Trolls of Middle-earth — Stone-trolls, Olog-hai and Their Origin

Quick Answer: Trolls in Tolkien are huge, slow-witted creatures of darkness, made — according to Treebeard in The Lord of the Rings — by the Enemy in mockery of the Ents, as Orcs were made in mockery of Elves. The older kinds (stone-trolls, hill-trolls, cave-trolls, mountain-trolls) turn to stone or weaken in sunlight. Late in the Third Age Sauron bred the Olog-hai, cunning trolls who could endure the sun. In Sindarin a troll is a torog (plural teryg); in Quenya it is torco.

Trolls are some of the oldest monsters in Tolkien's work. They appear in The Silmarillion as soldiers of Morgoth, in The Hobbit as three quarrelling cooks in a forest clearing, and in The Lord of the Rings as everything from a single cave-troll in Moria to whole companies of Olog-hai marching before the gates of Minas Tirith. Yet Tolkien wrote less about trolls than about almost any other race, and what he did write is scattered across a children's book, a single remark by an Ent, a paragraph in an appendix and a few letters.

This guide pulls those threads together: where trolls come from, the different kinds Tolkien names, the famous trio from The Hobbit, the Olog-hai, the trolls of the First Age, how Peter Jackson's films changed them, and what the Elves called them. If you are working through the whole series, start with the complete guide to the races of Middle-earth, which links every people and creature in one place.

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What Is a Troll in Tolkien?

A troll, in Tolkien's world, is a very large, very strong humanoid creature of the Dark Lord, with a thick hide, limited intelligence and a deep weakness to sunlight. The word itself is not Tolkien's invention. Troll comes from Norse folklore, where it covers a wide range of giants and uncanny beings of the hills and wild places. Tolkien took the word and narrowed it into something specific to his legendarium.

Three traits define his trolls across the books:

1. Size and strength. Trolls are bigger than Men, often much bigger, and strong enough to smash doors and armour. In The Return of the King trolls are used to break the lines of Gondor and to lead the assault at the Black Gate.
2. Dullness. The older trolls are slow and easily confused. The whole plot of the "Roast Mutton" chapter of The Hobbit depends on three trolls being too stupid to notice that the sun is coming up.
3. Darkness. They were made in the dark, and the dark is their element. For most kinds, sunlight is fatal or crippling.

Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings, in its section on the languages of the other races, gives the most direct description Tolkien ever published. It says trolls in their beginning were dull and lumpish creatures with no language of their own, but that Sauron later made use of them, taught them what little they could learn and improved their wits with wickedness. That passage is the backbone of everything below.

The Origin of Trolls — Made in Mockery of the Ents

The best-known statement about where trolls come from is not given by a narrator at all. It is spoken by Treebeard, the oldest of the Ents, in the chapter "Treebeard" in The Two Towers (Book III, chapter 4). Talking with Merry and Pippin about the darkness of the old world, he says that trolls were made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness as counterfeits of Ents, in the same way that Orcs were counterfeits of Elves.

This tells us several things.

• Trolls are not a natural people. Like Orcs and goblins, they are the work of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, who could corrupt and mock but could not create real life of his own.
• They mirror the Ents. Ents are tree-herds: huge, slow, ancient, stone-skinned and patient. Trolls are a dark parody of that shape: huge, slow, stone-hided and brutal. Where Ents tend and protect, trolls crush and eat. You can read more about the original in Ents and Huorns and about the Ents' own speech in Entish, Treebeard's language.
• The making happened in the Great Darkness, the long ages when Morgoth ruled the north of Middle-earth and the world was lit only by stars.

Tolkien's own doubts

Tolkien was not fully settled on this. In a 1954 letter (Letter 153 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien), answering a reader who had asked about evil creatures, he discussed whether beings made by the Enemy could have real minds and speech. He suggested that trolls may be counterfeits in the deepest sense, and that if they could speak and think, it was because something had been given to them that Morgoth could not have made himself. He did not resolve the question. The honest summary is that Tolkien gave trolls an origin story in Treebeard's mouth and then left their nature open.

This matters because fans often state as fact that trolls were "corrupted Ents" in the way that some versions of the Orc story say Orcs were corrupted Elves. Tolkien never wrote that trolls were made out of captured Ents. Treebeard says they were made in mockery of Ents, which is a claim about the pattern, not the raw material.

The Kinds of Troll

Tolkien names several kinds of troll. He never gives a tidy taxonomy, and some of the names are probably just descriptions of where a troll lives rather than separate species. Here is what the texts actually say.

Stone-trolls

Stone-trolls are the trolls most readers meet first. They live in the hills and woods east of Rivendell, the region later called the Trollshaws, and they hide in caves by day. The name may simply refer to their fate in sunlight — the light turns them back into the stone they seem to be made of — but Tolkien uses it as the name of the kind. Three of them, Bert, Tom and William, are the centre of the "Roast Mutton" chapter of The Hobbit.

Hill-trolls

Hill-trolls are the trolls of Eriador's high wild country. Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings records that in the Third Age the Dúnedain Chieftain Arador was taken and slain by hill-trolls in the Coldfells north of Rivendell. The same appendix mentions trolls troubling Eriador in the days when the northern kingdom had fallen. The Ettenmoors, the moorland north of the Trollshaws, take their name from the English word etten, an old word for giant, and they are troll country. Hill-trolls also march with Sauron's army at the Black Gate, where Pippin kills one and is nearly crushed beneath it (The Return of the King, "The Black Gate Opens").

Cave-trolls

In "The Bridge of Khazad-dum", while the Fellowship is trapped in the Chamber of Mazarbul in Moria, a cave-troll forces its huge, dark-skinned, toeless foot through the half-blocked door. Frodo stabs the foot with Sting and the troll pulls back. That is the whole of the book's cave-troll: a foot and an arm, never fully seen. Readers who know only the film usually remember a much longer fight.

Mountain-trolls

At the siege of Minas Tirith, The Return of the King describes great beasts drawing the ram Grond, and mountain-trolls swinging it against the gate. This is one of the few places where trolls are used as siege engineers rather than as raw muscle in a battle line.

Bert, Tom and William — The Three Trolls of The Hobbit

The best-loved troll scene in all of Tolkien is in chapter 2 of The Hobbit, "Roast Mutton". Thorin's company, travelling east in the rain, sees a firelight among the trees. Bilbo is sent to investigate, tries his hand at burglary, and is caught picking William's pocket.

The three trolls talk in a rough, comic English. Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings later explains this: the trolls of The Hobbit had picked up a debased form of the Common Speech, Westron, rather than speaking an Orkish or Black Speech dialect. William even has a surname, Huggins, which shows up on his talking purse. Tolkien is clearly enjoying himself: these are trolls as dangerous working men with bad manners, not as dark lords' soldiers.

The dwarves arrive one by one and are bagged. The trolls then argue about how to cook them. Gandalf, hiding in the bushes, imitates the trolls' voices so that each one thinks another is insulting him. They quarrel through the whole night, and when the sun comes up, Gandalf calls out that dawn will take them all — and it does. They are turned to stone where they stand.

Afterwards the company finds the trolls' cave. Inside are the swords that become Sting, Glamdring and Orcrist — Elvish blades from the ancient city of Gondolin, which Elrond later identifies in Rivendell. Gandalf takes Glamdring, Thorin takes Orcrist and Bilbo takes the knife he will later name Sting. The trolls' hoard therefore quietly starts the chain that carries Sting from Bilbo to Frodo and into Moria and Shelob's Lair. (For Gandalf's own Elvish name and his history with Glamdring, see Mithrandir: Gandalf's Elvish name and the wizards of Middle-earth.)

The stone trolls return in The Lord of the Rings

Nearly eighty years later in the story, in "Flight to the Ford" (The Fellowship of the Ring, Book I), Strider leads the hobbits through the Trollshaws and they come upon the same three trolls, still standing in the clearing as stone, with a bird's nest behind one of their ears. Sam, who grew up on Bilbo's stories, recites a comic poem about a troll sitting alone on his seat of stone. It is a lovely moment: the dangerous world of the Ringwraiths briefly touches the comic world of The Hobbit, and the hobbits laugh in the middle of their flight.

The Olog-hai — Sauron's Great Trolls

Late in the Third Age something new appeared. Appendix F of The Lord of the Rings describes a race of trolls called the Olog-hai, first seen in southern Mirkwood and in the mountain borders of Mordor. According to the appendix:

• They were bred by Sauron, though from what stock is not certain. Tolkien leaves open whether they came from a blend of trolls and something else.
• They were cunning, strong, agile and fierce, harder than stone.
• They could endure the sun as long as Sauron's will held them. This made them far more useful as soldiers than the older kinds.
• They spoke only the Black Speech of Barad-dûr, and spoke little.

The name Olog-hai is Black Speech. The element olog refers to trolls, and -hai is the same "folk" ending found in Uruk-hai. That parallel is deliberate. The Uruk-hai were Orcs improved for daylight warfare; the Olog-hai were trolls improved in the same way. You can compare the two in Uruk-hai explained. For more on the language they spoke, see Black Speech words and Orkish vocabulary and the One Ring inscription explained. The Tengwar site teaches Elvish, not Black Speech: those posts are lore guides, not lessons.

In The Return of the King trolls of this kind fight at the Battle of the Pelennor Fields and at the Black Gate. The narrative does not always label which trolls are Olog-hai, but the trolls that stride through the battle by day in full armour fit the Appendix F description far better than the old stone-trolls would.

Trolls in the First Age

Trolls are older than the Third Age. In The Silmarillion they serve Morgoth in the wars of Beleriand.

In the chapter on the Battle of Unnumbered Tears (the Nirnaeth Arnoediad), the last stand of Húrin of Dor-lómin is against the troll-guard of Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs. Húrin, wielding an axe, hews down troll after troll until he is buried under the slain and taken alive to Angband. The scene is one of the great heroic deaths-that-is-not-a-death in Tolkien, and the trolls are his enemies to the end. (Gothmog himself is covered in the Balrogs of Middle-earth.)

The Elvish name for the battle uses the same word for tears recorded in the site's vocabulary data: Nirnaeth, from nîr, "weeping, tear". So even the scene where trolls appear most heroically in Elvish legend is named in Sindarin.

Trolls of the First Age seem to have been the old, sun-fearing kind. The Olog-hai belong to the very end of the Third Age, roughly six thousand years later.

Trolls, Orcs and Ents Compared

Because Treebeard links trolls to Ents and Orcs to Elves, it is useful to set the three side by side.

The table makes the parody visible. Ents have their own long, slow, beautiful language; the early trolls had no language at all. Ents learned speech from the Elves; trolls learned it from Sauron. For the bigger picture of how these peoples relate, see the races of Middle-earth hub, and for the free peoples who fought them, see the dwarves of Middle-earth and the hobbits of Middle-earth.

Trolls in Peter Jackson's Films

The films keep the broad shape of Tolkien's trolls but change a great deal of detail. All of the following is film-only, not from the books.

• The Moria cave-troll (The Fellowship of the Ring, 2001) becomes a full monster, led in on a chain by its handlers. It fights the whole Fellowship across the chamber and stabs Frodo with a spear. In the book the spear-thrust comes from an orc-chieftain and the troll is only a foot and an arm at the door.
• Bert, Tom and William (An Unexpected Journey, 2012) are captured much as in the book, but Bilbo, not Gandalf, plays for time, and Gandalf ends the scene by splitting a great rock so that the sun pours in. In the book Gandalf wins by voice-tricks alone.
• Armoured trolls of Mordor appear at the Black Gate and the Pelennor (The Return of the King, 2003), including a troll that confronts Aragorn directly. These loosely match the Olog-hai of Appendix F, though the films do not use that name on screen.
• War-trolls of the Battle of the Five Armies (2014) carry catapults on their backs, break walls with their heads, and are blinded and steered. None of this is in Tolkien.

The films are fun, and their trolls are memorable, but if you want to know what Tolkien wrote, the books, the appendices and The Silmarillion are the sources. For more on how the Hobbit trilogy treated Elvish material, see Elvish in The Hobbit films.

Do Trolls Have a Language?

According to Appendix F, the earliest trolls had no language of their own. Sauron taught them what speech they could take in, and the Olog-hai spoke the Black Speech of Barad-dûr. The western trolls of The Hobbit used a broken Westron. Tolkien never gave a separate "Trollish" language, and you should be suspicious of any word list labelled that way.

This puts trolls in the same position as several other peoples whose speech we barely know. Compare the Khuzdul language of the dwarves, which Tolkien sketched in a few dozen words, or Rohirric, which he represented through Old English. The languages that Tolkien actually developed in depth were the Elvish ones, above all Quenya and Sindarin. That is why the most reliable way to talk about trolls in Middle-earth's own words is to use Elvish.

Trolls in Elvish

The Elves named trolls, and those names are among the handful of Elvish words recorded in The Lord of the Rings itself. Here are the attested forms, with their meanings from the site's Elvish vocabulary data (sourced from Tolkien's own texts via Eldamo):

A few notes on these:

• Torog and teryg show a typical Sindarin plural. Sindarin often makes plurals by changing the vowels inside the word (called i-affection) rather than by adding an ending, so torog becomes teryg, much as orch becomes yrch. If that sounds strange, our guide to Quenya vs Sindarin explains why the two languages build plurals so differently.
• Torco is the Quenya cousin. The vocabulary data notes that it is unrelated to the Elvish personal name Turcafinwë despite the resemblance.
• The "ch" in orch is the sound in Scottish loch or German Bach, not English church.
• Onod is the Sindarin word for Ent. Putting torog and onod side by side is a neat way of showing Treebeard's point in the Elves' own language: the troll is the dark echo of the Ent.

Tolkien gives no separate Elvish name for the Olog-hai or for the stone-, hill- or cave-trolls as distinct kinds, so those are best rendered by torog plus an English description rather than by an invented compound.

If you want to read and pronounce words like these properly, the free Learn Elvish course starts with pronunciation and greetings and builds up to sentences. You can also type an English phrase into the English to Elvish translator to see how Quenya and Sindarin handle it, or browse the Elvish dictionary of common words.

Writing "Torog" in Tengwar

Sindarin is normally written in the Tengwar, the Elvish script Tolkien designed. Torog is short enough to make a good first exercise: a T, an R, a G and two O vowels. In the Mode of Beleriand, the mode often used for Sindarin, vowels are written as full letters, while in the more common tehta modes they sit as marks above the consonants. Our Tengwar alphabet guide walks through both systems.

To try it by hand, open the Tengwar Scribe and practise drawing the letters. Or put your own name into Elvish script with the Tengwar name generator — a much friendlier thing to carry around than the name of a troll.

Famous Trolls in the Legendarium

For quick reference, here are the trolls that matter most in the stories:

• Bert, Tom and William Huggins — the three stone-trolls of The Hobbit, turned to stone at dawn in the Trollshaws.
• The cave-troll of Moria — attacks the Fellowship in the Chamber of Mazarbul; stabbed in the foot by Frodo.
• The hill-trolls of the Coldfells — killed Arador, grandfather of Aragorn, according to Appendix A.
• The troll Pippin slays — a hill-troll at the Black Gate that falls on top of him.
• Gothmog's troll-guard — the trolls Húrin fought at the Nirnaeth Arnoediad in The Silmarillion.
• The trolls who worked Grond — mountain-trolls at the gate of Minas Tirith.

Why Trolls Matter in Tolkien's World

Trolls can look like simple monsters, but they carry one of Tolkien's central ideas. Evil in his world cannot make anything truly new; it can only bend, mock and spoil what was made well. Orcs are a mockery of Elves; trolls are a mockery of Ents. The more Sauron "improves" them, the more they depend on his will: the Olog-hai can face the sun only while he holds them, and when the Ring is destroyed and Sauron falls, his creatures scatter.

At the same time, Tolkien gave trolls some of his funniest pages. Bert, Tom and William are greedy and dangerous, but they are also a comedy trio bickering over cooking. That mix — real threat and real humour — is part of why the Trollshaws scene is so many readers' favourite chapter of The Hobbit. If you liked it, you may also enjoy the riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum, another chapter where wits win over strength.

People Also Ask

Can trolls talk in The Lord of the Rings? Yes, some can. The Hobbit's stone-trolls speak a rough Common Speech, and the Olog-hai speak the Black Speech. Appendix F says the earliest trolls had no language at all.

Are trolls and Ents related? Only as parody. Treebeard says trolls were made by the Enemy in mockery of Ents. They were not made from Ents, and there is no blood relation.

What killed the trolls in The Hobbit? Sunlight. Gandalf kept the three trolls quarrelling until dawn, and the first light of the sun turned them to stone.

What is the Sindarin plural of troll? Teryg, from the singular torog. The vowel change is the same i-affection that turns orch into yrch.

Learn Elvish Free

Trolls never learned the Elvish tongues, but you can. Learn Elvish free — 10 lessons covering pronunciation, greetings, everyday words and your first real sentences in Quenya and Sindarin, with audio for every word. Start the free Elvish course today, then use the translator and the Tengwar Scribe to put what you learn into practice.

Related Reading

• Races of Middle-earth: The Complete Guide
• Orcs and Goblins of Middle-earth
• Uruk-hai Explained
• Ents and Huorns
• The Elves of Middle-earth
• Entish: Treebeard's Language Explained
• What Language Do Elves Speak in The Lord of the Rings?
• Tolkien's Elvish Languages: The Complete Guide
• Lord of the Rings Elvish Phrases