Giants in Middle Earth

amysrevenge

amysrevenge

Well-Known Member
Giants in Middle Earth. Select one:

a) They were real and continued to exist to the end of the 3rd Age.

b) They were poetic license, created whole cloth by Bilbo when he told the "children's story" version of his adventure.

c) They are believed to once have existed but were no more by the 3rd Age, inserted but not invented by Bilbo.

d) Other (explain in reply)
 
My answer is really from a different perspective entirely:

d) Middle-earth* changed over time in Tolkien's conception. Giants were ok when he wrote _The Hobbit_ but as he expanded and reconsidered the entire history during the writing of _The Lord of the Rings_ they seem to have dropped out of existence. Sort of. On Caradhras, they were apparently mostly-metaphorical, not physically real. Maybe. In _The Hobbit_ they were probably real (but your speculation about Bilbo exaggerating has some merit as well). Things changed.

So the answer is exactly what you'd expect from an Elvish history, "both no and yes", just like all Elvish advice. <g>

Aside: I, for one, am thankful that Tolkien never got very far with his late-in-life complete rewriting of the legends, with, for example, the world having always been a round ball from the beginning. I think the rounding of the Earth at the fall of Numenor is one of the coolest things in the whole legendarium, and I have no problem at all with Illuvatar making such a retroactive change to Arda, so that
a) it used to be flat, but
b) now it is round and has always been round, but a) is still true.
That's just the sort of thing that only a transcendent deity could accomplish, exactly because to us it is incomprehensible.
Of course, Tolkien, as a good Augustinian, would no doubt disagree: he would not allow even Illuvatar to transcend Logic.

* not "Middle Earth" - this is one of those hyphenated "this was a single word in Westron" things, I believe.
 
@Jim
I think your answer is looking a bit at the beam rather than along it, if you take my meaning. It's all well and good to see why Tolkien changed his mind as an author, but it doesn't really answer the question of the seeming discrepancy in-universe.

For my part, I'd go with a). The fact that we don't really read about them in Lord of the Rings doesn't mean they aren't there, especially if they are rare, and live primarily outside the regions through which the books take us. Dragons also don't appear in the trilogy (though they are mentioned a couple times), and yet there doesn't seem to be any claim that dragons have been removed from the world, or that Bilbo made up that part. The giants having a much less important role in Bilbo's adventure seems reason enough to me for them to be overlooked so long as Frodo and his companions didn't encounter them.

We already meet within the books huge tree people and spirits of mirth who marry the daughters of rivers; is it really that much of a stretch to think that somewhere in Middle-earth there could still be large stone people?

As for similarities with Caradhras, I think we need to be careful not to read too much into it. Keep in mind that in the LotR drafts, the idea for the Ringwraiths evolved from the Barrow-wights, and yet neither disappeared . Just because Caradhras was introduced doesn't mean that mountain-indwelling-spirits replaced stone-giants. Also, it seems to me that a mountain spirit makes more sense in a significant, important mountain peak; and not so much in some random pass through the Misty Mountains, which would more likely have the more generic stone-giants. I'm not saying there's no textual connection between the two, nor even that they may not be related somehow within the story, but the presence of the one doesn't preclude the existence of the other.
 
JJ48 said:
I think your answer is looking a bit at the beam rather than along it, if you take my meaning. It's all well and good to see why Tolkien changed his mind as an author, but it doesn't really answer the question of the seeming discrepancy in-universe.
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Ah, yes of course. Not only that, but I could easily be accused of verging on crit-fic. On the other hand, if you consider the issue through the entire published corpus, including the posthumous parts, there's a whole lot more in the way of discrepancies to explain!

But within the compass of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, I do like to play with the "different authors" conceit: say one bit was inserted by a loremaster of Gondor, perhaps; that other bit was written by Sam; and this one is poetic license from Bilbo. (I especially like to believe that the "talking fox" was snuck into the manuscript by Bombadil. He could do it, you know.)

So I'm somewhere between b) and c). Giants were not invented by Bilbo, but not necessarily experienced by him either, and may or may not exist or ever have existed. How's that for a firm opinion? <g>
 
Here is the basis for my "Bilbo never saw a giant" premise: the troll's talking purse. I posit to you that no troll's purse ever talked. Bilbo made it up. And with that precedent, other stuff that doesn't "fit" could also have been made up. And a bunch of giants not on anybody's side away off in the mountains doesn't fit for me.
 
JJ48 said:
Any particular reason you doubt the speech capabilities of trolls' purses?
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On the one hand, we do have evidence of at least one other inanimate object speaking, which is Gurthang.

On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that a lowly troll would possess such a wondrous object without such things being far more common; the fact that only these two inanimate objects are ever mentioned as speaking would seem to count against the proposition.

On the gripping hand, the Hobbit narrator does say that "[t]rolls' purses are the mischief" which can be taken to imply that there are other talking purses out there which we simply haven't met.

In my head-canon, a fair amount of "There and Back Again" is Bilbo dressing up his adventures to make it more palatable for his Hobbit audience, like the scene from the movie when he is telling them to those adorable Hobbit children. It is therefore somewhat difficult to discern how much is supposed to be properly factual and how much is "lies to children" to cover up things that are too gruesome or that Bilbo himself didn't fully understand.

A good question to ask would be: "if the talking purse wasn't real, what actually happened that Bilbo is covering up with such a daft story?"
 
NotACat said:
On the one hand, we do have evidence of at least one other inanimate object speaking, which is Gurthang.
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I've always felt Gurthang's speech was the like the ring "speaking" - a voice heard in Turin's head, basically, not an inanimate object speaking out loud for all to hear. (There's also the question of who could possibly have heard it to report it back to the storyteller, anyway? There were no survivors!)

This is similar to the way Old Man Willow spoke to the Hobbits. Remember Sam's "Hark at it singing about sleep now!" This is preceded by "...it seemed they could almost hear words, cool words, saying something about water and sleep" (emphasis mine). I think it's quite clear that if there had been a tape recorder running it wouldn't have picked up a thing. There may be speech, or something akin to speech, but there's no actual sound involved. It's more a matter of the meaning being directed into your head without having to go through the ears.

NotACat said:
"if the talking purse wasn't real, what actually happened that Bilbo is covering up with such a daft story?"
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Probably a totally absurd and silly mistake that's so embarrassing he needs to cover it up just to keep his dignity! And after the things he wrote in The Unexpected Party -- "Hit by lightning! Hit by lightning!" and all -- it's got to be some truly and amazingly stupid thing. I can't even imagine.

To me, I think the gripping hand is that Tolkien wrote some truly delightful stories, and I really don't know why this kind of questioning and analysis makes any sense. It's just so much fun, though!
 
I'm mostly coming from a SilmFilm "if there are giants we put them on the screen, if there aren't giants we don't" perspective.

I'm more than capable of enjoying the book as it is, on its own merits, in the spirit in which it was presented. And the Rankin Bass adaptations, and the Bakshi adaptation, and the Jackson adaptations, and the BBC adaptation each on their own merits.

But it is a fun and interesting intellectual exercise to try to ferret out the "real" story, as if there was a real story and everyone, even Tolkien himself, was doing their own adaptation.
 
As someone who came to The Hobbit after (actually, long after) reading LoTR, I subscribe pretty heavily to the notion that The Hobbit is a kids' story version of what Bilbo had originally written. So, his experience in the mountains was similar to Caradhras and he wrote about "it being as if giants were throwing stones"... which, with generations of re-telling as a bed time story, became literal giants throwing stones.

But that doesn't answer whether giants actually exist. And to that, I'd answer, from the Hobbit perspective everything is a giant. Ents are Giants. Oliphaunts are Giants. Even Pippin is referred to as a Giant, when he returns to the Shire. In The Hobbit, there are Giant spiders, and Beorn is mentioned to have grown to "Giant Size". Everything big is "a giant".

The idea of giants seems pretty deeply seated in Hobbit culture. But that makes a lot of sense. They're small, and big things are scary. But every giant we encounter is a "giant-something". And, while they do refer several times to being afraid of "giants", I don't think that has to be interpreted as meaning that giants are distinct species living in the mountains beating up Hagrid's little brother. I think it's more that they're afraid of giant-type things. Sort of like, if I were to walk through a safari park in Africa, I might be afraid of "predators". What type of "predators"? All of them! Why should I be specific about which predators I'm afraid of when any of them might eat me?

If we dismiss the stone-throwing mountain giants, the only evidence I can find in The Hobbit or LoTR for the existence of giants as a species is when Gandalf says "I must see if I can’t find a more or less decent giant to block it [The goblin hole] up again" in The Hobbit. I can't actually find a way to dismiss this fully, except by arguing that The Hobbit as a whole is a flawed source. Still, it seems pretty tenuous to claim that giants exist as their own species based on that one line.
 
It sounds as if most of the arguments against stone giants (and trolls' purses talking) is that there's only a little bit of mention made of them. The arguments are not being made "X conflicts with Y, in the story, therefore they can't coexist" but rather "X isn't mentioned much, so therefore it doesn't exist."

The problem with arguing based on how likely something is or how often it's mentioned is that by this line of reasoning you could dismiss pretty much anything in the story that you don't like. People talk about the giants being misinterpretations of a spirit like Caradhras, but who says Caradhras itself isn't a misinterpretation? Maybe it actually was Sauron or Saruman controlling the storm, and the whole "cruel Caradhras" is just Dwarvish superstition. Maybe Sam really is horrible at tying knots and rope simply came undone. Maybe Shelob was only the size of a quarter, and Sam embellished the story a bit in the retelling. And how likely is it that trolls would just happen to have two Elvish swords of such renown and lineage that pretty much every goblin in the world knows them on sight?

This is a work of fiction. If you pull at the threads enough, it will unravel. We can work at finding reasons to dismiss all the loose threads and make do without them, or we can try to find our own ways to weave them into the story so they fit.
 
My mind rejects the giants as an implausible element of the old children's story that Tolkien included to entertain his young boys.

John Francis, his oldest son, said in a televised interview (it's somewhere on YouTube) that J R R Tolkien fist told them the story of Bilbo Baggins when John Francis was 9 years old, in 1926 (ten years before the book was published). Michael Hillary was 6 years old and Christopher would have been just 2 at the time. That was the audience for the original story. I suspect that early versions of the tale included a lot of other things from fairy tales that have never made it into print.
 
Harnuth said:
My mind rejects the giants as an implausible element of the old children's story that Tolkien included to entertain his young boys.

John Francis, his oldest son, said in a televised interview (it's somewhere on YouTube) that J R R Tolkien fist told them the story of Bilbo Baggins when John Francis was 9 years old, in 1926 (ten years before the book was published). Michael Hillary was 6 years old and Christopher would have been just 2 at the time. That was the audience for the original story. I suspect that early versions of the tale included a lot of other things from fairy tales that have never made it into print.
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But this tells us absolutely nothing about whether giants exist within Middle-earth itself. In a similar way, many people have felt that Tom Bombadil didn't really fit well with the greater story and could point out that Tom is a preexisting character that Tolkien just seems to be having a bit of fun with. That doesn't mean we can ignore Tom and say he doesn't actually exist in Middle-earth.
 
JJ48 said:
But this tells us absolutely nothing about whether giants exist within Middle-earth itself. In a similar way, many people have felt that Tom Bombadil didn't really fit well with the greater story and could point out that Tom is a preexisting character that Tolkien just seems to be having a bit of fun with. That doesn't mean we can ignore Tom and say he doesn't actually exist in Middle-earth.
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This reminds me of a post some time back on UseNet (ok, so I'm dating myself just by mentioning UseNet) where someone had a Harry Potter question of some sort. I don't remember the question at all, but it was something that Dumbledore would probably have known the answer to. The poster's lament:

"Dumbledore died at the end of book 6, so I can't ask him!"

We play with ideas like the "true existence" of Middle Earth, but sometimes we get pretty muddled in our thinking about it!
 
Jim Deutch said:
This reminds me of a post some time back on UseNet (ok, so I'm dating myself just by mentioning UseNet) where someone had a Harry Potter question of some sort. I don't remember the question at all, but it was something that Dumbledore would probably have known the answer to. The poster's lament:

"Dumbledore died at the end of book 6, so I can't ask him!"

We play with ideas like the "true existence" of Middle Earth, but sometimes we get pretty muddled in our thinking about it!
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That actually reminds me of something I was just thinking about as I was re-reading The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Lewis writes, "By the way, I have never yet heard how these remote islands [the Lone Islands] became attached to the crown of Narnia; if I ever do, and if the story is at all interesting, I may put it in some other book."

Since it was never (as far as I can remember) put into any other book, are we to understand that Lewis never found out, that he did find out and that the story wasn't very interesting, or that it was interesting but he just decided not to put it in some other book?

EDIT: I just encountered in The Last Battle that the story is told, in brief, as Jewel is telling Jill about some of the old tales of Narnia. Carry on with the giant discussion.
 
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JJ48 said:
But this tells us absolutely nothing about whether giants exist within Middle-earth itself. In a similar way, many people have felt that Tom Bombadil didn't really fit well with the greater story and could point out that Tom is a preexisting character that Tolkien just seems to be having a bit of fun with. That doesn't mean we can ignore Tom and say he doesn't actually exist in Middle-earth.
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One fact that tells me all I need to know: Except for the ents, there are no giants in either The Silmarillion or The Lord of the Rings; and they are mentioned only once (the stone giants) in the original children's story called The Hobbit. Conclusion: Once he started writing the story in earnest, Tolkien did not intend to include giants in Middle Earth.

As for Tom Bombadil, Tolkien himself said that he obviously had decided to leave Tom Bombadil in the story. This tells us that Tolkien himself seriously considered cutting ol' Tom out of the story before it was published. And indeed, when reading The Lord of the Rings, if you skip over the three chapters about Tom Bombadil, you won't miss anything at all from the development of the main plot. So if you want to ignore Tom, go ahead. You'll miss what I see as some fun side adventures and a lot of poetry that Corey obviously enjoys, but hey, it's your brain; feed it as you will!
 
Jim Deutch said:
"Dumbledore died at the end of book 6, so I can't ask him!"

We play with ideas like the "true existence" of Middle Earth, but sometimes we get pretty muddled in our thinking about it!
Click to expand...

That brought to mind some advice that I got from Larry Niven: "When you don't know what to do [while writing a story], ask the characters." He went on to cite a couple of examples from his own work where he had been stuck on the plot development, but as soon as he asked the characters what they would do, it all started flowing again.

I think he was on to something. All the main characters from my stories are alive today in my head, in memories that seem as real as any from the real world and stronger than many. So are many of Larry Niven's characters. No wonder we get muddled in our thinking!
 
well he kept lots of allusions to giants as creatures of legend...

"There
upon its spur stood high walls of ancient stone, and within
them was a lofty tower. 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."

In the Lost Tales and the Lay of Leithian we still have the Giants Gilim and Nan...
and we have the Legend of Tarlang the Giant in Gondor.

In the earlier drafts for lotr he still mentions Giants on occasion... but later took them out

"...giants were spoken of, a Big Folk only far bigger and
stronger than Men the [?ordinary] Big Folk, and no stupider,
indeed often full of cunning and wizardry."

"'Trolls and giants were abroad, of a
new and more malevolent kind, no longer dull-witted but full of cunning
and wizardry.'"

But back then even Treebeard was yet conceived as an evil Giant...

So personally I´d prefer the solution that there maybe ARE giants, but they are something puzzling of unknown origin like Tom Bombadil and Goldberry...
 
We have plenty enough allusions to giants in legend in regular-Earth without real giants. And we're no better or worse than Middle-Earthers.
 
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