Monsters of Middle Earth

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SME120: Tolkien wrote thousands of pages about elves, men and hobbits, and gave his monsters a few paragraphs apiece. For the third annual Halloween special of Secrets of Middle-earth, the panel works through the bestiary of the legendarium and asks where these creatures came from, and why Tolkien said so little about them.

Jeff Haecker hosts Rob Leonardi, Fr. Bryan Shackett, Rob Story and Patrick Mason. They start with wargs. What are wargs in Tolkien, and are they just big wolves? The word comes from an old term for wolf that also meant outlaw, which Tolkien explains in Letter 290a, and the creatures themselves appear only in the Third Age.

Werewolves in Tolkien are something else: fell spirits imprisoned in wolf bodies. Sauron takes werewolf form himself on Tol-in-Gaurhoth, the Isle of Werewolves, until Huan takes him by the throat. The tale of Beren and Lúthien supplies the rest of the cast. Draugluin is the sire of the werewolves, Carcharoth is the wolf Morgoth fed by his own hand, and Thuringwethil is the bat-winged messenger whose name means “woman of secret shadow.” The panel sets all of them against the werewolves and vampires of modern horror and finds very little in common.

Then come the spiders. Ungoliant drinks the light of the Two Trees and pours out Unlight, which Fr. Bryan reads as an active corruption of light, worse than darkness. Her fight with Morgoth ends only when the Balrogs answer his scream. Her daughter Shelob got her name from “she + lob,” as Tolkien wrote in Letter 70, and the conversation weighs Ungoliant vs. Shelob and what each says about evil that eats until it consumes itself.

Orcs and trolls come next, made in mockery of elves and Ents, and that leads to Morgoth’s Ring: the idea that Morgoth poured so much of his malice into the world that evil can’t be fully rooted out until the end. Fr. Bryan reads the Return of the King description of the fell beasts, and Rob Story makes the case that they were bred from the winged drakes Tolkien barely mentions.

The episode ends far below Moria with the nameless things that gnaw the world, which even Gandalf won’t describe. Is the Watcher in the Water one of them? Does Norse myth’s Nidhogg sit behind them? And what does Rob Leonardi’s Ratatoskr theory do to the picture?

Plus a look ahead to Rings of Power Season 3, which premieres November 11, and the reported pause of Stephen Colbert’s Shadow of the Past.

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Secrets of Middle-earth Secrets of Middle-Earth 1-300