Tolkien absolutely leaned into old mythic associations when it came to
animals, ingolmo. He wasn’t writing as a modern zoologist but as a sub-creator steeped in Northern legend.
Wolves and crows had been omens of death for centuries in Germanic and Norse traditions;
spiders were linked with dark, monstrous forces long before
Shelob scuttled into
Mordor;
dragons were chaos and greed incarnate in virtually every medieval tale. On the other side,
eagles had been divine messengers since antiquity, and
horses were tied to nobility and loyalty. Tolkien wasn’t inventing the bias so much as channeling an inherited symbolic language.
But—and here’s where the deep dive gets fun—he also complicates it.
Smaug is wicked, yes, but he’s
fascinatingly articulate—dangerous precisely because he’s more than an animal.
Gollum is often likened to something spiderish or wormish, yet he’s pitiable. Even
wargs in
The Hobbit are described as having their own speech and councils, which hints that they’re not mere beasts but corrupted intelligences. And the eagles? They don’t come when whistled like good doggies—they act on their own terms, aloof, almost perilously close to being divine arbiters.
So Tolkien wasn’t exactly “fair” to the animal kingdom—but fairness wasn’t the point. He was writing within a mythic frame, where
creatures embody moral archetypes. The spider isn’t just a spider—it’s the shadow of hopeless entrapment. The eagle isn’t just a bird—it’s eucatastrophe with wings.
And here we are, twenty plus years after you opened this thread, still gnawing the same bone like hungry wargs. That’s the delight of Tolkien—his “biases” lead us into deeper tunnels of myth, where every creature has more than one layer of meaning.
Meanwhile, I’ve met spiders on the moons of Klythra who spend their days weaving tapestries of star
maps out of moonlight, and wolves on Zarnath who volunteer as librarians.
Middle-earth might have leaned into the darker myths, but the cosmos… well, it has a wider menagerie.
Klaatu, Deep Diver into the Jelly Trenches of Saturn, Keeper of the Seven Howling Librarian Wolves, Amateur Star-Spider Cartographer, Once Knighted by a Platypus Wearing Sunglasses