The Many Faces of Trolls in Middle-earth


by Andrew C. Peter­son

J.R.R. Tol­kien had a fas­ci­na­tion with trolls. From the comi­cal adven­tures of the trolls in The Hobbit to the poem ​“Troll Sat Alone on His Seat of Stone” and to the battle with the Cave Troll in the mines of Moria it is clear that trolls were an impor­tant part of his nar­ra­tive world-buil­ding. Howe­ver, Tol­kien seemed unsure about the ori­gins of these crea­tures. Tol­kien him­self admit­ted, ​“I am not sure about Trolls” (The Let­ters of J.R.R. Tol­kien, No. 153, dated 1954). Given the dif­ferent por­trayals of trolls throu­ghout Tolkien’s wri­tings it is easy to agree with this sta­te­ment. Obviously the trolls in Middle- earth seem to suffer an iden­tity crisis at the hands of their crea­tor. So which ver­sion of the troll is cor­rect ? The short answer — all of them. But where did they come from ?

In order to unders­tand how trolls came to inha­bit Middle-earth, we first need to unders­tand their role in our world mytho­lo­gies. Ety­mo­lo­gi­cally, trolls can be traced to Old Norse, as seen here from the Online Ety­mo­logy Dic­tio­nary :

Troll (n.)

As Dou­glas Ander­son writes in The Anno­ta­ted Hobbit Tol­kien was cer­tainly expo­sed to Old Norse lan­guage, mytho­logy and sto­ries from a young age : While a student at King Edward’s School, Tol­kien read Beo­wulf, first in a modern trans­la­tion and then in the ori­gi­nal Anglo-Saxon. He went from there to the Ice­lan­dic sagas, some in trans­la­tions by William Morris, and to the prose Edda of Snorri Stur­lu­son, and the Elder Edda, a col­lec­tion of Old Norse mytho­lo­gi­cal and heroic poems. He encoun­te­red the Fin­nish Kale­vala in 1911…Tolkien read and stu­died the entire corpus of early Ger­ma­nic lan­guages and lite­ra­tures, spe­cia­li­zing in Old English, Old Norse, and Middle English…Tolkien’s inter­est in sha­ring such enthu­siasms led him to form a Viking Club at Leeds, which met to drink beer and read sagas ; and back in Oxford he foun­ded an Ice­lan­dic club, the Kol­bi­tar, which consis­ted of a group of dons that met from 1926 through around 1930–31 in order to read aloud to one ano­ther Ice­lan­dic sagas, trans­la­ting impromptu (AH 3–4). Fur­ther­more, Rate­liff remarks that in his book on Teu­to­nic Mytho­logy ​“Jacob Grimm notes…‘numerous approxi­ma­tions and over­lap­pings bet­ween the giant-legend and those of dwarfs…as the com­pre­hen­sive name « troll » in Scan­di­na­vian tra­di­tion would itself indi­cate. Dwarfs of the moun­tains are, like giants, liable to trans­for­ma­tion into stone, as indeed they have sprung out of stone” (104). Finally, Grimm concludes that “‘It would appear…that giants, like dwarfs, have reason to dread the day­light, and if sur­pri­sed by the break of day, they turn to stone’” (HH 104). While Tolkien’s dwarves went onto bigger and better things, Tolkien’s trolls kept this inherent weak­ness. In doing so, Tol­kien igno­red two well-known sto­ries concer­ning trolls ; namely ​“The Three Billy Goats Gruff’ and ​“The Troll”, a short story by T.H. White. In both sto­ries the trolls do not suffer ill- effects from sun­light. Rate­liff explains, ​“Des­pite Tolkien’s breezy addi­tion of ​‘as you know’ to the des­crip­tion of their petri­fi­ca­tion, he seems to have intro­du­ced the motif to English fic­tion” (HH 102). Here Tol­kien is ​“stron­gly at variance with what an English audience of his day would have been taught to expect about trolls. In fact, he is igno­ring or sides­tep­ping a modern fairy tale tra­di­tion in favor of revi­ving an ancient folk-lore belief once held by people who actually belie­ved in such creatures…When given a choice, Tol­kien opts over and over again for folk-lore over fairy tale…ancient belief over arti­fi­cial inven­tion” (HH 104).

Given their root in Old Norse ety­mo­logy and folk­lore, trolls are also encoun­te­red in Beo­wulf, which was cer­tainly well-known to Tol­kien. Gren­del has long been refer­red to as a troll in trans­la­tions of Beo­wulf, but the word is actually never used to des­cribe him in the ori­gi­nal text. Howe­ver, Grendel’s mother is refer­red to as his ​“troll-dam” so the conclu­sion from the infe­rence is a logi­cal one. Even if Gren­del is never actually called a ​“troll”, he exhi­bits many of the troll-like abi­li­ties that Tol­kien applied to the trolls of Middle-earth. As Seamus Heaney tells the tale, Gren­del only attacks at night :

Then a power­ful demon, a prow­ler through the dark,
nursed a hard grie­vance.
It har­ro­wed him to hear the din of the loud ban­quet
every day in the hall, the harp being struck and the clear song of a skilled poet
tel­ling with mas­tery of man’s begin­nings … (Heaney lines 86–91).
Also, Gren­del is incre­di­bly strong ; able to grab thirty men at a time :
So, after night­fall, Gren­del set out
for the lofty house, to see how the Ring-Danes
were set­tling into it after their drink,
and there he came upon them, a com­pany of the best
asleep from their feas­ting, insen­sible to pain
and human sorrow. Sud­denly then
the God-cursed brute was crea­ting havoc :
greedy and grim, he grab­bed thirty men
from their res­ting places and rushed to his lair,
flu­shed up and infla­med from the raid,
blun­de­ring back with the but­che­red corpses (Heaney lines 115–125).
After Gren­del takes the great hall, ​“He took over Heorot, haun­ted the glit­te­ring hall after dark” (Heaney lines 166–167). If Gren­del is not a troll in name, he cer­tainly is in spirit. By the time he wrote The Hobbit, Tol­kien had long been expo­sed to trolls in lite­ra­ture, lan­guage and mytho­logy.

Trolls in The Hobbit

First and fore­most, The Hobbit is a children’s story. Spe­ci­fi­cally, it is a story writ­ten for his chil­dren and publi­shed in 1937. Bet­ween 1926–1930 ​“a series of Ice­lan­dic au pair girls-will live with the Tol­kien family and enter­tain the boys with tales about trolls” (Tol­kien Com­pa­nion & Guide, I:135). Pre­su­ma­bly, Tol­kien either heard his chil­dren speak of the trolls from these sto­ries or actually lis­te­ned to an au pair girl regale his chil­dren with these sto­ries of trolls. In any event, the Tol­kien chil­dren cer­tainly enjoyed the au pair girls’ tales of trolls.

In 1926 Helen Buck­hurst (an Ice­lan­dic Scho­lar and friend of Tolkien’s from Oxford) read a paper titled ​“Ice­lan­dic Folk­lore” to the Viking Society for Nor­thern Research. Her paper includes this des­crip­tion of trolls : ​“The Ice­lan­dic Trolls, as depic­ted both in the Sagas and in more recent tales, are huge, mis­sha­pen crea­tures, bea­ring some resem­blance to human form, but always hideously ugly. They make their homes among the moun­tains, living gene­rally in caves among the rocks or in the lava. They are almost always mali­gnant in dis­po­si­tion, and fre­quently des­cend at night upon out­lying farms in order to carry off sheep and horses, chil­dren, or even grown men and women, to devour in their moun­tain homes.” Buck­hurst fur­ther adds, “« Some kinds of trolls have no power except during the hours of dark­ness ; during the day they must remain in their caves, for the rays of the sun turn them into stone” (TC&G, 229). When Tol­kien des­cribes the trolls in The Hobbit, he echoes Buck­hurst but with a dis­tinctly light-hear­ted flair : ​“Three very large per­sons sit­ting round a very large fire of beech-logs. They were toas­ting mutton on long spits of wood, and licking the gravy off their fin­gers. There was a fine tooth­some smell. Also there was a barrel of good drink at hand, and they were drin­king out of jugs. But they were trolls. Obviously trolls. Even Bilbo, in spite of his shel­te­red life, could see that : from the great heavy faces of them, and their size, and the shape of their legs, not to men­tion their lan­guage, which was not dra­wing-room fashion at all, at all” (AH 70).

Spea­king of their lan­guage, in The Anno­ta­ted Hobbit, Ander­son points out that Tol­kien pre­sen­ted the trolls’ speech ​“in a comic, lower-class dia­lect” (70). It is humo­rous to think that Tol­kien had Cock­ney in mind when he wrote that the trolls spoke a ​“deba­sed form of the Common Speech” (LotR 1132), but it’s clear that he did ; for we have either Tom or Bert com­plai­ning :

It is highly unli­kely that the Trolls found in Middle-earth spoke with Cock­ney accents, just as it seems unli­kely that one of them would have been named « William”. Howe­ver, by giving the trolls names heard in the day-to-day lives of the Tol­kien chil­dren and thick cock­ney accents which would have been a source of come­dic mirth when read aloud, the trolls become hul­king but harm­less, tall but tooth­less, and scary but serio­co­mic.

Clearly Gan­dalf was concer­ned when he heard that there were trolls in the area, and he did return to check on Bilbo and the dwarves, but he easily tricks the trolls into staying up all night until the dawn turns them to stone. Tol­kien writes :

“Dawn take you all and be stone to you ! » said a voice that soun­ded like William’s. But it wasn’t. For just at that moment the light came over the hill, and there was a mighty twit­ter in the branches. William never spoke for he stood turned to stone as he stoo­ped ; and Bert and Tom were stuck like rocks as they looked at him. 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 hap­pe­ned to Bert and Tom and William” (AH 80).

I find it hard to believe that these trolls are the elite of the Dark Lord’s army. Ins­tead, these are but cari­ca­tures of the trolls found in The Lord of the Rings. Yet, they had their sup­por­ters. It is noted in The Anno­ta­ted Hobbit that Tolkien’s second son, Michael, said that as chil­dren he and all of his siblings thought that Roast Mutton was the best chap­ter in The Hobbit at one point or ano­ther. He said, ​“We thought there was some­thing rather nice about trolls, and it was a pity that they had to be turned into stone at all » (86).

Still, even in the pages of The Hobbit we can see glimpses of the his­tory of Middle-earth. With these trolls defea­ted, Gan­dalf leads the group to their hideout, and they find a number of strange wea­pons. In the next chap­ter, Elrond will iden­tify them as elvish blades that date back to Gon­do­lin. This is a strong connec­tion into the larger story of Middle- earth and The Lord of the Rings. So, while the Troll adven­ture in The Hobbit should not be taken too lite­rally as a source of Troll-lore in Middle-earth it is clear that Tol­kien belie­ved that trolls have a place in the folk­lore of Middle-earth. To help put them there, he uses Sam Gamgee to rein­tro­duce the trolls from The Hobbit to the reader when he recites The Troll Song (or Sam’s Song of the Troll) in The Lord of the Rings.

This lively song has its origin in The Root of the Boot, a poem writ­ten by Tol­kien and which, accor­ding to Chris­to­pher Tol­kien in The Return of the Shadow, “…goes back to his time at the Uni­ver­sity of Leeds” (142), Chris­to­pher also notes that, ​“My father was extre­mely fond of this song, which went to the tune of The fox went out on a winter’s night » (142) which is a tra­di­tio­nal English folk­tale thought to date from the fif­teenth cen­tury. By rewor­king and adding an English folk­tale to the legen­da­rium of Middle-earth Tol­kien uses the echoes of the English poem to give the reader a sense of their own his­to­ri­cal past while also craf­ting a rich, paral­lel his­tory in Middle-earth.

The trolls so expertly dis­pat­ched by Gan­dalf in The Hobbit are redis­co­ve­red by the four hob­bits and Ara­gorn in The Lord of the Rings during Flight to the Ford :

‘There are trolls!” Pippin panted. ​“Down in a clea­ring in the woods not far below. We got a sight of them through the tree trunks. They are very large!”

“We will come and look at them,” said Stri­der, picking up a stick. Frodo said nothing, but Sam looked scared.

The sun was now high, and it shone down through the half-strip­ped branches of the trees, and lit the clea­ring with bright patches of light. They halted sud­denly on the edge, and peered through the tree-trunks, hol­ding their breath. There stood the trolls : three large trolls. One was stoo­ping, and the other two stood sta­ring at him. Stri­der walked for­ward uncon­cer­nedly. ​“Get up, old stone!” he said, and broke his stick upon the stoo­ping troll.

Nothing hap­pe­ned. There was a gasp of asto­nish­ment from the hob­bits, and then even Frodo lau­ghed. ​“Well!” he said. ​“We are for­get­ting our family his­tory ! These must be the very three that were caught by Gan­dalf, quar­rel­ling over the right way to cook thir­teen dwarves and one hobbit.”

“I had no idea we were anyw­here near the place!” said Pippin. He knew the story well. Bilbo and Frodo had told it often ; but as a matter of fact he had never more than half belie­ved it. Even now he looked at the stone trolls with sus­pi­cion, won­de­ring if some magic might not sud­denly bring them to life again.

“You are for­get­ting not only your family his­tory, but all you ever knew about trolls,” said Stri­der. ​“It is broad day­light with a bright sun, and yet you come back trying to scare me with a tale of live trolls wai­ting for us in this glade ! In any case you might have noti­ced that one of them has an old bird’s nest behind his ear. That would be a most unu­sual orna­ment for a live troll!” (LotR 205–206).

Clearly Ara­gorn remem­bers his troll lore. This is only proper, as Arador (Aragorn’s grand­fa­ther) was ​“taken by trolls and slain in the Cold­fells” (PoME 263). After the meal, Merry calls for a song to be sung. After some reluc­tance, Sam recites the ​“Troll Song”:

Stan­ding up, with his hands behind his back,
as if he was at school, he began to sing an old tune.
Troll sat alone on his seat of stone,
And mun­ched and mum­bled a bare old bone ;
For many a year he had gnawed it near,
For meat was hard to come by.
Done by ! Gum by !
In a cave in the hills he dwelt alone,
And meat was hard to come by.
Up came Tom with his big boots on.
Says he to Troll : ​‘Pray, what is yon ?
For it looks like the shin o’ my nuncle Tim,
As should be a-lyin’ in gra­veyard.
Caveyard ! Paveyard !
This many a year has Tim been gone,
And I thought he were lyin’ in gra­veyard.’
​‘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 ! Thin­bone !
He can spare a share for a poor old troll,
He’s got no use for his shin­bone.’

Said Tom : ​‘I don’t see why the likes o’ thee Without axin’ leave should go makin’ free With the shank or the shin o’ my father’s kin ;

So hand the old bone over !
Rover ! Trover !
Though dead he be, it belongs to he ;
So hand the old bone over ! ’
​‘For a couple o’ pins, ’ says Troll, and grins,
​‘I’ll eat thee too, and gnaw thy shins.
A bit o’ fresh meat will go down sweet !
I’ll try my teeth on thee now.
Hee now ! See now !
I’m tired of gna­wing old bones and skins ;
I’ve a mind to dine on thee now.’
But just as he thought his dinner was caught,
He found his hands had hold of naught ;
Before he could mind, Tom slip­ped behind And gave him the boot to larn him.
Warn him ! Darn him !
A bump o’ the boot on the seat, Tom thought,
Would be the way to larn him.
But harder than stone is the flesh and bone Of a troll that sits in the hills alone.
As well set your boot to the mountain’s root,
For the seat of a troll don’t feel it.
Peel it ! Heal it !
Old Troll lau­ghed, when he heard Tom groan,
And he knew his toes could feel it.
Tom’s leg is game, since home he came,
And his boot­less foot is las­ting lame ;
But Troll don’t care, and he’s still there With the bone he boned from its owner.
Doner ! Boner !
Troll’s old seat is still the same,
And the bone he boned from its owner ! (LoTR 206–208).

Much like in The Hobbit, this troll is also a figure of some amu­se­ment — inso­far as a troll that is gna­wing on someone’s femur can be found ​‘amu­sing’. ​“Troll Sat Alone on His Seat of Stone” is brought to life in The Lord of the Rings from within the shadow of the troll adven­ture from The Hobbit. In doing so, Tol­kien creates a lite­rary bridge for the trolls to cross over bet­ween The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Howe­ver, these are not the trolls of Tolkien’s chil­dren and their Ice­lan­dic au pairs. No, these trolls are some­thing else enti­rely.

Trolls in The Lord of the Rings :

Right from the start trolls are esta­bli­shed as a clear and present threat in The Lord of the Rings : ​“The Dark Tower had been rebuilt, it was said. From there the power was sprea­ding far and wide, and away far east and south there were wars and gro­wing fear. Orcs were mul­ti­plying again in the moun­tains. Trolls were abroad, no longer dull-witted, but cun­ning and armed with dread­ful wea­pons” (LoTR 44). Trolls are also to be wat­ched out for on the road : ​“The lands ahead were empty of all save birds and beasts, unfriendly places deser­ted by all the races of the world. Ran­gers passed at times beyond the hills, but they were few and did not stay. Other wan­de­rers were rare, and of the evil sort : trolls might stray down at times out of the nor­thern val­leys of the Misty Moun­tains” (LoTR 190). Yet through his dia­logue Tol­kien gives us subtle clues as to the aspect of trolls in Middle-earth : “‘Who lives in this land?” he asked. ​“And who built these towers ? Is this troll-coun­try?”

“No!” said Stri­der. ​“Trolls do not build”” (LoTR 201).

Trolls may not build, but they are cer­tainly part of Sauron’s army. Gan­dalf explains to Frodo that, ​“Not all of his ser­vants and chat­tels are wraiths ! There are orcs and trolls, there are wargs and were­wolves ; and there have been and still are many Men, war­riors and kings, that walk alive under the Sun, and yet are under his sway. And their number is gro­wing daily” (LoTR 222). The trolls are also present in the Mines of Moria. In The Bridge of Khazad-dûm, Tol­kien wrote : « … For the moment they are han­ging back, but there is some­thing else there. A great cave-troll, I think, or more than one. There is no hope of escape that way » (LoTR 324). The fact that Gan­dalf was able to reco­gnize this crea­ture spe­ci­fi­cally as a cave-troll stron­gly sug­gests that this appea­rance was shared by others of the kind. The cave-trolls of Moria were clearly des­cri­bed, too : ​“There was a blow to the door that made it quiver ; and then it began to grind slowly open, dri­ving back the wedges. A huge arm and shoul­der, with a dark skin of gree­nish scales, was thrust through the wide­ning gap. Then a great, flat, toe­less foot was forced through below. There was a dead silence out­side. Boro­mir leaped for­ward and hewed at the arm with all his might ; but his sword rang, glan­ced aside, and fell from his shaken hand. The blade was not­ched” (LoTR 324). We learn even more about trolls during the battle :

“Sud­denly, and to his own sur­prise, Frodo felt a hot wrath blaze up in his heart. ​“The Shire!” he cried, and sprin­ging beside Boro­mir, he stoo­ped, and stab­bed with Sting at the hideous foot. There was a bellow, and the foot jerked back, nearly wren­ching Sting from Frodo’s arm. Black drops drip­ped from the blade and smoked on the flood’ (LoTR 324).

The trolls would be seen one more time in the Mines of Moria : ​“Lego­las turned…He gave a cry of dismay and fear. Two great trolls appea­red ; they bore great slabs of stone, and flung them down to serve as gang­ways over the fire” (LoTR 329).

Ulti­ma­tely, it wasn’t the trolls that gave Lego­las pause ; but their inclu­sion in aiding the Balrog serves to legi­ti­mize the troll’s place along­side the great evils of Middle-earth.

In ​“The Black Gate Opens”, we read firs­thand of the trolls in Sauron’s army :

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 (LoTR 892).

Tol­kien rethought his depic­tion of the Trolls in The Hobbit in a 1954 letter to Peter Has­tings, an Oxford book­shop mana­ger. He obser­ved that : ​“I do not know about Trolls. I think they are mere ​“coun­ter­feits”, and hence…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” (Letter # 153, 191). Tol­kien also had Tree­beard echo his sen­ti­ment about trolls as coun­ter­feit beings : ​“But Trolls are only coun­ter­feits, made by the Enemy in the Great Dark­ness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves” (486).

Tol­kien out­li­ned his thoughts on trolls in Appen­dix F of The Lord of the Rings When he des­cribes them as ​“crea­tures of dull and lum­pish nature” we can clearly hear the echoes first heard in Ice­lan­dic lore. We also see Tol­kien expan­ding on the role of trolls in Middle-earth when he details that Sauron ​“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 Stone-trolls spoke a deba­sed form of the Common Speech.” Of course, lan­guage was all-impor­tant to Tol­kien and he explai­ned the speech of orcs and trolls thusly : « But Orcs and Trolls spoke as they would, without love of words or things ; and their lan­guage was actually more degra­ded and filthy than I have shown it » (LoTR 1134). All of this is far remo­ved from the cock­ney speech of Tom, Bert and William from The Hobbit. Tol­kien conti­nued to out­line the dif­fe­rences in his trolls. During 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.” We are told that ​“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.” Tol­kien has impro­ved upon the trolls first encoun­te­red in The Hobbit. The Olog-hai have been craf­ted so that they are immune to the sun’s effects and will not turn to stone. Ins­tead, their skin is now ​“harder than stone”. Here Tol­kien has brilliantly main­tai­ned the exis­tence of the Stone Trolls in The Hobbit while simul­ta­neously put­ting them on the side­line ; to be repla­ced by a better, stron­ger, fier­cer and more wicked type of troll as befits the dan­gers found in The Lord of the Rings.

In conclu­sion, one cannot help but notice the dif­fe­rences bet­ween the trolls from The Hobbit and from The Lord of the Rings. Part of this is due to the dif­fe­rence in the tone of the sto­ries. The Hobbit is a much ligh­ter tale, when com­pa­red to The Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit draws its form in part from folktales–we know from the start that (most) eve­ryone will live hap­pily ever after, even if frigh­te­ning things may happen before then. The narrator’s voice in The Hobbit gives the novel a story book feel that insu­lates the reader from the darker aspects of the larger nar­ra­tive of Middle-earth. Using ​“Troll Sat Alone on His Seat of Stone” as a nar­ra­tive bridge bet­ween The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings allo­wed for a conti­nuity of myth and idea that subtly yet effec­ti­vely brings the more inno­cent world of Bilbo Bag­gins into the darker world of Frodo Bag­gins. As Tol­kien craf­ted the his­tory of Middle-earth revea­led in The Lord of the Rings he arran­ged for the trolls of The Hobbit to claim a place in the mytho­logy of Middle-earth. This allo­wed for the expan­sion of the race of trolls so that they become a serious threat to the peoples of Middle-earth as well as a viable part of Sauron’s army. Yet, even as Tol­kien sought to define and rede­fine the trolls of Middle-earth he did so accor­ding to the folk­lore and mytho­logy of our world and the sto­ries first craf­ted over a mil­len­nia ago in Nor­thern Europe. In doing so he allo­wed the ancient tales of trolls from our world his­tory to echo into the bes­tiary of Middle-earth. 

Works Cited

Heaney Heaney, Seamus. Beo­wulf : a New Verse Trans­la­tion. New York : W.W. Norton & Co., 2001. Print.

OED « Online Ety­mo­logy Dic­tio­nary. » Online Ety­mo­logy Dic­tio­nary. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 Apr. 2012. http://​www​.ety​mon​line​.com/.

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