Q: Are the Stone Giants Supposed to Be Demons like the Balrog?
ANSWER: Long before Peter Jackson took up the rights to The Hobbit readers of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books have been puzzled by the stone giants. They appear briefly in one scene in the book and Gandalf mentions finding a decent enough giant later on in the story to seal up the entrance to the Goblin Town.
But there are never any further references to giants, much less stone giants, in any of the published materials (except in Tolkien’s plot notes leading up to the introduction of Treebeard, who is transformed from an evil giant into a benevolent Ent). Some people have told me that it’s a “cheat” to say that the Ents are giants (the word ent is Old English and is translated as “giant”); besides which, it wasn’t Ents tossing rocks around the Misty Mountains as Thorin and Company passed through.
The strange “walking tree” story that Sam Gamgee mentions early in The Lord of the Rings isn’t explained, either. Maybe it’s an Ent, maybe it’s a Huorn. But then the wild trees of the Old Forest aren’t really explained, either. Treebeard hints there is a connection between Fangorn and the Old Forest (and he states there was a historical connection). Trees are not simple things in Middle-earth, it seems.
But what about giants? Tolkien gives us trolls that turn to stone and hill-trolls that have green scales and don’t turn to stone, and black-skinned troll-men from the far Harad. Are these all supposed to be types of giants? The trolls of Eriador come from the Ettenmoors, and etten (or ettin) is another old word that is often translated as “giant” (although it could just mean “big monster”).
Tolkien loved his monsters, but were the stone giants supposed to be monsters? In the Peter Jackson movie they are larger than I have imagined and they are closer to the Dwarves than indicated in the book (at least, Tolkien never has the Dwarves separated by the legs of a stone giant).
Still, when I saw the stone giants in the movie I was quite impressed. They are a remarkable interpretation of things scattered across Tolkien’s many writings. For example, what if the stone giants are indeed “demons like the Balrog?” (That is, what if they are borrowed from Tolkien’s older works?)
There were indeed “giants” in The Book of Lost Tales (Tolkien’s so-called “mythology for England”). And two names for giants survived into “Lay of Leithian”, which Tolkien composed after he abandoned The Book of Lost Tales (or perhaps which he began just before abandoning the earlier mythology).
In early drafts for The Lord of the Rings Tolkien mentioned “trolls and giants” and described the giants as a “Big Folk only far bigger and stronger than Men the [?ordinary] Big Folk”. But these giants were eventually removed from the narrative and Tolkien never mentioned them in any of the published appendices. However, he did actually use giants as a reference for a source of (Shire) Hobbit names in an early draft of the appendices. The reference was deleted when Tolkien condensed the material for publication.
The Hobbit was published in September 1937. He began working on the sequel that his publisher (George Allen & Unwin) requested in December 1937. He completed the basic story in 1947 or 1948. Tolkien did not begin working on the appendices until about 1950, and he only finished them in 1955 as they were going to publication. So it would appear that sometime between 1950 and 1955 J.R.R. Tolkien excised the last non-Entish reference to “giants” in Middle-earth.
It could therefore be argued (albeit perhaps not so persuasively) that Tolkien never fully gave up on the idea of including non-Entish giants in Middle-earth while he was working on the First Edition of The Lord of the Rings. Unfortunately for the giant-lovers in the audience, he never made the effort to reintegrate them into his ever-expanding and evolving stories about Middle-earth.
I am not aware of any post-1955 references to giants. John Rateliff says that Tolkien abandoned the story in The 1960 Hobbit before Bilbo and the Dwarves entered the Misty Mountains. At the very least, Tolkien did not delete the mentions of giants from the hastily revised 1965 edition of The Hobbit but that may not be a reliable indication that Tolkien wanted to retain non-Entish giants in Middle-earth.
So, the question about what the giants were supposed to be is clouded by the question of whether they were to be retained at all. Tolkien certainly wanted to extensively rewrite The Hobbit to be more like The Lord of the Rings but he persuaded against doing this. One must not confuse material from The Book of Lost Tales with the worlds of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion (each like the other two but nonetheless distinct).
There is no whole, coherent Middle-earth canon, as we have often noted here and elsewhere. So that means we can only speculate about the nature of “giants” in Middle-earth. It is hard to reconcile them with rational incarnates, the beings imbued with life and “souls” by Iluvatar for such creatures are never enumerated; but then, neither are Bombadil, Goldberry, and the River Woman. To accept Bombadil is to accept all manner of unnamed creatures.
In fact, it is a mistake to assume that Treebeard’s poem about naming creatures is comprehensive or all-inclusive; as well to assume that The Silmarillion is intended to explain everything that might be found in Middle-earth. Middle-earth is too large and vast for a single book to contain everything; and The Silmarillion purports only to relate the history of the Eldar of Aman and Beleriand, and not even of all the Elves.
So the reader is free to imagine what the giants might be, where they would be found, or what their allegiances and cares might be. If you want support for the idea that they might be Maiar, then I suppose the vague reference Gandalf makes to “nameless things older than Sauron” under the earth might support a Maiaric origin for the giants. But does that mean they are evil creatures (and, if so, why did they not help Morgoth and Sauron?) or does it only mean that some of the Maiar simply “went native” and devolved into stone-loving beings who assumed bodies made of stone?
Peter Jackson’s stone giants do seem to act like spirits that inhabit and animate the stone from which the mountains are made. Hence, when they knock each other’s heads off (in the movies) they don’t necessarily have to die. They may only have to wait a while before taking shape again (although, technically, Tolkien stated in notes that Christopher published in Morgoth’s Ring that a self-incarnated Maia or Vala whose body was slain could not take shape again, unless he was very, very powerful — and only Morgoth was said to be that strong).
On the other hand, if the stone giants were Maiar-gone-native then they could have externalized their power much as Sauron had (by investing most of his native strength in the One Ring). In that case, the stone giants could have suffered numerous bodily “deaths” and still survived to take shape again — but this argument would only support what we have seen in the movie for in the book none of the stone giants were beheaded.
# # #
Have you read our other Tolkien and Middle-earth Questions and Answers articles?
Interesting view, but I always thought about Stone Giants as just another sentient race of beings, quite mysterious but still part of the ,,rational incarnates”. Nameless Things below Moria, trolls, orcs, wargs and werewolves, dragons all of these things have cloudy origin :). Either some are speculated to be Maiar who took permanent shape or artificial automatons without a soul in case of trolls, personally I think that even trolls might have some spirits in them (yes I know about the letter, but it was not sent so I assume it’s invalid) and other things I listed but not necessarily of the Ainur. There are two kinds of spirits, those divine and those destined to be incarnate. Someone like Morgoth who had share in all gifts of all other Ainur and the first to practice necromancy (after elves came into being) could have use this part of gift of our well known Masters of Spirits (Namo and Irmo) to trap spirits of dead elves to create things like dragons, werewolves, trolls and theory that orcs came from elves is more probable for me as well, after all other proposed origin are only early drafts or just that: in-universe theories. Ents and Great Eagles are those rightfully used spirits to create new kind of beings (with approval of Iluvatar) while rest of ,,evil” races would be a combination of twisting previous life forms and giving them spirit to inhabit new forms unlawfully it would also explain the fact of breeding.
Stone Giants could be one of those free agents, beings unique and still part of the physical world. Maybe they are just mountain version of Ents and Eagles (Ents associated with trees, Eagles with air and birds, so why not some beings associated with stone). Also I’m interested in what you wrote about text on Ainur reincarnation, does that mean that without the ring Sauron would never regain body?! What about Valar, could they did so if slain?
You know I thought that even without externalization of power like in case of the ring, any Ainur could rebuild body after it’s forceful removal, only that with each time they lost body, it’s rebuilding would use more and more power and the longer amount of time it would take (and such body with each time would be lessened in terms of Ainu control over it). Also the physical harm they took would heal in new body only if enough power was left to do so. Sauron had only four fingers in Third Age because it was his second demise the ring was removed from him and he could not use it’s preserved power to fully recover and second rebuilding of shape took so much of his ,,energy” 🙂 that it would not regenerate on it’s own, ehh at least that’s what I thought. Can you shed some light on the matter?
from the Hobbit: “When he peeped out in the lightning-flashes, he saw that across the valley the stone-giants were out, and were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with a bang.”…
As usual, Jackson took a sentence and expanded it into a huge visual effect.
Tolkien probably “stole” the idea from Norse Mythology, where the Jutuns are called storm giants. They opposed the “gods”, so they probably could be called lesser Maia in Tolkien’s mythology.
http://www.viking-mythology.com/jotuns.html
they lived in the northern mountains and hoarded gold. There are other giants such as frost giants who do not come into the tales.
There’s also the Giant from JRRT’s story Farmer Giles of Ham. Though this isn’t part of the Middle-earth Legendarium, the events of that story happened in the same world–our own earth habitation, as depicted by Tolkien. The naming of the pre-Saxon, Celtic British kingdoms as “The Little Kingdom” and “The Middle Kingdom” is stylistically similar to the Third Age names: “The North Kingdom” and “The South Kingdom” (and the Fourth Age “Reunited Kingdom”), and our own sixth or seventh age “United Kingdom”. I’m saying that the Farmer Giles story fits stylistically with Middle-earth. Other stories (such as the Father Christman Letters and Roverandom) explicity tie in with the Legendarium. So the Giant in Farmer Giles would be a left-over from the legendary Third Age.
Also, since there are “light elves” (Calaquendi) and “dark elves” (Moriquendi) and “wood elves”, like in Germanic myth, there are probably, besides Stone Giants, some kind of Frost or Rime Giants and Fire Giants.
The manuscript version of Tolkien’s “Nomenclature of The Lord of the Rings” contains (in two successive versions) another mention of giants. The place-name Tarlang’s Neck is explained as being named after a giant named Tarlang who fell and broke his neck as he and other giants were building the White Mountains (see A Reader’s Companion, p.356). It was left out of the final “Nomenclature”, presumably because it was irrelevant to translators. It should probably be regarded as a piece of Gondorean folklore rather than a “true” account.
I’ve always thought that the Giants were Faeries. In particular, I think they may have come from the ranks of the Orossi or the Nandini, respectively the spirits of the mountains and of the vales. They may have been the stock Morgoth corrupted to create the Trolls.