I dispatched four of them, but the rest got away, and I presently shut my window. These insects were as large as partridges: I took out their stings, found them an inch and a half long, and as sharp as needles.

The narrator in this passage is human sized as there is no 'Alice in Wonderland' style growing or shrinking in Gulliver's encounters with smaller and larger peoples.