In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins and the Dwarf company encountered three trolls on their journey to Erebor. They were supposedly bred by the Dark Lords Melkor and Sauron for their own evil purposes, helping to express Tolkien's combination of 'fairy tale with epic. Tolkien, a Roman Catholic, drew back from giving trolls the power of speech, as he had done in The Hobbit, as it implied to him that they had souls, so he made the trolls in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings darker and more bestial.
In The Hobbit, like the dwarf Alviss of Norse mythology, they must be below ground before dawn or turn to stone, whereas in The Lord of the Rings they are able to face daylight.Ĭommentators have noted the different uses Tolkien made of trolls, from comedy in Sam Gamgee's poem and the Cockney accents and table manners of the working-class trolls in The Hobbit, to the hellish atmosphere in Moria as the protagonists are confronted by darkness and monsters. They are portrayed as monstrously large humanoids of great strength and poor intellect. Tolkien's Middle-earth, and feature in films and games adapted from his novels.
