The OP says it all. It’s for a throw-away line in a story I’m working on. Prepfably it would be a roughly humanoid cbeast, but “fiery” and “giant” are more It should definitely be a malevolent entity; I cannot use the words dragon, phoenix, or surtur. If you name a creature from a workof fiction rather than myth, it has to be from a story published pre-1987, as that is when the story is set, and I’m relating thoughts of a specific character.
I thought of Balrog right after I hit submit. It would be perfect were it not so associated with Professor Tolkien. I’m going to look around and see if I can find legendary antecedents the professor might have drawn on; if anybody knows some (other than Surtur), I’d be grateful to hear about them.
Can’t use that one for in-story reasons. Besides, they aren’t giants.
I’ve already used jotun and jinn in the sentence in question. I’m basically trying to ditch the word “dragon.”
If anyone has a suggestion on a mythological giant stone beast, I could use that instead. (But not troll; I’m thinking BIG. Kaiju big. Big enough so that it could reasonably be in the same attack group as a roc.)
ETA: You edited while I was posting, so I’ll append. In Arabic legend, ifrits are akin to jinn. See the wikipedia article, which I am too lazy to link too.
What’s wrong with just “fire giant?” They were a perfectly respectable race of fire-based gigantic humanoids in Norse mythology, destined to war against the gods and destroy Midgard in the time of Ragnarok. Alternately, if “fire giant” isn’t glamorous enough for the purpose, what about the Norse “eldjotun” (plural: “eldjotnar”)?