Q: What Are Wargs in The Hobbit?
ANSWER: Wargs are, according to J.R.R. Tolkien, demonic wolves who assist the Orcs in their mischief. In The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, the following footnote appears in Letter No, 297 (a summation of drafts that were never sent):
The word Warg used in The Hobbit and the L.R. for an evil breed of (demonic) wolves is not supposed to be A-S specifically, and is given prim. Germanic form as representing the noun common to the Northmen of these creatures. It seems to have ‘caught on’ – it appears in Orbit 2 p. 119, not as a word in [a] strange country, but in an official communication from Earth to a space-explorer. The story is by a reader of the L.R.
In late 1967 J.R.R. Tolkien began to write Letter No. 306 to his son Michael Tolkien. He opened the letter with this paragraph:
I am…. delighted that you have made the acquaintance of Switzerland, and of the very part that I once knew best and which had the deepest effect on me. The hobbit’s (Bilbo’s) journey from Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains, including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods, is based on my adventures in 1911*: the annus mirabilis of sunshine in which there was virtually no rain between April and the end of October, except on the eve and morning of George V’s coronation. (Adfuit Omen!)†1
In the footnote denoted by the asterisk he wrote:
* Though the episode of the ‘wargs’ (I believe) is in part derived from a scene in S. R. Crockett’s The Black Douglas, probably his best romance and anyway one that deeply impressed me in school-days, though I have never looked at it again. It includes Gil de Rez as a Satanist.
Many attempts to explain the Wargs have drawn upon Norse mythology and the etymology of words like vargr but in fact J.R.R. Tolkien seems to have had a fairly simple concept in mind. The name he chose for these wolves was certainly drawn from Old English or Germanic use but attempts to associate warg with werewolves have been problematic and controversial. There appears to be no place for Wargs in the world of The Silmarillion, which gave rise to many of the elements of The Hobbit. They appear to have been devised strictly for The Hobbit itself and then incorporated into The Lord of the Rings. There is only one passage in the published Silmarillion which may be an allusion to Wargs, although it could be referring to something else (such as werewolves):
And ere long the evil creatures came even to Beleriand, over passes in the mountains, or up from the south through the dark forests. Wolves there were, or creatures that walked in wolf-shapes, and other fell beings of shadow; and among them were the Orcs, who afterwards wrought ruin in Beleriand: but they were yet few and wary, and did but smell out the ways of the land, awaiting the return of their lord. Whence they came, or what they were, the Elves knew not then, thinking them perhaps to be Avari who had become evil and savage in the wild; in which they guessed all too near, it is said.
Tolkien used wolves and wolf-like creatures as servants of evil going all the way back to The Book of Lost Tales, but the concept of the Warg does not seem to appear until The Hobbit. People should be cautious of reading too much into Tolkien’s use of the word. He most likely chose it because it sounded suitably evil and other-worldly and was associated in historical usage not so much with wolves as with outlaws. In Middle-earth, the Wargs were not normal wolves — hence, they would have been “outlaws” among wolves.
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