Warg

High summer east of the Misty Mountains, and the pine wood had gone weeks without rain. The needles underfoot were dry enough to snap. Into a clearing among the trees the wolves came one at a time, unhurried, and they did not behave like wolves at all: they arrived at an appointed hour, settled into a ring, and waited for a grey chief to speak before any of them answered him.

The Northmen of Rhovanion called them Wargs, and the name spread from them across the western lands. Wild Wolves was the other term, though it undersold the problem. Ordinary wolves do not hold councils. Ordinary wolves do not keep appointments with goblins.

The word carries a double meaning that most of the people now using it have forgotten. Old Norse vargr meant wolf, and it also meant criminal, destroyer, outlaw, with the second sense the older of the two. Norse law knew the vargtré, the outlaw-tree, which was a gallows, and the phrase vargr í véum, a wolf in the sanctuary, for a man who had shed blood in a holy place. Old English wearg kept the criminality and let the animal go: a wearg was a hunted man, not a hunted beast. Tolkien’s spelling sits deliberately between the two, and Tom Shippey reads it as a cross of the Norse and the English forms, a word built to mean wolf and outlaw in the same breath. Tolkien himself traced the whole family, Norse, Old English and Old High German alike, back to a root meaning strangler or choker.

Which is the moment for the plain fact. The Warg is not ancient. It walks into the world in 1937, in the sixth chapter of The Hobbit, and every warg written since descends from that chapter. Tolkien said in a late letter that the episode derived in part from a scene in S. R. Crockett’s The Black Douglas, an 1899 romance he had been deeply impressed by at school, in which men fight werewolves. The ancestry of the word is genuinely old. The creature is not.

He was also stingy about how they look, which is worth saying, because most readers now carry a very specific picture. Their size comes only by implication, since an armoured goblin rides one without difficulty. Beyond that there is cunning, a language, and evil, and then he stops. The heavy hyena-jawed animal that surfaces when most people hear the word is a design decision made for the films, not a description from the book. What Tolkien supplies instead is behaviour, and the behaviour is stranger than anatomy would have been.

In that clearing the pack had come to meet goblins and settle a raid. The plan under discussion was a sweep down into the Woodmen’s villages: burn them out, drive the survivors off the land, and carry away whatever people could be taken. Routine work. The wolves talked it through in their own tongue, growling and yelping, and the only reason any of it is on record is that a wizard happened to be sitting in a pine above them, listening.

He did not stay hidden long. Gandalf had gone up the largest tree at the edge of the glade with thirteen dwarves and a hobbit scattered through the branches around him, and when the ring of wolves closed and would not let anyone down, he began lighting pine cones and throwing them. They came down whizzing into the pack. Coats caught. The chief wolf took one across the nose and wore the burn afterwards. The wood was tinder-dry, so the fire the wolves ran with went into the undergrowth and spread, which solved the immediate problem and created a much larger one, and it took eagles to finish the rescue.

The Wargs did not forget it. Hunting the company afterwards, they got as far as Beorn’s fences on the far side of the mountains, and Beorn took a goblin and a warg between them. He set the goblin’s head on a spike above his gate and nailed the warg-skin to a tree just beyond it. Nobody in that part of the world needed the message explained.

They turned out once more that year, ridden by goblins into the Battle of Five Armies, and after the battle they were simply gone from those woods, and men walked abroad again without watching the treeline.

Decades later the Fellowship of the Ring met them in Hollin, west of the mountains, where wargs had no business being. No orcs came with them this time. The company forted up inside a ring of stones on a hilltop with a fire in the middle, and in the small hours a great wolf came to the edge of the light and was challenged by name as a hound of Sauron before Legolas put an arrow through it. The rest came in a mass after that. Gandalf called out in Elvish for fire against the wolf-host, the tree above him went up like a torch, the whole hilltop caught, and the survivors scattered into the dark.

At dawn there were no bodies. Not one. Only Legolas’s arrows lying whole on the scorched ground where wolves had fallen, undamaged, as though the things they had been shot into had stopped existing. Whatever died in that ring left nothing to bury.

That detail does more work than anything else written about them. It puts the Wargs among the demonic rather than the merely vicious, evil spirits wearing wolf-shape rather than animals with bad habits, and sets them alongside the older werewolves of the Elder Days, Draugluin and Carcharoth, without quite merging the two kinds. Where they came from is not recorded. One reading, drawn from the drafts behind The Hobbit, places them among the creatures Morgoth bred in the First Age and left behind him. Gandalf, listing the servants of Sauron late in the Third Age, names Wargs among them and does not explain what they are.

Their strengths follow from all that. They think, they plan, they speak, and they hold to agreements with other thinking enemies, which makes a warg pack a military formation rather than a hazard of the landscape. They carry armed riders at speed across country that would stop a horse. They prefer to work at night. And on the evidence of Hollin, killing one is not quite the same transaction as killing an animal.

The limits are just as consistent. Fire frightens them out of all proportion, and a single burning cone thrown into a pack will break it. They cannot climb, which is why a man twenty feet up a pine is safe and knows it. Above all they are subordinates. Wargs raid for goblins, carry orcs and answer to Sauron, and the moment their allies collapse they melt back into the woods and stay there.

The word did not stay in the woods. Gene Wolfe borrowed it for a short science fiction story in 1967, close enough that Tolkien noticed and remarked on it, and from there it drifted into the wider fantasy vocabulary, where it now trots around as the worg of countless dungeons. A term that once meant an outlawed man, hunted like a beast, has come back into English as a beast. Anyone using it in the ninth century would have caught the joke immediately.

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 live east of the Misty Mountains, speak a language of their own, ally themselves with goblins and orcs, and are frequently ridden into battle as mounts. Tolkien treats them as something closer to evil spirits in wolf form than to real animals.

Are Wargs the same as werewolves?

No, though the line between them is not sharp. Tolkien’s werewolves, such as Draugluin and Carcharoth, belong to the ancient wars of the Elder Days and are explicitly spirits housed in wolf bodies, while Wargs appear later and are usually described simply as an evil breed of wolves. Both are listed separately among the servants of the Enemy.

Where does the word Warg come from?

Tolkien built the word from Old Norse vargr and Old English wearg, both descended from a root meaning strangler or choker. Norse vargr meant wolf and outlaw at once, while Old English wearg meant only an outlaw or hunted criminal and had lost the animal sense. The spelling “warg” is Tolkien’s own cross of the two forms.

How do you fight off Wargs?

Fire. Wargs are terrified of it out of all proportion to the damage it does, and in The Hobbit a handful of burning pine cones thrown down from a tree is enough to break an entire pack. They also cannot climb, so height is safety, though a burning wood removes that advantage very quickly.

Did Tolkien invent Wargs?

Tolkien invented the creature, not the word. Wargs as a race of speaking, goblin-ridden wolves originate in The Hobbit in 1937; the term behind them is genuinely ancient Germanic. Tolkien said the warg episode itself was partly derived from a werewolf fight in S. R. Crockett’s 1899 novel The Black Douglas, which he had read as a schoolboy.

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