No ordinary 🐺wolves?

[Arvedui]

From The Fellowship of the Ring; A Journey in the Dark:

When the full light of the morning came no signs of the wolves were to be found, and they looked in vain for the bodies of the dead. No trace of the fight remained but the charred trees and the arrows of Legolas lying on the hill-top. All were undamaged save one of which only the point was left.
'It is as I feared,' said Gandalf. 'These were no ordinary wolves hunting for food in the wilderness. Let us eat quickly and go!'

If those were not ordinary wolves, then what were they?

 

[Confusticated]

Hmm... well I never gave this much thought and I just kind of assumed they were some kind of phantoms. But then we don't hear much else about this sort of thing in the LotR.

I would guess they were maybe some of the least powerful ainur spirits, who sort of haunted around under the command of whichever dark lord was in business at the time. Perhaps even the werewolves we hear about in The SIlmarillion.


I'd like to hear other ideas though.


EDIT:

p.s. the reason I say Ainur spirits is that I do not recall reading anything to allow for a man or elf spirit being able to take physical shape, assuming the oathbreakers could only be phantom type images. But the idea of any incarnate being able to take physical shape just doesn't fit. Now there might be a chance a man or elf spirit could take on the phantom-shape of some beast, but I don't recall anything to support this. Ainur just feels more likely to me.

 

[Barliman Butterbur]

From The Fellowship of the Ring; A Journey in the Dark:

If those were not ordinary wolves, then what were they?

Spies of the Enemy...

Barley

 

[aragil]

LOL! Simple enough, Barley!

I'd go with Nóm on this one:

From LotR book II, A Journey in the Dark:
'Naur an edraith ammen! Naur dan i gnaurhoth! he cried.

We know that the 1st age Minas Tirith was re-named 'Tol-in-Gaurhoth' following the Dagor Bragolach, and that this is translated as the 'Isle of Werewolves'. 'Gaurhoth' and 'Ngaurhoth' look similar enough to me to simply be alternate spellings. 'Naur dan i gnaurhoth'=?'fire to the werewolves'. Assuming Gandalf knew what he was doing (and we have no reason to doubt this- after all the spell worked), this seems to indicate that the wolves were indeed werewolves, which were described in the Silmarillion as 'fell beasts inhabited by dreadful spirits that he {Sauron} had imprisoned in their bodies', which again supports Nóm's reading.

Interestingly enought, the pack which attacks the Fellowship are described in an earlier passage by 'A great host of Wargs had gathered silently and was now attacking from every side at once'. The Wargs which attack Gandalf, Bilbo, and the Dwarves in the Hobbit are described as especially intelligent and evil, and they could talk, which might agree with the 'fell beasts inhabited by dreadful spirits' of the werewolves, i.e. this could all be a singular variety of creature with several names.

And in case anybody is wondering, I have discussed this topic before. Credit goes to Snaga for finding the Ngaurhoth:Tol-in-Guarhoth link.

 

[Confusticated]

Good point Aragil, Snaga!

I guess the only question is if (n)gaur (the front of Sindarin words can do some funny stuff depending on what comes before it - gaur and ngaur are the same as Aragil suggests) can also mean "wolf" in addition to werewolf. I don't know anything about Sindarin really, but i do know that in the etymologies (HoME 5) there are seperate entries for wolf and werewolf, see NGAW- and NGAR(A)M- .. where the Noldorin/Sindarin word for wolf is garaf, whereas werewolf is gaur. Unfortunately off hand I can't think of any elvish word that contains wolf but not werewolf. I personally guess that they would have remained distict through the writing of LotR and beyond, but I'm no expert! Some of the entries were added or editted during the writing of FotR, by the way.

 

[Inderjit S]

Great posts Nom and aragil!

Nom, this may be relevant to a thread you started about 'mythological creatures', or rather it may be of relevance to some of the points raised in that thread about anomalous bad guys. Eriador is packed full of them. First of all we get the Barrow-Wights, the evil spirits and now (possibly) these werewolves; ''fell beasts inhabited by dreadful spirits that he {Sauron} had imprisoned in their bodies' Middle-Earth certainly wasn't just inhabited by "normal" bad guys such as Orks, Men and whatnot, there were evil spirits a large. This again goes back to the statement early on in the LoTR hinting at such creatures "which had no name" now roaming freely around Eriador.

 

[aragil]

I've always assumed 'draug' is S. for wolf, as in 'Draugluin', the unfortunate fellow whose pelt was worn by Beren during the quest of the Silmaril. I can't recall where I saw that attested to, but I'm reasonably confident in it.

Quendi and Eldar has some gn/ng stuff where the g is dropped (in the discussion for the naming of orcs), but I believe the letter order is reversed from ngaurhoth/gaurhoth. Also a front word element of 'ng' seems difficult for full pronunciation, esp. in Sindarin- one or the other letter must be silent. Should we summon a language guy?

Inderjit- how do we take Old Man Willow- Entish creature gone bad, or tree inhabited by an evil spirit?

 

[Inderjit S]

Well given that Old Man Willow came to be before Ents, who themselves went through several different conceptions, I assume Willow was, when concieved a tree inhabited by a spirit, like he is described by Bombadil but we could, considering Tolkien's revisions and the invention of the Huorns and Ents claim that Willow was a Huorn, despite them not existed when he first came about. (Interestingly there was something about tree-men in BoLT, perhaps Tolkien was thinking of this when he created Willow-or the mysterious tree-man who Sam's cousin saw in the early chapters.) Also remember that Treebeard mentions the existence of "bad patches" in Eriador.

Also wouldn't a evil spirit want to inhabit something more useful, or to put it bluntly something more mobile than a tree? Then again there is the mention of the Witch-King awakening former servants or evil spirits as he passed through Eriador...and what about the Arnorians who fled into the forest following the ovethrow of their realm by the Witch-King-did Tom protect them from Willow?

 

[Confusticated]

I think you're right about Draug. See etymologies entry DARAK- ... where draug is 'wolf', but oddly draugluin is not a normal wolf. But it still doesn't mess with the idea that Gaur only refers to werewolves.

And yes if anyone around here knows Sindarin they might be summoned.

And by the way, I looked into it and I believe the Ngaur form has undergone "nasal mutation"

Just like the article i for singular "the" triggers soft mutation, the article in for plural "the" triggers nasal mutation: Tolkien explicitly stated that "the nasal mutation...appears after the plural article in: thîw, i Pheriannath"

From http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf/sindarin.htm#mutations

I didn't start the thread you speak of Inder but I can check it out later, I have my own belief about such creatures in M-e.

 

[Ithrynluin]

I think it most likely that the wolves are the (much) less powerful cousins of the First Age werewolves (and wolves), whom Sauron bred. Much like the spiders of Mirkwood are the largely diminished offspring of the allegedly great spider beasts that plagued Dorthonion. Just like Ungoliant mated with these great spiders, I'm also allowing for the possibility that these wolves could have had an Ainuric predecessor many generations removed, who mated with one of the great werewolves of old (perhaps it was even Sauron? Though I wouldn't really push that one into the fore. )

I believe that all these creatures we are unable to classify into one finite group or another are not all necessarily of Ainuric descent. They may simply be 'creatures' created by the Ainur through the Music, or some of Yavanna's kelvar and olvar, or put there by Eru for one purpose or another... all perverted/enhanced by Melko/Sauron for their own ends.

 

[Aglarband]

I had always thought they were wargs, but now that I read your posts and the passage again, I feel that they very well may have been lesser werewolves.

 

[aragil]

An earlier passage does in fact describe them as wargs, but I'm not sure that 'wargs' and 'werewolves' are exclusive identifiers. Perhaps this is like arguing the difference between 'goblins' and 'orcs'- they might differ in every day usage, but the denotation of both words are identical.

 

[Arvedui]

You guys never stop impressing me!
And I understand that I perhaps should emphasize my understanding of the Elvish languages a little more...

Thank you very much.

 

[Snaga]

On this topic, I would like to add a note that in HoME IV we discover the origin of the term 'Warg'. It comes from the Norse vargr meaning 'wolf, outlaw', and the Old English wearg for 'felon, outlaw, accursed being'.

We also find in this phase of the development of the mythology (i.e "The Quenta"), the first mention of Thu [>Sauron] in a recognisable form, who is referred to as 'lord of wolves'. In this version the words 'wolf' and 'werewolf' are used interchangeably in the same sentence. Of course, it is also known that 'were-' is a prefix meaning 'man' so werewolf should imply 'wolf-man'. Sauron, who has the power to take the form of a wolf could readily be identified as a 'werewolf'. However there is no sign that Draugluin or others his kind had that power. If on the other hand a less Hollywood-led interpretation is used of an intelligent being (were-) in a wolf's body were used, this might explain matters a little more.

The difficulty with this what to make of the disappearence of the bodies. If they WERE Ainur spirits in wolf-form, as Nom suggests, then perhaps their bodies disappeared in similar fashion to Saruman's, when he died. But as lesser beings than he, and because it was at night, it was not so clear what was happening.

This all seems ok, except I suppose most readers expect Ainur spirits to be of greater potency and fewer number.

 

[Elthir]

... And by the way, I looked into it and I believe the Ngaur form has undergone "nasal mutation"

I think it has undergone soft mutation. Collective plural gaurhoth 'werewolf-host' can also take a singular article (the singular article is i, the plural article is in).

Compare Gandalf's spell: naur dan i ngaurhoth! (i ngaurhoth represents i ñaurhoth) to the rendering Tol-in-Gaurhoth where the plural article in is used in front of the same collective plural.