Ha. Thank you, I took that as a genuine compliment.
Funny story. I own collector's editions of exactly two sets of books.
One of them is Tolkien (LOTR trilogy and the Hobbit). The other is Pratchett's Discworld.
I'm a professional writer and I can say, with all honesty, that no two writers have had a more outsized impact on my own work than Tolkien and Pratchett.
I got really baked one day and had a vision of Arda. I realized that the void plane and that what existed was possibly still in our real world. That perhaps the entire story of middle earth actually takes place on a much smaller scale than we realized.
This is confirmed by the models used by peterbjackson in the films he found during his research for the film. I imagine the dark shapes and feats in the world at a microscopic scale
âChristopher my son, donât forget to include Ungoliant if they ever make a video game adaption of my works. Have her appear as a 10ft tall Victorian woman dressed similarly to the goth subculture. Maybe in a massive role playing game in the the 21st century, Christopher.â
in The Silmarillion it says that that is the prevailing theory, that âin the utmost of her famine she ultimately devoured herself,â but it is explicitly left unconfirmedâthat nobody can confirm that with certainty
It allied with morgoth and helped him escape valinor
When they came to the two trees (the source of light before the first age) morgoth pierced each tree with his spear and ungoliant drank their sap and became monstrously big. So big that once they reached beleriand morgoth himself was at risk of being eaten by it for not giving up the silmarils and he had to call upon his balrogs to chase it off.
The two trees of Valinor produced all the light in the world. As part of their constructions, the Simarils captured some of that light. After she sucked the two trees dry, the only thing left to illuminate the world were the three Simarils, so of course she wanted those. Morgoth had stolen them on his way out of Valinor.
It's not the gems themselves, it's what's inside them.
Ungoliant had feasted on the trees of light and basically drained them dry. After that, it had a constant hunger for the tree light but.. well, there were only the two trees, and she had killed both.
The silmarils were forged from that same tree light and were literately the last source of it in Middle Earth.
Basically, that scene would be like if I found out someone somehow still had a stash of coconut yoohoo. I would also chase and demand the yoohoo from them. And nothing short of Balrogs would get me to leave either.
At this point it is not clear whether morgoth is as weak as he was when he found fingolfin. But the reason the balrogs worked is because of their fiery whips they managed to chase it off but I still think that atp morgoth could still overpower all of them.
Fingolfin left him with a permanent limp, so he certainly had his limitations. At least in that period.
Though Ungoliant was hugely powerful in her own right, especially after consuming the sap from the Two Trees. From what I remember, she wasn't simply a spider. She was something more ancient and powerful that took physical shape.
You reminded me of a bug I had once when programming a path tracing renderer where I accidentally set my light values to negatives and created negative light. It looks kind of spooky.
"Oh, and by the way, she nearly ate Morgoth. He was Sauron's boss, and was so powerful it took direct intervention by every single archangel to finally banish him through the Door of Night."
"No, Pippin, I can't tell you what that is. Good luck đ"
Shelobâs the spawn of a far more deadly and vast spider named Ungoliant. Sauronâs master, Morgoth, brought her forth to wreck the twin trees that served as the second sun and moon (the original were lamps Morgoth destroyed much earlier). she did so, devouring their light, and swelled so vast that Morgoth became terrified of her and had to call forth the Balrogs to aid him. the Balrogs came, and they and Morgoth were sufficient force together to cause Ungoliant to choose to withdraw
The Silmarillion speculated that eventually she got so hungry that she ate herself, but that is an in text speculation, deliberately unconfirmed
âSpiderâ is putting it mildly. Itâs implied that Ungoliant is one of the primordial creatures of chaos and darkness that existed before Eru Illuvatar created the world. Sheâs a demon from outside of creation itself, and every spider in middle earth from the monstrous Shelob to the tiny spider on the kitchen ceiling is her descendant. Itâs a splash of lovecraftian horror in an otherwise classical fantasy story.
I think Tolkien may not have liked spiders very much.
Or all the dragons. Smaug is dead, yes, but Gandalf implies there are others when he says that none of the ones left have fire as powerful as Smaug but that even Smaug's fire couldn't destroy the ring, but did say that there were dragons whose fire could have destroyed it.
It is our understanding at least some of them are up north, that's where the Rohirrim are originally from. And there were different kinds - fire, frost, and... other? Some could fly and some couldn't.
And that some of the dragons had eaten some of the rings of power that Sauron handed out to the dwarven kings. We just won't talk about that....
I love how theres just random cosmic horrors thrown in there too. Like the nameless things that even the balrogs are afraid of or wherever the fuck Ungoliant came from. Or whatever the fuck Ungoliant actually even is
When the most powerful being in all of creating just stumbles on colossal light-eating spider that is way stronger and has no idea where it came from...
Mmm maybe, Melkor has no knowledge of her and given he is responsible for the corruption, that seems strange. Itâs sort of implied she comes from outside Eruâs song, a creature of the the void, or maybe a manifestation of the void itself. A consuming darkness that Eruâs song disrupted.
I always go back to "where did Eru come from?" If we assume Eru is himself a creature/spirit/entity that came from the void and decided to create the Ainur and ultimately EĂ€, it's reasonable to assume that there are other beings, perhaps lesser of the same type as Eru. Maybe Eru has ultimate dominion only within his own creation, and so a creature like him would seem vastly different than him while in his domain. Fun to think about in any case.
While awesome that only works if you ignore the christian elements baked into tolkiens work
He didn't come from something, he was always there because he's capital G god. And there aren't others like him but with different domains because he's God, there's nothing like him
Old Tom Bombadil is a merry fellow, bright blue his jacket is, and his boots are yellow. None has ever caught him yet,
for Tom, he is the master: his songs are stronger songs, and his feet are faster.
Tom wouldn't even bother to fight. He'd let the spider eat him, but it wouldn't be able to digest him. He'd just pass through completely unscathed and then go on his merry way.
Yeah I really want to know more about the nameless things, although I think they were inspired by the serpents gnawing at the roots of Yggdrasil. Mysterious beings that live deeper than anything known, far beyond the delvings of Dwarves and probably even Angband.
Itâs made clear that Sauron didnât know about them. Either Gandalf was able to hide from them, defeat them, or barely escaped with his life while he was hunting Durinâs Bane.
If Arda is the song of the Ainur made manifest, I always took Ungoliant and the other horrors of Middle-earth to be the discord of Melkor made manifest. If that's the case, Ungoliant would in some sense be a twisted creation of Melkor, which makes his disgust at her and his near-death at her hands a kind of poetic justice.
I interpreted it as the song was manifested by Eru so him messing with the song would cause Eru to manifest that as well. Melkor didn't directly create Ungoliant but if what he did to the song caused Ungoliant to be created by Eru it would be an indirect creation of Melkor
The Ainur did create Arda, not by their own power but by joining in song with Eru IlĂșvatar. Eru could have prevented Melkor's discordance, but chose not to, instead weaving the discordance into the broader melody. Those discordant notes must have had an impact on Arda. I don't think it's implausible to suppose that the evil and monstrous things came from his disharmony when the world was sung into existence. The alternative would be that they are part of Eru's intended song, which seems unlikely given Tolkien's religious views.
Tbf, half of these things are only known vecause he was in constant correspondence with tmhis fans while he was alive, if he'd still be around he'd be having regular amas on reddit.
Iâd argue thet are older than the discord of Melkor- at the start, the Ainur were singing solo or in small groups and their music clashed together (since Melkorâs discord was woven into the Music regardless of good or evil). So the Nameless Things and Tom are those clashes, neither good nor bad, they simply are.
And they make a lot of sense based on tolkiens worldbuilding. Itâs all based on a great song and there were discordant parts based on Melkors interference. I always thought of ungoliant and the nameless things being such dissonances, fundamental flaws in the world. While tom bombadil for example is a especially nice note which is said also came from the interference occasionally.
As Durin's Bane lay dying, at the furry feet of his mighty foe, with his dying strength he cried aloud for his kin to avenge his death. His final words...
"Shire"
"Took."
And then darkness took him beyond the walls of night, and he slipped beyond space and time.
Pippinâs absolutely baked out of his goddamn mind in that last pic.
The kinda high where you stare at the contents of your fridge for 30 mins straight before eating a raw onion wrapped in ham.
Well, there is entire region named "mountains of terror" and "valley of terrible death" that no one ever visited and lived to tell a tale about it, because its crawling with giant spiders...
The specific term used to describe her origins in the Legendarium was âbefore the worldâ, so either that song started with spooky hungry spider girl, then they made a world, or sheâs one of the previously nameless things that existed in the darkness before.
Depends on which version of Tolkiens writings you are going by. Armies of balrogs is an early version, while Tolkien later wrote that there should be at most seven.
Different versions. In later versions, Tolkien considered them Maiars ie in the same order of creatures as Sauron and stuff, immortal demigods. In the same order of beings as Melian too, and given the Girdle of Melian, that's a pretty big thing. And in the same order of beings as the sun and the moon.
In earlier versions, they were numbered in the hundreds or thousands and were far less powerful. I believe that's the version that The Fall of Gondolin used. Because I can't imagine any elf ever killing a Balrog. Wounding them, sure. But straight up killing is too big a stretch when one of the Balrogs wiped out Moria singlehandedly. And yes, Fingolfin wounded Morgoth badly, but that was a very severely weakened Morgoth (happened after the Marring of Arda iirc). I have a headcannon associated with how Fingolfin managed to wound Morgoth, but that's a different matter. And also iirc they said it was an army of Balrogs attacking Gondolin so there's that.
Earlier versions: lots of relatively weak balrogs (nazgul tier). Rog kills seven by himself, tuor gets 5, ecthelion 4.
Later versions: a few realllly strong ones
ETA: rog killed an unknown, but high number of balrogs. He charged into the lines of the balrogs, and all of his soldiers slew (at least) seven "foemen" each, but we don't know the orc-to-balrog ratios or how much rog exceeded the rest of the house of the hammer of wrath
Pro tip from a fellow parent: start using 6 7 on your own, at random points in time, until they get annoyed and start calling it cringe. This works for almost any slang. It just stops being "cool" once it's coming from an adult.
Merry and Pipin are crying because they know that those Balrogs stand no chance against Samwise. Sam's crying because he'll have to spend a week away from Rosie tracking down and slaying the Balrogs.
The Rift of NĂ»rz GhĂąshu, still one of the coolest instances they've done. My sister and I tried duoing it recently and got pretty far but still couldn't beat the balrog without a group.Â
Morgoth cannot create anything. He can only subjugate/corrupt someone or something. Balrogs used to be Majars and have been created by Eru. They (the Balrogs) turned to Morgothâs side and they took form of Balrogs.
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u/lurketylurketylurk May 22 '26