Trolls in Middle-earth

This is a good article. Click here for more information.
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Trolls are fictional characters in

Alviss of Norse mythology, they must be below ground before dawn or turn to stone, whereas in The Lord of the Rings
they are able to face daylight.

Commentators have noted the different uses Tolkien made of trolls, from comedy in

Melkor and Sauron for their own evil purposes in mockery of ents[1], helping to express Tolkien's combination of "fairy tale with epic, ... bonded with the Christian mythos".[2]

Appearances

The Hobbit

"Mutton yesterday, mutton today, and blimey, if it don't look like mutton again tomorrer", said one of the trolls. "Never a blinking bit of manflesh have we had for long enough", said a second.

— from "Roast Mutton" in The Hobbit[T 1]

In

drawing-room fashion at all, at all",[3] spoke with Cockney accents, and had matching English working-class names: Tom, Bert, and William.[T 1][4] Jennifer Eastman Attebery, a scholar of English, states that the stone trolls in The Hobbit "signify the uncouth".[3]

The Lord of the Rings

'My lad,' said Troll, 'this bone I stole.
But what be bones that lie in a hole?
Thy nuncle was dead as a lump o' lead,
Afore I found his shinbone.
Tinbone! Skinbone!
He can spare a share for a poor old troll,
For he don't need his shinbone.'

—from "The Stone Troll" in The Fellowship of the Ring[T 2]

As Aragorn and the four hobbit companions made their way towards

comic poem, "The Stone Troll", on the supposed dangers of kicking a troll, who has a "seat" which is "harder than stone", to cheer everyone up.[T 2][5]

Olog-hai they were called in the Black Speech. That Sauron bred them none doubted, though from what stock was not known... Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race, strong, agile, fierce and cunning, but harder than stone. Unlike the older race of the Twilight they could endure the Sun, so long as the will of Sauron held sway over them. They spoke little, and the only tongue that they knew was the Black Speech of Barad-dûr.

Tolkien's description of the trolls in Appendix F "Of Other Races" in The Return of the King[T 3]

Cave trolls attacked the Fellowship in

Sting.[T 4]

Mountain trolls wielded the great

Grond to shatter the gates of Minas Tirith.[T 5] They fought using clubs and round shields at the Battle of the Morannon.[T 6][6] Sauron bred mountain and cave trolls,[6] and developed the more intelligent Olog-hai that were not vulnerable to sunlight.[7]

Snow trolls are mentioned only in the story of Helm Hammerhand. When Helm went out during the Long winter clad in white to ambush his enemies, he was described as looking like a snow-troll.[T 7]

The Trollshaws is a wooded region, lying north of the East Road between the rivers

Bruinen, where Bilbo encountered the trolls. It is not named in the text of either The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, but appears on the latter's map of Middle-earth drawn by Christopher Tolkien. Described as "the Trolls' wood" in the main text, the name "Trollshaws" is derived from troll + shaw, an archaic term for a thicket or small wood.[8]

The Silmarillion

Last of all

Gothmog
until it withered...

—from "Nirnaeth Arnoediad" in The Silmarillion[T 8]

First Age of Middle-earth.[T 9] They were strong and vicious but stupid; as in The Hobbit, they turned to stone in sunlight.[6]
During the wars of
War of Wrath, but some survived and joined Sauron, the greatest surviving servant of Morgoth.[T 10][T 8]

Origins

Further information: Troll and Tolkien and the Norse
Alviss to prevent him from marrying his daughter Þrúðr; at dawn Alviss turns to stone. Drawing by W. G. Collingwood
, 1908

In

Alviss (not a troll) talking until dawn, and sees him turn to stone.[11][12][13]

Moria – made that journey "a descent into hell".[13] Attebery writes that Trolls thus moved from being grim Norse ogres to more sympathetic modern humanoids.[3] In her view, Tolkien's trolls are based on the ogre type, but with two "incarnations": ancient trolls, "creatures of dull and lumpish nature" in Tolkien's words,[T 11] unable to speak; and the malicious giants of strength and courage bred by Sauron with "enough intelligence to present a real danger".[3] The scholar of English Edward Risden agrees that Tolkien's later trolls appear far more dangerous than those of The Hobbit, losing, too, "the [moral] capacity to relent"; he comments that in Norse mythology, trolls are "normally female and strongly associated with magic", while in the Norse sagas the trolls were physically strong and superhuman in battle.[14]

Christina Fawcett, a scholar of English, writes that Tolkien synthesises materials from different eras, so his writing and his creatures can take on different qualities, from playful to monstrous; his hill-trolls "while still threatening, are primarily comic and slow-witted".[7] On the other hand, when Gandalf outwits them, these same trolls are seen as "monstrous, a warning against vice, captured forever in stone for their greed and anger."[7] All the same, Fawcett cautions that Tolkien uses tradition selectively, transferring the more positive attributes of Norse trolls, including being rich and generous, to hobbits.[7]

Analysis

Trolls in The Hobbit

mutton on William Morris's travels in Iceland.[15] Drawing of Morris cooking in Iceland c. 1870 by Edward Burne-Jones

Shippey criticises Tolkien's

class-based depiction of the trolls and goblins in The Hobbit, writing that the trolls were too close to labourers, just as the goblins were to munitions workers. Shippey notes, too, Tolkien's storytelling technique here, observing that making the troll's purse (which Bilbo attempts to steal) able to speak blurs the line between the ordinary and the magical.[16]

mutton every day matches the fantasy writer and designer William Morris's account of his travels in Iceland in the early 1870s, one of many Middle-earth features that follows Morris, including the existence of trolls: Morris mentioned visiting places called Tröllakirkja ("Trollchurch") and Tröllahals ("Trollneck"). Burns notes, too, that the adventure with the three trolls combines Bilbo's fear of being eaten with the temptation of the "fine toothsome smell" of roast mutton.[15]

The critic Gregory Hartley notes that while in The Hobbit, Tolkien's trolls were still much like those of Norse mythology, "archetypal, stereotypical ... basking in unexamined sentience",

epic, which was in turn bonded with the Christian mythos. Characters and creatures began functioning on a multiplicity of registers."[2] The entertainingly "light-hearted informality" of The Hobbit's Cockney-speaking trolls thus gave way to the "more bestial trolls" of the later works.[2] Hartley comments that the redaction effort that Tolkien threw himself into for his legendarium was driven by the way he had composed The Hobbit; and that the resulting "rich, curious roles" that trolls and other beasts play in Middle-earth would not have existed without it.[2]

Speech, sentience, and souls

Main article:
Tolkien's sentience dilemma
Tolkien's wordless trolls have been compared to Grendel, a monster in Beowulf.[7] Illustration by J. R. Skelton, 1908

Fawcett suggests that Tolkien's "roaring Troll" in The Return of the King reflects the Beowulf monster Grendel's "[fiery] eye and terrible screaming."[7] Noting that Tolkien compares them to beasts as they "came striding up, roaring like beasts ... bellowing", she observes that they "remain wordless warriors, like Grendel", although they are sentient, with intelligence and a single language, unlike the varied tongues of Tolkien's orcs.[7]

Critics including Fawcett and Hartley note that by making all the beasts in The Hobbit talk, Tolkien, a devout

dragons, which are straightforwardly a created species with the power of speech, but certainly monsters; and in contrast to orcs which, as corrupted elves, do have souls. She concludes that Tolkien's linking of souls to speech "complicates these monstrous races".[7]

Tolkien had another conceptual problem with the existence of evil creatures, as he believed that while good could create, evil could not. So he considered whether his evil creatures could have been corrupted from sentient beings, and whether they could breed, writing various and contradictory explanations of their origins.

Melkor and Sauron for their own evil purposes.[19][7]

Defeat of evil

The Inklings scholar Charles A. Huttar writes that the trolls' presence, alongside orcs and the Balrog, means that "Moria not only houses inert obstacles but active monsters".[20] Burns notes that with the destruction of Sauron, trolls, like the rest of Sauron's minions, were scattered in defeat, though some survived by hiding in the hills. In Burns's view, this makes Tolkien appear both optimistic, since evil can be defeated, and pessimistic, as that defeat is never absolute.[21]

Country folk music

Further information:
Music in Middle-earth

The Tolkien scholar

major key, like Cecil Sharp's "southern English melodies" for the song. Bratman finds this "appropriate", noting Tolkien's comment that the Shire "is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village" of around 1897. In short, Bratman concludes, Tolkien intended readers to imagine Hobbits as "English country folk singing English folk songs."[22] The poem appears also in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; in the Tolkien critic Paul H. Kocher's words, it achieves a certain "grisly slapstick".[5]

Adaptations

Film

A cave-troll in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring

Trolls are replaced by "Groans" in Gene Deitch's 1967 animated short film adaptation of The Hobbit.[24]

In

Rankin/Bass's animated 1977 adaptation of The Hobbit, the trolls were voiced by Paul Frees, Jack DeLeon, and Don Messick, who all also voiced other characters.[25]

Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated version of The Lord of the Rings follows the book faithfully in its depiction of the encounter with the cave troll in the Chamber, though the cave troll's foot has toes. Glenn Gaslin, reviewing the film on Slate, describes a clip from the film as "of ravenous trolls, [which] does no justice to Tolkien's darker elements".[26]

Trolls appear in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings film trilogy. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Bilbo Baggins recounts his altercation with the three stone-trolls and later on, the four hobbits and Aragorn are shown resting in the shelter of the petrified trolls. The location used was Piopio, Waitomo District, in New Zealand.[27] In the mines of Moria, a single cave troll, animated in software, is among the attackers and is depicted with two toes.[28][29]

An armoured troll approaches Aragorn during the Battle of the Morannon in The Return of the King

In The Return of the King, trolls fight in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields,[30] and Aragorn fights an armoured troll in the Battle of the Morannon, a departure from the book;[31][32] Jackson had at one stage intended Aragorn to fight the Dark Lord Sauron in person, but "wisely" reduced this to combat with a troll.[33]

In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey the three stone trolls appear as in Tolkien's book. The trolls are portrayed through voice and motion capture. Bert is performed by Mark Hadlow, Tom is performed by William Kircher, and William is performed by Peter Hambleton.[34]

In The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, trolls appear in Azog's army as shock troops. Some of the trolls have catapults mounted on their backs while others have bladed shields and other strange weaponry, such as one troll who had flails sutured to its limbs. Behind the scenes, Peter Jackson's design team added trolls to the orc army, saying that they were a "natural extension of the orcs' forces".[35][36]

Games

Trolls have featured in many video games set in Middle-earth, including The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth,[37] The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II, The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age,[38] and The Lord of the Rings: Conquest.[39] In The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth II: The Rise of the Witch-king, the Angmar faction has a hill-troll hero named Rogash (voiced by Gregg Berger),[40][41] and an Olog-hai named Brûz the Chopper (voiced by Gideon Emery) is important to the plot of Middle-earth: Shadow of War.[42]

Middle-earth trolls have appeared in

Middle Earth Strategy Battle Game includes trolls, while Games Workshop produce a selection of troll miniatures.[45][46][47][48][49]

Notes

  1. ^ The melody can be heard on YouTube.[23]

References

Primary

  1. ^ a b Tolkien 1937, ch. 2 "Roast Mutton"
  2. ^ a b Tolkien 1954a, book 1, ch. 12, "Flight to the Ford"
  3. ^ Tolkien 1955 Appendix F "Of Other Races"
  4. ^ Tolkien 1954a, book 2, ch. 5 "The Bridge of Khazad-dûm"
  5. ^ Tolkien 1955, book 5, ch. 4 "The Siege of Gondor"
  6. ^ Tolkien 1955, book 5, ch. 10, "The Black Gate Opens"
  7. ^ Tolkien 1955, Appendix A. II "The House of Eorl"
  8. ^ a b c Tolkien 1977, ch. 20 "Of the Fifth Battle: Nirnaeth Arnoediad", p. 195
  9. ^ Tolkien 1955 Appendix F, "The Languages and Peoples of the Third Age", "Of Other Races"
  10. ^ Tolkien 2007, ch. 2 "The Battle of Unnumbered Tears"
  11. ^ Tolkien 1955, Appendix F, I, "Of Other Races", "Trolls"
  12. ^ a b Carpenter 2023, #153, to Peter Hastings, September 1954.
  13. ^ Tolkien 1954, book 3, ch. 4, "Treebeard"

Secondary

  1. ^ The idea that trolls were made in mockery of ents------https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Trolls#:~:text=Their%20exact%20origins%20are%20unknown,were%20as%20inarticulate%20as%20animals.
  2. ^
    OCLC 889426663
    .
  3. ^
    JSTOR 43308256
    . The comedy is conveyed chiefly through the trolls' lower class British dialect and their clumsy handling of little Bilbo
  4. ISBN 978-1-60413-146-8
    .
  5. ^
    ISBN 0140038779
    .
  6. ^
    ISBN 3-608-93521-5
    .
  7. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Fawcett, Christina (February 2014). J.R.R. Tolkien and the morality of monstrosity (PhD). University of Glasgow (PhD thesis). pp. 29, 97, 125–131.
  8. ISBN 978-0-00-720907-1
    .
  9. ISBN 978-3-406-52837-8. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help
    )
  10. ISBN 978-0304345205
    .
  11. ISBN 0261102753
    .
  12. ISBN 978-0-41596-942-0
    .
  13. ^
    ISBN 978-0261-10401-3
    .
  14. ISBN 978-0-7864-9865-9
    .
  15. ^
    ISBN 978-0-8020-3806-7
    .
  16. ISBN 978-0261102750
    .
  17. ISBN 978-0261-10401-3
    .
  18. ISBN 978-0-00-720907-1
    .
  19. ISBN 978-0-415-86511-1
    .
  20. ISBN 978-0-87548-303-0. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help
    )
  21. ISBN 978-0-8020-3806-7
    .
  22. ^
    ISBN 978-0-7864-5660-4
    .
  23. ^ Rodgers, Jimmie. "The Fox and the Goose]". The Orchard Enterprises.
  24. ISBN 978-1-93799-427-3
    .
  25. Buena Vista Records
    . 1977. 103.
  26. Slate
    . Retrieved 10 April 2020.
  27. ^ Plush, Hazel (21 September 2017). "10 epic Middle Earth locations that really exist in New Zealand". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 10 April 2020.
  28. ISBN 978-0-00-717558-1
    .
  29. ^ Doyle, Audrey (February 2003). "The Two Towers". Computer Graphics World. 26 (2): n.s. Retrieved 16 April 2020.
  30. ^ O'Hehir, Andrew (18 December 2003). "The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King". Salon.com. Retrieved 16 April 2020.
  31. ^ Evans, Willy (3 March 2018). "15 Secrets You Didn't Know Behind The Making Of Lord Of The Rings". Screenrant. Retrieved 16 April 2020.
  32. ISBN 978-0-8018-9187-8
    .
  33. ISBN 978-0-7864-8473-7. Archived
    from the original on 2023-05-28.
  34. ^ "The Hobbit Then and Now". The Insider. 2 January 2019. Retrieved 10 April 2020.
  35. ^ Gilsdorf, Ethan (19 December 2014). "Peter Jackson Must Be Stopped". Wired. Retrieved 10 April 2020.
  36. ISBN 978-0-06226-571-5
    .
  37. ^ IGN Staff (12 November 2004). "Battle for Middle-Earth - Mordor, Part 2". IGN. Retrieved 19 April 2020.
  38. ^ IGN Staff (21 October 2004). "The Third Age: Forces of Evil". IGN. Retrieved 19 April 2020.
  39. ^ McCarthy, Dave (16 January 2009). "Lord of the Rings Conquest UK Review". IGN. Retrieved 19 April 2020.
  40. ^ Barratt, Charlie (23 August 2006). "LOTR: The Battle for Middle-earth II: The Rise of the Witch-king". GamesRadar. Retrieved 19 April 2020.
  41. ^ Adams, Dan (4 November 2006). "The Rise of the Witch-king Hands-on". IGN. Retrieved 19 April 2020.
  42. ^ Graeber, Brendan (15 March 2019). "Shadow of War's Nemesis System Took Things Way Too Far". IGN India. Retrieved 19 April 2020.
  43. ISBN 978-0915795314
    .
  44. ISBN 978-0915795499
    .
  45. ^ "Mordor Troll Chieftain". Games Workshop. Retrieved 18 April 2019.
  46. ^ "Cave Troll". Games Workshop. Retrieved 18 April 2019.
  47. ^ "Mordor Troll". Games Workshop. Retrieved 18 April 2019.
  48. ^ "Half Trolls". Games Workshop. Retrieved 18 April 2019.
  49. ^ "Hill Troll Chieftain Buhrdur". Games Workshop. Retrieved 18 April 2019.

Sources

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trolls_in_Middle-earth&oldid=1220276920"