Warg

High summer on the eastern side of the Misty Mountains, and there had been little rain for weeks. The pine needles were dry enough to crack. Just after dark a howl went up down the hill, long and shuddering, and was answered from the right, and then from the left, and then a good deal nearer. Wolves were gathering. They came into a small glade ringed with pines, one after another, until they sat in a great circle, and in the middle of it a great grey wolf began to speak.

This is how the Warg enters the world: in 1937, in the sixth chapter of The Hobbit, and every warg written since descends from that glade. The grey chief spoke “the dreadful language of the Wargs.” Gandalf, sitting up a pine above them with thirteen dwarves and a hobbit scattered through the branches, understood every word. Bilbo understood none of it and was sure it was all about cruel and wicked things. He was right.

The glade was a meeting-place, and the wolves had come to keep an appointment. The book is plain about the arrangement. Goblins and Wargs helped each other in their wickedness, and goblins sometimes rode wolves as men ride horses. Men had lately been coming back into the lands below the mountains, cutting the woods and building villages in the valleys, and a great goblin raid was set for that very night against the villages nearest the hills. Had it gone ahead, there would have been nobody left there by morning. All would have been killed except the few the goblins kept back from the wolves and carried off to their caves as prisoners. The goblins were late. The wolves waited, and grew angry, because they took the strangers in the trees for friends of the woodmen, sent to spy and carry a warning down the valleys.

They could not get at them. Even the wild Wargs, the evil wolves over the Edge of the Wild, cannot climb trees. So they sat in a ring under the pines and kept watch, and settled down to wait for the goblins and for the company to come down hungry.

Gandalf did not wait. He gathered the huge pine cones from his branches, set them alight with bright blue fire, and threw them whizzing down into the circle. Fur caught. A large one hit the chief wolf on the nose, and he leapt ten feet in the air and then ran round and round the circle, snapping even at his own pack in rage and fright. The burning wolves ran for the woods. The wood was tinder, and it went up behind them. When the goblins finally arrived they did not put the fire out. They built it up around the trees where the dwarves were trapped, while the wolves stood guard below with eyes shining as red and fierce as the flames. It took the Lord of the Eagles and his people to lift the company off the burning pines.

The Wargs did not forget it. Beyond the mountains Beorn, out hunting, caught a Warg and a goblin wandering in the woods, and learned that goblin patrols were out with Wargs, still furious over the fire and hunting for the dwarves. The next morning there was a goblin’s head stuck up outside his gate and a warg-skin nailed to a tree just beyond. Nobody needed the message explained.

They came out once more that year. When the goblin host marched on the Lonely Mountain the cry went up that goblins were riding upon wolves “and Wargs are in their train,” and the swiftest wolf-riders came howling on ahead of the army. In the Battle of Five Armies the Goblins and the wild Wolves held one side of the field against Elves, Men and Dwarves, until the Wargs were scattered and wolf and rider fell or fled.

Decades later, in The Fellowship of the Ring, they turn up where they had no business being: in Hollin, west of the mountains. Aragorn read the howling correctly. Where the warg howls, he said, the orc also prowls. The company climbed a hill crowned with a ring of great boulders, lit a fire in the middle and waited. In the small hours a great dark wolf-shape came to a gap in the stones, and Gandalf stood up and called it a Hound of Sauron and told it to fly if it valued its foul skin. Legolas put an arrow through its throat. Later the pack came in silently from every side. Aragorn and Boromir cut down their leaders, and Gandalf, crying out in Elvish for fire against the wolf-host, set the tree above him ablaze until the whole hilltop blazed. Legolas’s last arrow kindled in the air and plunged burning into the heart of a great wolf-chieftain, and the survivors fled.

Morning brought the strangest detail in the whole account. There were no bodies. Nothing was left of the fight but charred trees and Legolas’s arrows lying on the hilltop, all of them undamaged except one, of which only the point remained. No orcs had come with the wolves. “These were no ordinary wolves,” Gandalf said, “hunting for food in the wilderness.”

That is nearly everything Tolkien says about how they look, which surprises readers who carry a very definite picture. There is grey and there is dark. There is a wolf strong enough to carry a goblin as a horse carries a man, and eyes that throw back firelight red. Then he stops. The heavy-bodied, heavy-jawed brute on screen is a design decision made for the films, not a description from the books. Where Wargs come from is never explained either. Tolkien shows what they do and lets that stand.

The word is far older than the creature, and it arrives carrying a double meaning. In Old Norse, vargr meant a wolf, and in law it also meant an outlaw, a man to be hunted down like one. The Cleasby and Vigfusson dictionary gives the legal phrase vargr í véum, “a wolf in the sanctuary,” for someone who had shed blood in a holy place and been declared accursed, and vargtré, “outlaw-tree,” for the gallows. The son of an outlaw was a varg-dropi, a wolf-dropping. Old English wearh kept the outlaw and lost the animal. Tom Shippey reads Tolkien’s spelling as a deliberate cross of the Norse and English forms, and ties the English word to an old verb, awyrgan, that meant both to condemn an outcast and to strangle one. Asked about the word by a young Gene Wolfe in 1966, Tolkien answered that it was an old word for wolf that also meant an outlaw or hunted criminal, and that he had adopted it, for its good sound, as the name of “this particular brand of demonic wolf.”

The scene itself had a school-days ancestor. In a late letter to his son Michael, Tolkien wrote that the episode of the wargs was in part derived from a scene in S. R. Crockett’s The Black Douglas, an 1899 romance that had deeply impressed him as a boy and that he had never looked at again. Crockett’s scene is a fight with werewolves.

Their strengths all come out of that first glade. Wargs think, plan and talk, keep bargains with goblins and orcs, and turn up at an agreed place and hour. They carry armed riders at speed. They hunt at night, and packs have leaders who can be marked and killed. And on the evidence of Hollin, killing one is not quite the same thing as killing an animal.

Their limits are just as consistent. Fire routs them, and a single burning cone can break a pack. They cannot climb, which is why a hobbit up a pine is safe for as long as the pine is. Above all they are allies and servants, never masters. They fight in someone else’s war, and when that army breaks they scatter with it.

The word has kept travelling. When Tolkien’s publisher Stanley Unwin gave the manuscript of The Hobbit to his ten-year-old son Rayner to read, the boy’s report praised its goblins and wargs, and the book was taken on. Dungeons & Dragons borrowed the creature in the 1970s and came out with the worg, and George R. R. Martin later turned a warg into a person who slips into an animal’s mind. A term that once named a man hunted like a wolf now names a wolf. Anyone speaking Old Norse would have caught the irony at once.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Warg?

A Warg is an evil, intelligent wolf from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, first appearing in The Hobbit in 1937. Wargs speak a language of their own, hold councils, ally with goblins and orcs, and are ridden into battle like horses. Tolkien later described them as a particular kind of demonic wolf.

Did Tolkien invent the Warg?

Tolkien invented the creature, not the word. The name comes from Old Norse vargr, meaning both wolf and outlaw, crossed with Old English wearh, meaning an outlaw or accursed person. Tolkien said the warg episode was partly derived from a werewolf fight in S. R. Crockett’s 1899 novel The Black Douglas.

What does the word warg mean?

In Old Norse, vargr meant a wolf and also an outlaw who could be hunted down like one, as in the legal phrase vargr í véum, “a wolf in the sanctuary.” Old English wearh meant only an outlaw or accursed person. Tolkien told Gene Wolfe in 1966 that he adopted the word because it had a good sound for the meaning.

How do you fight off Wargs?

With fire and height. In The Hobbit, Gandalf breaks a whole pack by throwing burning pine cones down from a tree, and Wargs cannot climb, so the company is safe in the branches until the forest itself catches. In The Fellowship of the Ring, a hilltop fire and a burning tree drive off a much larger attack.

What happened to the Wargs’ bodies in The Fellowship of the Ring?

The dead Wargs vanished. After the night attack in Hollin, the company found no bodies in the morning, only charred trees and Legolas’s arrows lying on the hilltop, all undamaged except one of which only the point was left. Gandalf concluded that these were no ordinary wolves.

Related Entries

Goblin, Troll, Elf, Dwarf, Morgoth, Tom Bombadil, Fenrir, Sköll, Garmr, Werewolf, Hellhound, Black Shuck, Amarok