Werewolves of Middle-earth

SECTION: What Is a Werewolf in Tolkien's Silmarillion?

In the year 457 of the First Age, two years after Morgoth broke the long siege of Angband, Sauron came south and took the tower Finrod Felagund had built on an island in the river Sirion. The Silmarillion gives him a string of titles at that moment. Sauron

"was now become a sorcerer of dreadful power, master of shadows and of phantoms, foul in wisdom, cruel in strength, misshaping what he touched, twisting what he ruled, lord of werewolves; his dominion was torment."

The island got a new name to match its new master. The Elves called it Tol-in-Gaurhoth, the Isle of Werewolves. Gaur is their word for one of these creatures, and a gaurhoth is a whole host of them.

So what actually is a gaur? The Silmarillion answers that a few years later, when Morgoth sends Sauron to hunt down Beren, son of Barahir, who's living as an outlaw in the highlands of Dorthonion. Sauron takes his wolves along. "Sauron brought werewolves, fell beasts inhabited by dreadful spirits that he had imprisoned in their bodies."

"Fell," is an old word for fierce or deadly. So each of these creatures is a real animal body with a dreadful spirit locked up inside it, and Sauron is the jailer.

That's a little different than the werewolves most of us grew up with. The word goes back to Old English. "Wer" meant a man, so a werwulf was a man-wolf, a person who turns into an animal and then back again. Tolkien taught Old English at Oxford, so I doubt hanging that word on a creature with no person in it was an accident. The body was always a wolf's, and nothing in the text suggests the prisoner in it was ever a man.

There's a reason Sauron needed real wolves to start with. In Tolkien's world, evil can't make life of its own. Frodo says it about the Orcs in The Return of the King: "The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own." Morgoth and Sauron couldn't build a wolf out of nothing, and they couldn't build a soul either. All they could do was take wolves that already existed and breed them in the dark, and take a being that already existed and lock it in one.

The Silmarillion never says who the prisoners were. It's tempting to guess they were lesser Maiar, the same kind of being as Sauron, who'd gone over to Morgoth early on, and that guess might be right. But nothing in the text says that. Tolkien left them without names or a history.

Sauron's island shows what these wolves were for. Finrod, the king of Nargothrond, had sworn long ago to help Beren's family. When Beren came to him for help on his quest for a Silmaril, Finrod went with him. They set out north with ten of Finrod's companions, disguised as Orcs, and Sauron caught them as they passed his isle. He threw them into "a deep pit, dark and silent," and promised them a cruel death unless one of them told him who they were and what they'd come for. Sauron didn't know who he had. One of his prisoners was a king of the Noldor, and another was Beren, the outlaw with as big a price on his head as Fingon, the High King himself.

"From time to time they saw two eyes kindled in the dark, and a werewolf devoured one of the companions; but none betrayed their lord."

That happened ten times. When the wolf finally came for Beren, Finrod "put forth all his power, and burst his bonds; and he wrestled with the werewolf, and slew it with his hands and teeth." He was fatally wounded doing this. One of the great princes of the Noldor died in the dark with no weapon at all, in Tol-in-Gaurhoth, "whose great tower he himself had built."

Beren was left alive. Still down in the dungeon. In the dark, right beside the fallen prince.

SECTION: Huan, the Hound of Valinor, and His Doom

In that same hour, Lúthien came to the bridge of Sauron's island and began to sing. She wasn't alone. Beside her was a hound from across the sea.

The hound's name was Huan, and in Tolkien's notes on the Elvish languages the name simply means hound. The Silmarillion says he "was not born in Middle-earth, but came from the Blessed Realm; for Oromë had given him to Celegorm long ago in Valinor." Oromë is the great hunter among the Valar, the Powers who govern the world, and Celegorm is one of the seven sons of Fëanor. When Fëanor's people rebelled and left Valinor, Huan followed Celegorm into exile "and was faithful."

That loyalty cost him. By following his master out of the Blessed Realm, Huan came under the rebels' curse too. The book describes it as follows: "it was decreed that he should meet death, but not until he encountered the mightiest wolf that would ever walk the world."

Tolkien never says who decreed it, but the terms are exact, and two of Huan's enemies are going to try to use them against him, first Sauron and then Morgoth himself.

The rest of what makes Huan special comes in a short list. "Nothing could escape the sight and scent of Huan, nor could any enchantment stay him, and he slept not, neither by night nor day." He couldn't be tricked, he couldn't be put under a spell, and he couldn't be caught napping. He could also understand language. "He comprehended the speech of all things with voice; but it was permitted to him thrice only ere his death to speak with words."

So Huan gets to talk three times in his whole life, and we'll hear all three.

The first one came because of Lúthien. She'd slipped out of Doriath on her own to go after Beren. Her father had shut her up in a house built high in a great beech tree, and she got down by growing her hair long and weaving it into a rope and a dark cloak with a spell of sleep in it. In the woods she ran into Celegorm and his brother Curufin, out hunting with Huan. The brothers took her back to Nargothrond and kept her there, a prisoner in all but name, planning to marry her to Celegorm and force her father's hand. Huan loved her from the moment he saw her. He laid across her door at night, and she talked to him about Beren. He understood every word. Then one night Huan brought Lúthien her cloak, spoke to her for the first time, told her what to do, and led her out of Nargothrond through secret passages.

So here's a beast with far more than a beast's mind in him, just like Sauron's wolves. The difference is how Huan got that way, and why he stays. Oromë gave him away as a gift. Huan followed Celegorm into exile because he was loyal, and when his heart went to Lúthien, he followed that instead. Nobody locked anything inside Huan.

Huan has been part of this story from the beginning, too. In Tolkien's first version of the tale, written around nineteen-seventeen and published long after his death by his son Christopher, Sauron's part belonged to a different villain, Tevildo, Prince of Cats, and Huan was Captain of the Dogs. The earliest draft of the quest for the Silmaril was, weirdly enough, a fight between cats and dogs. The werewolves came later, when Tolkien retold the story in the nineteen-twenties as a long poem, the Lay of Leithian. But even in that first draft there was already a wolf lying at the gate of Angband.

SECTION: Draugluin and Sauron's Werewolf Form on the Bridge

Lúthien's song carried up into the tower, and Sauron knew whose voice it was. Her beauty and her singing had been famous far beyond Doriath for years, and he saw a chance to take Thingol's daughter captive and hand her over to Morgoth.

"Therefore he sent a wolf to the bridge. But Huan slew it silently. Still Sauron sent others one by one; and one by one Huan took them by the throat and slew them."

So Sauron sent a bigger one. "Then Sauron sent Draugluin, a dread beast, old in evil, lord and sire of the werewolves of Angband." Sire means the father of an animal, so Draugluin is the head of a family line.

"His might was great; and the battle of Huan and Draugluin was long and fierce. Yet at length Draugluin escaped, and fleeing back into the tower he died before Sauron's feet; and as he died he told his master: 'Huan is there!'"

So Draugluin got away from Huan on the bridge, and he spent his last breath alerting his master. These creatures could talk, and Draugluin died like a soldier passing a warning up to his commander. Whatever spirit was in that wolf was still working for Sauron right to the end.

Sauron understood the warning. "Now Sauron knew well, as did all in that land, the fate that was decreed for the hound of Valinor, and it came into his thought that he himself would accomplish it." If Huan could only be killed by the greatest wolf in the world, Sauron would become that wolf. "Therefore he took upon himself the form of a werewolf, and made himself the mightiest that had yet walked the world; and he came forth to win the passage of the bridge."

Sauron's plan almost worked. "So great was the horror of his approach that Huan leaped aside." Sauron went straight for Lúthien, and she fainted "before the menace of the fell spirit in his eyes and the foul vapour of his breath." But as she fell, she threw a fold of that sleep-woven cloak across his eyes. Sauron stumbled, and Huan sprang.

In the Lay of Leithian, the fight that follows goes through shape after shape. Sauron twists from wolf to serpent to monster and finally into his own demon form, and Huan won't let go of him. The Silmarillion compresses all of that into one sentence: "But no wizardry nor spell, neither fang nor venom, nor devil's art nor beast-strength, could overthrow Huan without forsaking his body utterly."

The only way Sauron was getting out of Huan's jaws was to give up the body he was in. And that's what Lúthien threatened him with. Before he could abandon it, Lúthien came and stood over him and told him he'd be "stripped of his raiment of flesh, and his ghost be sent quaking back to Morgoth," unless he surrendered his tower to her.

To Lúthien, the wolf Sauron had made of himself was clothing, something he was wearing, and she was threatening to have it torn off him and send him home to his master with nothing at all. It's the setup from Finrod's pit, a spirit living in a wolf, except that Sauron had put this one on himself. And he cared enough about that body to give up his fortress for it. "Then Sauron yielded himself."

Sauron didn't stay to watch Lúthien take his island. "Immediately he took the form of a vampire, great as a dark cloud across the moon, and he fled, dripping blood from his throat upon the trees, and came to Taur-nu-Fuin, and dwelt there, filling it with horror." Taur-nu-Fuin means the Forest under Night. It's the pine highlands of Dorthonion, the country where Sauron had hunted Beren with his wolves a few years before.

So Huan had just fought the greatest wolf that had yet walked the world, and he was still alive. His fate was tied to a different wolf, the mightiest that would ever walk it, and Morgoth hadn't raised that one yet.

SECTION: Wolf-Hame and Bat-Fell: Beren and Lúthien in Disguise

After the island, Huan went back to his master, because he was faithful, though there was less love between them now. Soon Celegorm and Curufin were thrown out of Nargothrond, with Huan still following Celegorm's horse, and when the brothers ran into Beren and Lúthien in the woods, they attacked them. Huan turned against Celegorm to protect them, and from then on he stayed with Lúthien.

Beren still intended to go to Angband and cut a Silmaril from Morgoth's crown, and he tried to go alone, to keep Lúthien out of it. She and Huan came after him. On the way, Huan stopped at Sauron's island and "took thence the ghastly wolf-hame of Draugluin, and the bat-fell of Thuringwethil."

Hame means a skin, and fell, this time, means a hide. These were the real hides, Draugluin's own skin and Thuringwethil's own wings.

Thuringwethil's name means something like Woman of Secret Shadow. "She was the messenger of Sauron, and often flew in the form of a vampire to Angband; and her great fingered wings were barbed at each joint's end with an iron claw." That's nearly everything The Silmarillion tells us about her. She never shows up alive, only her skin, and Tolkien never explains how it ended up on Sauron's island. What the line does tell us is that she flew "in vampire's form," the same shape Sauron used to escape. Sauron's servants could put a shape on and take it off again.

At the edge of Taur-nu-Fuin, Huan spoke for the second time in his life. He told Beren he couldn't shield Lúthien from the shadow of death anymore, because her love had already bound her to it. The two of them could run into exile together, or they could face what lay ahead, hopeless, Huan said, but not certain. And he finished with a line that turns out to be true: "my heart forebodes that what you find at the Gate I shall myself see."

So Beren put on Draugluin's skin, and Lúthien put on the bat-wings.

"Beren became in all things like a werewolf to look upon, save that in his eyes there shone a spirit grim indeed but clean; and horror was in his glance as he saw upon his flank a bat-like creature clinging with creased wings."

So here we sort of see a werewolf that we're used to. A man inside a wolf's shape. In The Silmarillion, the one man we actually see in that shape is Beren, the hero, wearing a dead wolf's skin. From the outside he looks just like the wolf that killed Finrod in the pit. The difference Tolkien points to is in the eyes. Sauron's wolves had something dreadful forced into them and held there. Beren climbed into this one by choice, for Lúthien and for the quest, and he could take it off again.

The disguise is one of the oldest parts of the whole story. In the nineteen-seventeen version, Huan kills Oikeroi, a warrior-cat who serves Tevildo, and Tinúviel, which is Lúthien's other name, dresses Beren in its fur and teaches him to sit and walk and trot like a cat. The animal changed between drafts, but the trick of walking up to the enemy's door dressed as one of his own creatures stayed.

It's also a much better disguise than the last one. When Finrod led Beren north, he'd changed the whole company's faces and shapes into the likeness of Orcs with his own arts, and Sauron beat him in a contest of songs and stripped the disguise away. This time Beren had a real hide on him instead of a spell.

Dressed like that, they crossed the dust-plain of Anfauglith and came down into the valley in front of Angband's gate, past black chasms and carrion birds.

The real problem was, whose hide, it was.

SECTION: Carcharoth, the Red Maw at the Gate of Angband

Angband already knew Draugluin was dead, and Morgoth had answered the fight on the bridge with a wolf of his own.

"Then Morgoth recalled the doom of Huan, and he chose one from among the whelps of the race of Draugluin; and he fed him with his own hand upon living flesh, and put his power upon him."

This is about the only kind of making Morgoth can do. He picks a pup out of Draugluin's line, which tells us that family was still breeding in Angband, and he raises it himself, by hand, on living meat, and then he pours his own power into it. "Swiftly the wolf grew, until he could creep into no den, but lay huge and hungry before the feet of Morgoth."

"There the fire and anguish of hell entered into him, and he became filled with a devouring spirit, tormented, terrible, and strong." Whatever Morgoth put in him was in pain from the start.

"Carcharoth, the Red Maw, he is named in the tales of those days, and Anfauglir, the Jaws of Thirst." Taken apart in Elvish, Carcharoth means something closer to great red fang. He's also the wolf who was already lying at the gate in that first draft, back when his name was Karkaras, Knife-fang.

"And Morgoth set him to lie unsleeping before the doors of Angband, lest Huan come." Huan never slept, so Morgoth put a wolf on his door that never slept either.

When Beren and Lúthien came down to that door in their stolen skins, Carcharoth stopped them. "News had long been brought to Angband that Draugluin was dead. Therefore when they approached he denied them entry, and bade them stand; and he drew near with menace, scenting something strange in the air about them."

Then some power from her mother's divine blood came over Lúthien. She threw back the bat-skin, stood out in front of the wolf, and spoke straight to the captive inside it, with something like pity: "O woe-begotten spirit, fall now into dark oblivion, and forget for a while the dreadful doom of life." And "Carcharoth was felled, as though lightning had smitten him."

To Lúthien, living in that body was a pain the creature should be allowed to forget for a little while. She was merciful. She gave it sleep.

Down in Morgoth's hall, Lúthien sang his court to sleep, and Morgoth himself fell from his throne. Beren had crept in under that throne in Draugluin's skin. Now he threw it off and cut one Silmaril out of the iron crown with a knife. He tried for a second, and the blade snapped. A shard of it flew up and cut Morgoth's cheek, and the sleeping host of Angband stirred.

Beren and Lúthien ran for the gate, and Carcharoth was awake again. He "stood now in wrath upon the threshold of Angband." Beren stepped in front of Lúthien, held up the Silmaril, and ordered him out of the way, and "Carcharoth halted, and for a moment was afraid."

"But Carcharoth looked upon that holy jewel and was not daunted, and the devouring spirit within him awoke to sudden fire; and gaping he took suddenly the hand within his jaws, and he bit it off at the wrist."

Scholars have pointed out how much this looks like a Norse myth Tolkien knew well, where the gods bind the great wolf Fenrir and he bites off the hand of the god Týr, at the joint the Norse came to call the wolf-joint, which is the wrist.

Morgoth had filled this wolf with hunger, and the holy jewel woke that hunger up instead of scaring it away. Beren's hand went down Carcharoth's throat with the Silmaril still in its grip.

SECTION: The Hunting of the Wolf in Doriath

A Silmaril burns any evil thing that touches it. Morgoth's own hands were burned black when he first seized the jewels, and they stayed black. Now one of those jewels was inside a wolf. Bad decision by the wolf...

"Then swiftly all his inwards were filled with a flame of anguish, and the Silmaril seared his accursed flesh."

Carcharoth fled howling from the gate. "Of all the terrors that came ever into Beleriand ere Angband's fall the madness of Carcharoth was the most dreadful; for the power of the Silmaril was hidden within him."

Beren lay at the gate with poison in him. The wolf was venomous. Lúthien drew the poison out of the wound, and the Great Eagles came down and carried the two of them south, toward home.

Carcharoth went south too. "The might of Melian upon the borders of the land stayed him not; for fate drove him, and the power of the Silmaril that he bore to his torment." Melian, Lúthien's mother, had woven an enchantment around Doriath that had kept Morgoth's armies out for centuries. It had let something through once before, for a similar reason. When Beren first came over the mountains into Doriath, he walked right through it, because a great fate was on him. Now the wolf carrying Beren's hand came through the same way.

So Thingol went hunting. Five set out on the Hunting of the Wolf: Huan, Mablung of the Heavy Hand, Beleg Strongbow, Thingol himself, and Beren, who had a new name by now, Erchamion, the One-handed.

They found the wolf in a dark valley where the river Esgalduin "fell in a torrent over steep falls. At the foot of the falls Carcharoth drank to ease his consuming thirst." Anfauglir, the Jaws of Thirst, was trying to put out the fire the Silmaril had lit in him.

Carcharoth hid in a thicket, and the hunters closed in around him. But Huan, impatient to see this wolf for himself, went in alone to drive him out, and the wolf broke cover and attacked Thingol. Beren tried to defend him with a spear but Carcharoth bit him again. Then Huan leapt onto the wolf's back, and the two of them went down together.

"No battle of wolf and hound has been like to it, for in the baying of Huan was heard the voice of the horns of Oromë and the wrath of the Valar, but in the howls of Carcharoth was the hate of Morgoth and malice crueller than teeth of steel."

That's Tolkien putting the two animals side by side himself. Huan came out of Oromë's hunt in Valinor, Carcharoth was raised by hand at Morgoth's feet, and in that fight you could hear where each of them came from.

"Huan in that hour slew Carcharoth; but there in the woven woods of Doriath his own doom long spoken was fulfilled, and he was wounded mortally, and the venom of Morgoth entered into him."

So this was THE wolf.

Sauron made himself the greatest wolf so far, and Huan had lived through him. Carcharoth though, was the one the prophecy meant. He was the mightiest wolf that would ever walk the world, because by the terms of Huan's fate it couldn't have been anyone else. Morgoth had raised that wolf to bring the hound down, and he got what he bred him for. He just hadn't planned on it happening deep in Doriath, with his wolf burned half hollow by a Silmaril.

Huan had one speech left.

"Then he came, and falling beside Beren spoke for the third time with words; and he bade Beren farewell before he died. Beren spoke not, but laid his hand upon the head of the hound, and so they parted."

Mablung cut the wolf open. The Silmaril was there. Not a scratch on it.

Mablung put the jewel in Beren's remaining hand, and Beren held it up to Thingol and told him the quest was done. Beren didn't survive his wound for long. The poison consumed him. His quest for love was over, and the Silmaril he'd lost his life for stayed behind for Thingol to keep.

SECTION: Werewolves vs. Wargs: The Wolves of the Third Age

Carcharoth is the last werewolf in The Silmarillion with a name of his own. Wolves keep running with Morgoth's armies for the rest of the First Age, but after the Hunting of the Wolf the book never again stops to tell us there's something locked in one.

Tolkien never says why. We can guess. Angband was broken at the end of the First Age, and whatever Sauron was doing when he shut those beings into wolves may have needed Morgoth's power behind it. But those are just guesses. Tolkien never tells us.

The wolves themselves don't go away. In the year twenty-nine eleven of the Third Age came the Fell Winter, when white wolves crossed the frozen rivers into Eriador. When the hobbits of Buckland blow their horn-call the night the Black Riders come to Crickhollow, it hasn't been heard in a hundred years, not since the white wolves came over the frozen Brandywine.

Thirty years after that winter, in The Hobbit, Bilbo and the dwarves are stuck up in pine trees while a great pack of wargs gathers in the clearing underneath. The wargs hold a council in their own language, and Gandalf can follow it. They've come to meet the goblins for a raid on the villages of the woodmen, and the two kinds of creature work together. They're wicked and they're clever, and they serve the Shadow, but nothing in the story says there's a captive in any of them.

Even the word warg has an outlaw in it. Scholars point out that Tolkien's spelling sits right between the Old Norse vargr, which means a wolf, and the Old English wearg, which means an outlaw, somebody cursed and cast out. That link between wolves and outlaws turns up in the First Age, too. When Túrin falls in with a band of human outlaws, they go by the name Gaurwaith, the wolf-men, built on the Elvish word gaur, and every one of them is a man.

Back in the First Age, The Silmarillion mentions in passing that Huan let Lúthien ride on his back, "even as the Orcs did at times upon great wolves," and by the War of the Ring Saruman is sending wolf-riders out of Isengard against Rohan.

The closest the Third Age comes to Sauron's werewolves is one night in January of the year thirty nineteen, in Hollin, on the road to Moria. Wolves come at the Fellowship in the dark, and Gandalf stands up and shouts at the pack-leader, "Listen, Hound of Sauron! Gandalf is here. Fly, if you value your foul skin!" Legolas shoots the leader dead. Later that night the wolves come back, and Gandalf sets a tree ablaze with a spell in Elvish: "Naur an edraith ammen! Naur dan i ngaurhoth!" Fire to save us, and fire against the werewolf-host. Gaurhoth is the same word that named Sauron's isle in the First Age. When the sun comes up, there are no bodies anywhere, only burned trees and Legolas's arrows lying on the hilltop, and Gandalf says, "These were no ordinary wolves hunting for food in the wilderness."

When Tolkien does give us a man who turns into an animal, it's in The Hobbit, and it's a bear. Beorn is a skin-changer, sometimes a huge black bear and sometimes a big black-haired man. Gandalf's best guess is that he's a man descended from the first Men of those parts, from before the dragons and the goblins came. Beorn is not a fan of wargs. Before Bilbo's group leaves Beorn's house, there's a goblin's head stuck on the gate and a warg-skin nailed to a tree just beyond it.