Are There Giants in Middle-earth?

Q: Are There Giants in Middle-earth?

ANSWER: In The Hobbit when Bilbo and his companions are traveling through the Misty Mountains during a storm Bilbo looks out and sees “stone giants” throwing rocks at each other as a game. Later on, after everyone has escaped from the goblins, Gandalf says he will have to find a “more or less decent giant” to help seal up the secret door that the goblins have made in the high pass. Most people assume these are all the references there are to giants, but that’s not entirely the case. For example, when Thorin complains about the storm in the mountains he fears the Dwarves, Hobbit, and wizard may “be picked up by some giant and kicked sky-high for a football.” Also, when Bilbo is engaged in his riddle game with Gollum he sits “in the dark thinking of all the horrible names of all the giants and ogres he had ever heard told of in tales”. And when Gandalf is describing Beorn to his companions he includes the reported speculation that Beorn “is a bear descended from the great and ancient bears of the mountains that lived there before the giants came”. When relating their story to Beorn, Gandalf casually mentions the stone-giants as though Beorn should know who they are.

It is clear from the text that giants are very much a part of the world of Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. They may be similar to ogres or quite the same thing; in fact, historically giant and ogre have been used interchangeably in many stories. Ogres may simply be thought of as small giants. Some Tolkien readers, especially among gamers, distinguish between giants, ogres, and trolls — although mythologically these may all be different names for the same types of creatures. In fact, ogres and trolls have been recast and redefined many times by many different writers and story-tellers.

J.R.R. Tolkien definitely had a quiet passion for giants. He included them in many stories in many ways, from “Gilim the giant of Eruman” in the poem “Lay of Leithian” to the folk-lore explanation of the history of Tarlang’s Neck in Gondor to the giant who wanders into the Little Kingdom only to meet Farmer Giles’ blunderbuss. And yet he seems to have found no place or use for giants in The Lord of the Rings. People who have read The History of Middle-earth know that Treebeard started out in Tolkien’s conception as a “giant” (in fact, an evil giant) but Treebeard became the leader of the Ents (or Onodrim — both names meaning “giants”).

Looking at the map of Middle-earth published in The Lord of the Rings one also sees the Ettenmoors, and ettin, etten is an Old English/Norse word for “giant, troll” or “monster”. But the Ettenmoors lay near the Trollshaws (a forest north of Rivendell) — and only trolls are said to live in the area. So are Tolkien’s “stone trolls” the same as his “stone-giants” or was he thinking of something different when he wrote The Hobbit?

It was once pointed out to me that in the scene where Gandalf attempts to lead the Fellowship over Caradhras and stones come tumbling down from the mountain, the passage is written as if the stones might have been thrown. Thrown by what? Perhaps stone-giants or stone trolls — or perhaps something else. This is, after all, one of the three peaks of Khazad-dum. Perhaps one of the nameless things that crawls under the Earth has come up to enjoy the blizzard. Tolkien doesn’t really say.

What we can be sure of is that in The Lord of the Rings there are names given to large, greater-than-man-sized humanoid creatures (Trolls and Ents) that mean “giant” — and, hence, it can be argued that Tolkien did include giants in The Lord of the Rings after all. On the other hand, there are references to far larger, more gigantic creatures in The Silmarillion — at least if you accept the self-incarnated forms of the Valar and Maiar who tower over Elves and Men. These fleshly forms might explain the vague references to giants in the rare mentions of Middle-earth folklore if Tolkien’s intent was to imply that Men (and perhaps Elves) remembered far larger and more ancient “giants” than mere trolls and Ents.

Trolls, of course, came of different kinds. The stone trolls returned to the stone of which they were made if exposed to sunlight, and so these could not have been true living creatures. But there are trolls who fight by daylight in both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings. Hurin slays 70 trolls at the end of the Nirnaeth; large trolls push the Mordorian ram up to the gates of Minas Tirith; and Pippin slays a green-scaled hill-troll (or some kind of troll) in the battle before the Morannon.

These trolls don’t have to be human-like creatures. They could be beasts that were enhanced and corrupted by Morgoth and Sauron to resemble giant humanoids. They might still seem like giants to Elves and Men. But one cannot help feeling a sense of cheat if this is all Tolkien intended. Did he simply feel uncomfortable with the idea of a true race of giant humans? Or did he perhaps feel that giants, being monsters in myth, had to seem monstrous in Middle-earth even if they were not all monsters?

The short, technically honest answer to the question “are there giants in Middle-earth” is, I think, yes — there are giants but not necessarily giant men such as are portrayed in movies and television shows. Although Tolkien does not rule out the possibility of giant men he does not describe any such creatures; and in the absence of such descriptions or identifications we cannot reasonably say that the giants of Middle-earth resembled men, except in that they had more-or-less humanoid shapes.

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