Trolls in Middle-earth
In The Hobbit, like the dwarf Alviss of Norse mythology, they must be below ground before dawn or turn to stone, whereas in The Lord of the Rings they are able to face daylight.
They were supposedly bred by the Dark Lords Melkor and Sauron for their own evil purposes in mockery of ents, helping to express Tolkien's combination of "fairy tale with epic, ... bonded with the Christian mythos".
They had vulgar table manners, constantly argued and fought amongst themselves, in Tolkien's narrator's words "not drawing-room fashion at all, at all",[1] spoke with Cockney accents, and had matching English working-class names: Tom, Bert, and William.
As Aragorn and the four hobbit companions made their way towards Rivendell through the Trollshaws, they came upon the three trolls that Bilbo and the dwarves had encountered many years earlier, and had seen turned to stone at daybreak.
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.
The Trollshaws is a wooded region, lying north of the East Road between the rivers Hoarwell and Bruinen, where Bilbo encountered the trolls.
During the Nírnaeth Arnoediad, the Battle of Unnumbered Tears, in which Morgoth defeated the united armies of Elves, Men, and Dwarves, the great warrior Húrin, a Man, faced Gothmog's trolls to protect the retreat of the Elven king Turgon.
[T 10][T 8] In Germanic mythology, trolls are a kind of giant, along with rísar, jötnar, and þursar; the names are variously applied to large monstrous beings, sometimes as synonyms.
"[5] All the same, Fawcett cautions that Tolkien uses tradition selectively, transferring the more positive attributes of Norse trolls, including being rich and generous, to hobbits.
Shippey notes, too, Tolkien's storytelling technique here, observing that making the troll's purse (which Bilbo attempts to steal) able to speak blurs the line between the ordinary and the magical.
Burns notes, too, that the adventure with the three trolls combines Bilbo's fear of being eaten with the temptation of the "fine toothsome smell" of roast mutton.
[15] Hartley comments that the redaction effort that Tolkien threw himself into for his legendarium was driven by the way he had composed The Hobbit; and that the resulting "rich, curious roles" that trolls and other beasts play in Middle-earth would not have existed without it.
[15] Fawcett suggests that Tolkien's "roaring Troll" in The Return of the King reflects the Beowulf monster Grendel's "[fiery] eye and terrible screaming.
"[T 12] Fawcett distinguishes the approach of Tolkien's narrator, who treats trolls as "wholly monstrous", from his "translator's notes" which take "a slightly more balanced view".
[5] She states that Tolkien adopts a similar multiplicity of viewpoints on the in-fiction creation of trolls: Frodo tells Sam that the Shadow cannot create "real new things of its own", but all the same, she writes, the "stone-bred mockery" seems very much alive.
[18][5] The Inklings scholar Charles A. Huttar writes that the trolls' presence, alongside orcs and the Balrog, means that "Moria not only houses inert obstacles but active monsters".
"[21] Sayer states in the liner notes of the LP album of the recordings that Tolkien sang the song to "an old English folk-tune called The Fox and Hens."
"[21] The poem appears also in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; in the Tolkien critic Paul H. Kocher's words, it achieves a certain "grisly slapstick".
In The Fellowship of the Ring, Bilbo Baggins recounts his altercation with the three stone-trolls and later on, the four hobbits and Aragorn are shown resting in the shelter of the petrified trolls.
[36] Season two features a hill-troll named Damrod (voiced by Benjamin Walker in "The Eagle and the Sceptre",[37] Jason Smith in "Doomed to Die"[38]) who allies with Adar's forces.
