Oh, yes, of course things are embellished—the giant gets larger, or multiplies, and no one mentions that it tripped into a ravine while the hero ran away in terror. But there still is usually a dead giant somewhere on the road behind him.

To manufacture the story whole cloth, well enough for everyone to believe it and no one to emerge to say his grandmother lives in that valley and there was never a giant, or that that village the giant was meant to be terrorizing burned down a decade before it was saved—that sounds like a full-time vocation.