Concerning Giants

G

Grant Harris

Registered User
Tolkien describes Giants inhabiting the Misty Mountains in the Hobbit. Does Tolkien ever try and explain this and why they aren't spoken of as a threat during the Fellowship's attempt at Caradhras? Does Saruman replace the Giants as the cause of the thunder and foul voices on the air?
 
in early drafts of LotR. At one point in early draftsTolkien had giants (called Ents -- 'ent' is Old English for 'giant') capture Gandalf and prevent him from meeting Bingo (who later became Frodo) when he should. Later that function was assigned to Saruman, and the Ents became an altogether different sort of giant.

In that sense, Saruman may be thought of as replacing giants, but in the book Saruman had nothing to do with the troubles on Caradhras, that was a movie invention.
 
had anything to do with the storm, and in fact it is suggested that Sauron himself is responsible, but as is so often the case we never get an answer to that question -- so Saruman could have been responsible. We just don't know.
 
Tolkien leaves the whole episode quite ambiguous. It is implied that the storm was not a coincidence, but we don't even know that for a fact. We don't really know who was behind the storm, or if anyone was behind it.

In The Hobbit the giants are more playful than evil, and Gandalf speaks of asking a friendly giant to stop up the goblin cave. In LotR there are no references to giants other than ents, unless you count whatever Sam's cousin Hal saw on the north border of the Shire, which could have been a giant or an ent. It seems that if there were giants in LotR, they did not march to war for either side in the War of the Ring -- at least that we saw. But I'm sure there are many mysteries in Middle-earth.

Another possibility is that the giants in The Hobbit were ents! After all, ents are giant, and do throw bolders. No one saw the giants in The Hobbit, and they are not described.
 
The giants of the Hobbit were not mentioned again in LotR, except as the Ents, who at least connote a very different kind of creature. One might surmise that Tolkien edited them out of the manuscript when he replaced them with Saruman. However, by that same token, it is clear from the text that Tolkien envisioned his world full of strange creatures, only a handful of which we actually see, so there could easily be giants, were-worms, and other things that are mentioned briefly in The Hobbit but never described.
 
The giants are the one thing I dislike about The Hobbit (luckily it's a small part!). From my very first reading, I wondered why they were there. They seem silly and out-of-place, and the whole business with them tossing boulders around during the storm is just like when parents tell their two-year-olds that the thunder is really "the angels are bowling". I rather enjoy Tolkien's fatherly narrative tone the rest of the time, but here it's a bit condescending. I try to rationalize the giants' presence in two ways, both of which have faults.

1) Perhaps Bilbo is just telling himself the silly "giants playing at ninepins" story to keep calm during the storm, which is really big and loud and frightening. He doesn't really believe there are giants out there, and neither do the dwarves -- it's just a figure of speech when they talk about them. Of course, when Gandalf mentions trying to get a giant to block the entrance of the goblins' tunnel, that discounts my theory because he's clearly being quite serious and saying it sincerely.

2) Perhaps "giant" is The Hobbit version of "troll" in the same way as "goblin" is The Hobbit version of "orc" (meaning that the one word is used mainly in The Hobbit and the other in LotR). After all, "ent" is an old word for "giant", and Sauron (or was it Morgoth?) made trolls in mockery of the ents. But Gandalf's statement messes up this theory too, because he wants to find a "more or less decent giant", but giants/trolls made by the Dark Lord can't be "decent".
 
read this thread the other day, and while re-reading TTT I stumbled across this in the Helm's Deep chapter and made note:

"Men said that in the far-off days of the glory of Gondor the sea-kings had built here this fastness with the hands of Giants. The Hornburg it was called......."

Figure of speech? or did they actually have Giants help them build it? I lean toword they actually helped...

It is my opinion that as Tolkien's story of middle-earth matured from The Hobbit to RoTK his opinion of these giants may have changed, maybe he just wanted them to be larger than normal humans, but not skyscrapers... maybe he didn't mention them much because he didn't want to back-track over what he already had in print (hobbit etc...)... maybe him mentioning them like this keeps the pages open for the imagination of readers but does not go deep into it...

makes sense that if you have smaller than average human-types (hobbits), you might as well have larger than average human-types (giants) [:)]

balance, perhaps?
 
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