Why Does the Sun Turn Some Trolls to Stone?

Q: Why Does the Sun Turn Some Trolls to Stone?

ANSWER: The original question I received reads: “What is it about the sun that turns Mountain Trolls into stone?”. Technically, I am not sure we can say that the three Stone-trolls in The Hobbit represent the only kind of “Mountain Trolls”. In the book we read the following:

…And there they stand to this day, all alone, unless the birds perch on them; for trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of, and never move again. That is what had happened to Bert and Tom and William.

Here Tolkien clearly states that William, Bert, and Tom were made of “the stuff of the mountains”; and the story itself says they came down from the mountains. But were they “mountain trolls”? That’s hard to say.

Tolkien does use the expression of one group of trolls, those who pushed the giant hammer Grond up to the gate of Minas Tirith:

The drums rolled louder. Fires leaped up. Great engines crawled across the field; and in the midst was a huge ram, great as a forest-tree a hundred feet in length, swinging on mighty chains. Long had it been forging in the dark smithies of Mordor, and its hideous head, founded of black steel, was shaped in the likeness of a ravening wolf; on it spells of ruin lay. Grond they named it, in memory of the Hammer of the Underworld of old. Great beasts drew it, Orcs surrounded it, and behind walked mountain-trolls to wield it.

I don’t believe he uses this expression anywhere else. Later in the story he names another group of trolls who fight Aragorn’s small army before the Morannon:

Then even as he thought these things the first assault crashed into them. The orcs hindered by the mires that lay before the hills halted and poured their arrows into the defending ranks. But through them there came striding up, roaring like beasts, a great company of hill-trolls out of Gorgoroth. Taller and broader than Men they were, and they were clad only in close-fitting mesh of horny scales, or maybe that was their hideous hide; but they bore round bucklers huge and black and wielded heavy hammers in their knotted hands. Reckless they sprang into the pools and waded across, bellowing as they came. Like a storm they broke upon the line of the men of Gondor, and beat upon helm and head, and arm and shield as smiths hewing the hot bending iron. At Pippin’s side Beregond was stunned and overborne, and he fell; and the great troll-chief that smote him down bent over him, reaching out a clutching claw; for these fell creatures would bite the throats of those that they threw down.

Tolkien uses the expression “hill-troll” again in the Appendices, in “The Tale of Aragorn and Arwen”:

‘And it happened that when Arathorn and Gilraen had been married only one year, Arador was taken by hill-trolls in the Coldfells north of Rivendell and was slain; and Arathorn became Chieftain of the Dúnedain. The next year Gilraen bore him a son, and he was called Aragorn. But Aragorn was only two years old when Arathorn went riding against the Orcs with the sons of Elrond, and he was slain by an orc-arrow that pierced his eye; and so he proved indeed shortlived for one of his race, being but sixty years old when befell.

Later on, in the story about Helm Hammerhand, he uses another expression to describe how terrifying Helm seemed in his wrath:

…Helm grew fierce and gaunt for famine and grief; and the dread of him alone was worth many men in the defence of the Burg. He would go out by himself, clad in white, and stalk like a snowtroll into the camps of his enemies, and slay many men with his hands. It was believed that if he bore no weapon no weapon would bite on him….

And further down in the section on languages Tolkien wrote:

Trolls. Troll has been used to translate the Sindarin Torog. In their beginning far back in the twilight of the Elder Days, these were creatures of dull and lumpish nature and had no more language than beasts. But Sauron had made use of them, teaching them what little they could learn, and increasing their wits with wickedness. Trolls therefore took such language as they could master from the Orcs; and in the Westlands the Stonetrolls spoke a debased form of the Common Speech.

But at the end of the Third Age a troll-race not before seen appeared in southern Mirkwood and in the mountain borders of Mordor. Olog-hai they were called in the Black Speech. That Sauron bred them none doubted, though from what stock was not known. Some held that they were not Trolls but giant Orcs; but the Olog-hai were in fashion of body and mind quite unlike even the largest of Orc-kind, whom they far surpassed in size and power. 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.

Clearly Tolkien was thinking in terms of different types of trolls, but what is not clear (to me, at least) is whether he intended several different descriptions to be used of any one type of troll. I am not convinced there were actually “Snowtrolls”, for example; rather, I believe that is meant only to be a metaphor used in the narrative (a rare instance if that is indeed the case). Unlike the infamous passage about the Balrog wings in Moria (where Tolkien uses the word “wings” to describe the darkness surrounding the Balrog as it expands outward) the “snowtroll” description of Helm does not describe any “real” aspect of his physicality. It would be equivalent to calling Andre the Giant (the famous wrestler) a “colossus” (the historical Colossus of Rhodes was a gigantic statue of the Greek god Helios).

What I think we can take away from these troll passages (and a few others I have not cited) is that there were indeed different kinds of trolls, and any “hill-trolls” were probably groups or tribes that simply lived in the hills (much like the “hill-men of Rhudaur” who were just men who lived in the hills). The stone-trolls do appear to be a separate, distinct group and it is plausible to suggest that all stone-trolls lived in the hills (where they would be likely to find dark caves in which to hide during the day). The Olog-hai, of course, did not turn to stone; Tolkien implies that the stone-trolls are “the older race of the Twilight” but I think it would be a mistake to assume that all older trolls were stone-trolls. That is because in The Silmarillion Hurin fights the Troll-guard of Gothmog at the end of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, a battle that took place during the day (perhaps lasting over several days). Hurin fought the trolls and Orcs until he was overcome around sundown. So those trolls could not have been stone-trolls like William, Bert, and Tom.

Finally, in 1954 Peter Hastings wrote to J.R.R. Tolkien and asked him if he had not overstepped his self-appointed boundaries with “Treebeard’s statement that the first Dark Lord created the Trolls and Orcs.” He goes on to say that evil could not create, but that if it could do so it would not create anything with a tendency toward good, a tendency William displays in The Hobbit when he expresses pity for Bilbo. To this Tolkien replied (in a draft we know as “Letter No. 153”):

As for other points. I think I agree about the ‘creation by evil’. But you are more free with the word ‘creation’ than I am.* Treebeard does not say that the Dark Lord ‘created’ Trolls and Ores. He says he ‘made’ them in counterfeit of certain creatures pre-existing. There is, to me, a wide gulf between the two statements, so wide that Treebeard’s statement could (in my world) have possibly been true. It is not true actually of the Orcs – who are fundamentally a race of ‘rational incarnate’ creatures, though horribly corrupted, if no more so than many Men to be met today. Treebeard is a character in my story, not me; and though he has a great memory and some earthy wisdom, he is not one of the Wise, and there is quite a lot he does not know or understand. He does not know what ‘wizards’ are, or whence they came (though I do, even if exercising my subcreator’s right I have thought it best in this Tale to leave the question a ‘mystery’, not without pointers to the solution).
…
I am not sure about Trolls. I think they are mere ‘counterfeits’, and hence (though here I am of course only using elements of old barbarous mythmaking that had no ‘aware’ metaphysic) they return to mere stone images when not in the dark. But there are other sorts of Trolls beside these rather ridiculous, if brutal, Stone-trolls, for which other origins are suggested. Of course (since inevitably my world is highly imperfect even on its own plane nor made wholly coherent – our Real World does not appear to be wholly coherent either; and I am actually not myself convinced that, though in every world on every plane all must ultimately be under the Will of God, even in ours there are not some ‘tolerated’ sub-creational counterfeits!) when you make Trolls speak you are giving them a power, which in our world (probably) connotes the possession of a ‘soul’. But I do not agree (if you admit that fairy-story element) that my trolls show any sign of ‘good’, strictly and unsentimentally viewed. I do not say William felt pity — a word to me of moral and imaginative worth: it is the Pity of Bilbo and later Frodo that ultimately allows the Quest to be achieved — and I do not think he showed Pity. I might not (if The Hobbit had been more carefully written, and my world so much thought about 20 years ago) have used the expression ‘poor little blighter’, just as I should not have called the troll William. But I discerned no pity even then, and put in a plain caveat. Pity must restrain one from doing something immediately desirable and seemingly advantageous. There is no more ‘pity’ here than in a beast of prey yawning, or lazily patting a creature it could eat, but does not want to, since it is not hungry. Or indeed than there is in many of men’s actions, whose real roots are in satiety, sloth, or a purely non-moral natural softness, though they may dignify them by ‘pity’s’ name.

So this is very complicated. Tolkien attempts to explain and defend himself while at the same time repudiating his own story, suggesting that he would have written it very differently after 20 years’ reflection.

However that may be, I think that we are left with two groups of trolls: a group made (by Morgoth) from stone, and perhaps the most ancient group predating his corruption of any Elves or Men. And later trolls may very well have been bred from Orcs or from Elves or Men, perhaps even from Dwarves — presumably “shaped” by Morgoth’s power (a magical process, as it were). The later trolls may have become differentiated a little in the Second and Third Ages, but it seems that Tolkien meant for the Olog-hai to be yet a third incarnation of trolls, bred by Sauron from “unknown stock”.

And thus we can say that the stone-trolls must have reverted to stone because they were originally made in darkness, before there was any light from the sun — perhaps because the sun’s light is holy, blessed by the Valar and intended by them to fight at least some of Morgoth’s evil. It is a common misconception among Tolkien readers (and some scholars) that Orcs cannot endure the sun; but they do, in fact, fight most of their battles and travel great distances by daylight, so Orcs can clearly tolerate the sun in ways that stone-trolls cannot. It is probably fair to say that they don’t like the sun and may even be weakened by it but when driven by the wills of their evil masters (Morgoth, Sauron, or Saruman) the Orcs were capable of performing great deeds in broad daylight, such as when the Uruk-hai and other Orcs fled across northern Rohan for three days.

See also:

• How Did Sauron Create the Olog-hai?
• Does Light Really Hurt the Orcs?

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