Tolkien's monsters
Some scholars add Tolkien's immensely powerful Dark Lords Morgoth and Sauron to the list, as monstrous enemies in spirit as well as in body.
[T 1][T 2] Evans notes that Tolkien's dragons, "an especially important monstrous type", do not fit either of these categories,[1] and he treats those "extraordinarily large, reptilian creatures ... preternaturally evil monsters" separately.
However, when the Wizard Gandalf outwits them, the scholar Christina Fawcett writes, these Trolls are seen as "monstrous, a warning against vice, captured forever in stone for their greed and anger".
That Sauron bred them none doubted, though from what stock was not known... Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race, strong, agile, fierce and cunning, but harder than stone.
Evans notes that "vaguer still", possibly not even living, are the "monstrous Watchers" that guard the gate of the Tower of Cirith Ungol, on a pass into the evil land of Mordor.
Shelob is both evil and ancient, "bloated and grown fat with endless brooding on her feasts, weaving webs of shadow; for all living things were her food, and her vomit darkness".
[13] The medievalist Alaric Hall states more generally that in The Lord of the Rings, as in Beowulf and the Grettis saga, the opposition of protagonists and monsters is psychological as much as physical, since "heroes cannot defeat their enemies without taking something from them to themselves.
"[14] The Tolkien scholar Verlyn Flieger writes that Galadriel's light is a splintered remnant of that of the Two Trees of Valinor, which were consumed into the limitless darkness of Shelob's earliest ancestor, Ungoliant.
[T 11][T 12] Gollum, too, once a member of a peaceful group of Hobbits, has become a desperate monster, alive but with his mind almost destroyed, constantly seeking the One Ring, after bearing it for many centuries.
This presented Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, with a problem: since "evil cannot make, only mock", the at least somewhat sentient and morally-aware Orcs could not have been created by evil as a genuinely new and separate species; but the alternative, that they were corrupted from one of Middle-earth's free peoples, such as Elves, which would imply that they were fully sentient and had immortal souls, was equally unpalatable to him.
[16][4] Tolkien realized that some of the decisions he had made in his 1937 children's book The Hobbit, showing his goblins (orcs)[1] as even slightly civilised, and giving his animals the power of speech, clearly implied sentience; this conflicted with the more measured theology behind his Legendarium.
[18] Shippey notes that in The Two Towers, Tolkien has the orc Gorbag disapprove of the "regular elvish trick" of seeming to abandon a comrade, as he wrongly supposes Sam has done with Frodo.
[19] Wargs, great wolf-like beasts, can attack independently, as they do while the Fellowship of the Ring is going south from Rivendell,[T 14] and soon after Thorin's Company emerged from the Misty Mountains.
These characters had immortal souls, were created good by the one God (Eru Iluvatar in the Legendarium), but had made the choice of evil by their own free will.
[T 18] In The Lord of the Rings, the Wizard Gandalf names the Balrog of Khazad-Dum as "a foe beyond any of you" and "flame of Udûn", meaning an immortal but evil being, with power similar to his own.
[23] Jason Seratino, writing on Complex, has listed his ten favourite Tolkien monsters in movies, describing the Great Goblin as "a slimy cross between Sloth and the Elephant Man".
