Tolkien’s Darkest Unknown Horrors - Middle Earth Lore DOCUMENTARY

0:11 J.R.R.

0:11 Tolkien's legendarium is a vast tapestry of myth, history, and moral philosophy,

0:16 where monsters often embody deeper themes of corruption,

0:20 ancient evil, and the unknown.

0:22 While creatures like dragons and trolls

0:24 are well-explained within the cosmology of Middle-earth,

0:27 all beings deriving from Morgoth's corruptions,

0:30 certain entities remain “unexplained.” These “unexplained monsters”

0:33 such as the Watcher in the Water, the Nameless Things,

0:37 and Old Man Willow defy easy categorization,

0:40 existing on the fringes of Tolkien's structured world.

0:44 They evoke a sense of cosmic-love craftian horror,

0:47 hinting at primordial forces predating

0:49 the Valar and Eru Ilúvatar's ordered creation.

0:52 In this video, we will explore what is known about these primordial entities,

0:57 delving into the lore that Tolkien wrote into the edges

1:00 of his pages to enrich the depth and mystique of his world.

1:04 The Watcher in the Water On January 13 of T.A 3019,

1:09 the Fellowship sidestepped a dark pool of stagnant

1:12 water to approach the Doors of Durin.

1:14 The Sirannon river had once flowed through this valley,

1:17 so something had dammed or diverted it.

1:19 As Gandalf tried to recall the password to open the door,

1:23 Boromir threw a rock into the pool in his frustration, rousing a creature.

1:27 “Out of the water, a long sinuous tentacle had crawled.

1:31 It was pale green, luminous, and wet.

1:33 Its fingered end had hold of Frodo’s foot and was dragging him into the water.

1:38 Twenty of them moved with one intention.

1:41 Its strength was horrible.

1:42 Its stench was hideous.” Sam was the fastest to act,

1:46 hacking at the limb to free Frodo

1:48 as twenty additional tentacles burst from the lake,

1:51 accompanied by a horrid stench.

1:53 As the Fellowship fled into Moria, the tentacles groped along the shore,

1:57 seized the doors, and, with brutal force, slammed them shut.

2:01 “I felt that something horrible was near

2:03 from the moment my foot touched the water,” Frodo said.

2:06 Was it one creature or many?” “I do not know,' answered Gandalf,

2:10 'but the arms were all guided by one purpose.

2:13 Something has crept, or has been driven out of dark waters under the mountains.

2:18 There are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world.”

2:24 He did not speak aloud his thought that whatever it was that dwelt in the lake,

2:28 it had seized on Frodo first among all the Company.

2:32 As the Fellowship traversed Moria,

2:34 they came across the tomb of Balin and the book of Mazarbul.

2:37 Within the last pages of the book,

2:39 Gandalf read of the plight of Balin’s company,

2:42 which attempted to recolonize Khazad-dûm thirty years prior.

2:46 Initially, the Dwarves had been successful,

2:48 but Balin was killed by an Orc archer,

2:50 allowing the foe to recapture the East-Gate,

2:53 First Hall and Second Hall after a fierce battle.

2:56 The Dwarves tried to escape the onslaught, and it was said of those fleeing

2:59 for the westgate that “Óins party went five days ago,

3:02 but only four returned: the pool is up to the wall at Westgate:

3:07 the watcher in the water took Óin- we cannot

3:10 get out.” It seems that, prior to the orc assault,

3:13 it was the Dwarves who dammed the Sirranon outside the Westgate.

3:17 Over time, the dam created a lake that rose

3:20 to the doors themselves and receded somewhat by T.A.

3:24 3018.

3:24 We are never given a full description of the creature

3:27 or creatures that gave rise to the twenty tentacles.

3:29 During The Hobbit, when Bilbo is venturing into Gollum’s cave,

3:33 we are given a possible description:

3:35 “So it is a pool or a lake, and not an underground river,” he thought.

3:39 Still, he did not dare to wade out into the darkness.

3:42 He could not swim, and he thought, too, of nasty slimy things,

3:46 with big bulging blind eyes, wriggling in the water.

3:50 There are strange things living in the pools

3:52 and lakes in the hearts of mountains:

3:54 fish whose fathers swam in, goodness only knows how many years ago,

3:58 and never swam out again, while their eyes grew bigger and bigger and bigger

4:02 from trying to see in the blackness; also,

4:05 there are other things more slimy than fish.” It

4:08 could be that these slimy fish creatures were the Watcher,

4:11 but there is no definitive description beyond the tentacles themselves.

4:15 The tentacles are described as long,

4:17 sinuous, pale-green, luminous with fingered ends.

4:20 They are certainly formidable,

4:22 as they uprooted trees and toppled the West Gate with ease.

4:26 Moreover, Balin’s company ostensibly chose to face an entire Orc army over them.

4:31 Additionally, the tentacles seemed to target the Ring-bearer,

4:34 not Boromir, who threw the stone, nor Bill the Pony, who was

4:39 closer by, suggesting perhaps an insidious intelligence.

4:41 Gandalf surmised that the monster might be very old,

4:44 driven up from the dark waters under the mountain.

4:48 Perhaps it was the awakening of Durin’s Bane that drove the monster up.

4:53 So what is the origin of this monster?

4:55 It could be that the Watcher was

4:56 a primordial aquatic creature corrupted by Morgoth.

5:00 J.E.A Tyler in The Complete Tolkien Companion suggested

5:04 the Watcher was actually one of Morgoth’s ambiguous cold-drakes.

5:08 However, it seems far more likely the Watcher was a by-product of Morgoth,

5:12 rather than a being directly designed by him,

5:15 as Morgoth greatly feared the Sea, which was the domain of Ulmo.

5:19 Unlike most of the Valar who dwelt in Valinor,

5:21 Ulmo dwelt in the seas and watched over the Children closely.

5:25 Because of this, Morgoth was unable to subdue or control water,

5:29 never building ships or waging war by sea,

5:32 and even his servants shunned the water.

5:35 Verlyn Flieger's Splintered Light interprets the Watcher as an embodiment

5:39 of "unlight,” a concept Tolkien explored in The Silmarillion,

5:43 where darkness is not mere absence but an active, malevolent force.

5:47 Flieger argues that the Watcher's habitat in the polluted waters

5:50 near Moria symbolizes the corruption seeping from Morgoth's ancient wars,

5:54 perhaps a remnant of Utumno's horrors.

5:57 Unlike Balrogs or dragons, which are explicitly Morgoth's servants,

6:02 the Watcher seems independent, possibly predating the Ainur's arrival.

6:06 Matthew Dickerson and Jonathan Evans' book, titled Ents, Elves, and Eriador,

6:11 views the Watcher as a perversion of nature,

6:14 its polluted pool a result of industrial dwarven mining.

6:17 They link it to Tolkien's environmentalism, as expressed in Letter 155,

6:22 where he laments the despoiling of landscapes.

6:26 Many Tolkien fans theorize that the Watcher is a fallen Maiar,

6:29 but scholars such as Douglas A.

6:31 Anderson dismiss this for lack of evidence,

6:35 emphasizing Tolkien's intentional vagueness.

6:37 Tom Shippey, in The Road to Middle-earth,

6:39 compares the Watcher to the Kraken of Norse legend,

6:42 suggesting Tolkien drew from Old English sources like Beowulf,

6:45 where monsters lurk in watery abysses.

6:48 Shippey noted the Watcher's tentacles evoke

6:51 the "grasping" motif in Anglo-Saxon poetry,

6:54 representing uncontrollable natural forces that threaten heroic quests.

6:59 This aligns with Tolkien's letter to Milton Waldman,

7:01 in which he describes Middle-earth as a world

7:04 where ancient evils persist in forgotten corners, not fully subdued by the gods.

7:09 Michael Drout, in J.R.R.

7:11 Tolkien Encyclopedia,

7:12 connects the Watcher to Babylonian chaos-monsters like Tiamat,

7:16 primordial sea-beasts slain by gods,

7:18 a motif Tolkien subverts by leaving it undefeated.

7:22 Drout argues this underscores themes of enduring evil,

7:25 as per Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Stories,"

7:29 where sub-creation mirrors an imperfect world.

7:32 In terms of narrative function, the Watcher serves as a threshold guardian,

7:36 testing the Fellowship's resolve before entering Moria's deeper perils.

7:40 John Rateliff's The History of The Hobbit draws

7:43 analogies to similar guardians in Tolkien's earlier works,

7:46 like the "water-demons" in drafts of The Hobbit.

7:49 Rateliff suggests that revisions to the Moria sequence,

7:52 by emphasizing the Watcher's mystery,

7:55 heighten tension and reflect Tolkien's evolving style toward ambiguity.

7:59 The Nameless Things Even more obscure than

8:00 the Watcher in the Water and possibly even related,

8:03 were beings Gandalf referred to when describing

8:06 his battle with the Balrog to Aragorn,

8:09 Legolas and Gimli, “We fought far under the living earth,

8:12 where time is not counted.

8:13 Ever he clutched me, and ever I hewed him,

8:16 till at last he fled into dark tunnels.

8:18 They were not made by Durin’s folk, Gimli son of Glóin.

8:22 Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves,

8:25 the world is gnawed by nameless things.

8:28 Even Sauron knows them not.

8:29 They are older than he.

8:31 Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day.

8:37 In that despair, my enemy was my only hope,

8:39 and I pursued him, clutching at his heel.

8:41 Thus, he brought me back at last to the secret ways of Khazad-dûm:

8:45 too well he knew them all.

8:47 Ever up now we went, until we came to the Endless Stair.”

8:52 The only possible description of these Nameless

8:54 Things comes from the same passage

8:56 from The Hobbit about Bilbo’s venture into Gollum’s cave.

8:59 “also there are other things more slimy than fish.

9:02 Even in the tunnels and caves the goblins have made for themselves,

9:06 there are other things living unbeknownst to them that have

9:09 sneaked in from outside to lie up in the dark.

9:12 Some of these caves, too,

9:13 go back in their beginnings to ages before the goblins,

9:16 who only widened them and joined them up with passages,

9:20 and the original owners are still there in odd corners,

9:23 slinking and nosing about.” Based on these two passages,

9:27 we know these creatures were capable of creating tunnels large

9:30 enough for Balrogs to navigate and were older than Sauron,

9:33 predating the physical arrival of some Maiar to Arda.

9:37 Similar to the Watcher, they could be primordial creatures or beings

9:41 corrupted directly or indirectly by Morgoth,

9:44 though we are given no indication that they are evil.

9:47 Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey interprets them

9:50 as manifestations of the existential void,

9:52 drawing from Tolkien's experiences in World War I trenches.

9:56 As John Garth details in Tolkien and the Great War,

10:00 the Nameless Things symbolize the senseless, subterranean horrors of war,

10:04 echoing the "No Man's Land" where unnamed terrors lurk.

10:07 Shippey, in Author of the Century, links them to Old Norse concepts of Niflheim,

10:13 the misty underworld,

10:14 suggesting Tolkien infused philological depth to evoke pre-Christian dread.

10:18 Flieger's A Question of Time explores their temporal anomaly:

10:23 beings older than Sauron imply existence before the world's shaping.

10:28 Flieger argues that this challenges Eru's monopoly on creation,

10:32 perhaps representing chaotic residues from the Ainulindalë's discordant music.

10:36 In The Silmarillion, similar unnamed evils are hinted at, but Flieger sees

10:41 the Nameless Things as deliberate gaps in the cosmology,

10:45 underscoring Tolkien's Catholic view of incomplete human knowledge.

10:48 Dimitra Fimi examines cultural influences,

10:51 comparing them to Aboriginal Dreamtime entities or Lovecraft's Elder Gods,

10:56 though Tolkien disavowed direct inspiration.

10:58 Despite this, Fimi, in Celtic Myth in Contemporary Children's Fantasy,

11:03 notes parallels with Welsh Annwn creatures,

11:05 underworld beings whose names are avoided to avoid summoning them.

11:09 Todd Jensen suggests that The Nameless Things may have

11:12 been inspired by the dragon Nidhog of Norse mythology,

11:16 who gnawed at the roots of Yggdrasil.

11:18 Narrative-wise, the Nameless Things heighten Gandalf's resurrection arc,

11:22 as analyzed by Janet Brennan Croft in War and the Works of J.R.R.

11:27 Tolkien.

11:28 Croft views their presence as a descent into hell, akin to Christ's Harrowing,

11:32 with the creatures as demonic remnants too ancient for Sauron's command.

11:37 Old Man Willow During the Fellowship of the Ring,

11:38 the first hostile character the Hobbits faced

11:40 after leaving the Shire was Old Man Willow.

11:43 The Hobbits are forced to cut through the Old Forest.

11:46 As they did so, Merry observed that “the forest

11:49 is queer and the trees do not like strangers.

11:52 They watch you.

11:53 Occasionally, the most unfriendly ones may drop a branch,

11:56 or stick a root out, or grasp at you with a long trailer.

11:59 I have only once or twice been in here after dark, and then only near the hedge.

12:04 I thought all the trees were whispering to each other,

12:06 and the branches swayed and groped without any wind.

12:09 They do say the trees do actually move,

12:12 and can surround strangers and hem them in.

12:14 In fact, long ago, they attacked the Hedge:

12:17 they came and planted themselves right by it, and leaned over it.

12:20 But the hobbits came and cut down hundreds of trees,

12:23 and made a great bonfire in the Forest,

12:25 and burned all the ground in a long strip east of the Hedge.

12:29 After that, the trees gave up the attack, but they became very unfriendly.”

12:34 As the Hobbits travelled through the Old Forest,

12:36 Old Man Willow cast a sleeping spell on them,

12:39 before trapping Pippin and Merry in the cracks

12:41 of its trunk and tipping Frodo into a stream.

12:44 Sam managed to stay awake and saved Frodo.

12:47 Afterwards, the two burned dry leaves,

12:49 grass and bark to scare the tree before it squeezed Pippin and Merry to death.

12:54 All of them were saved by Tom Bombadil, who put the tree to sleep.

12:58 Tom would go on to explain that “the hearts of trees and their thoughts,

13:02 which were often dark and strange,

13:04 and filled with a hatred of things that go free upon the earth,

13:07 gnawing, biting, breaking, hacking, burning: destroyers and usurpers.

13:11 It was not called the Old Forest without reason,

13:15 for it was indeed ancient, a survivor of vast forgotten woods;

13:19 and in it there lived yet, ageing no quicker than the hills,

13:23 the fathers of the fathers of trees, remembering times when they were lords.

13:27 The countless years had filled them

13:29 with pride and rooted wisdom, and with malice.

13:32 But none were more dangerous than the Great Willow:

13:35 his heart was rotten, but his strength was green; and he was cunning,

13:39 and a master of winds,

13:40 and his song and thought ran through the woods on both sides of the river.

13:44 His grey thirsty spirit drew power out of the earth

13:47 and spread like fine root-threads in the ground,

13:50 and invisible twig-fingers in the air,

13:52 till it had under its dominion nearly all the trees

13:55 of the Forest from the Hedge to the Downs”.

13:57 Prior to writing Lord of the Rings,

13:59 Tolkien had developed Old Man Willow as a predatory

14:03 tree in his 1934 poem The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.

14:06 Flieger notes that in this draft and in the 1943

14:10 "Manuscript B,” Tolkien links "a tree and a spirit,

14:14 a 'non-incarnate mind which is imprisoned in an individual

14:17 tree.” It seems evident that Old Man Willow’s

14:20 malice derives from the time of Gorhendad Oldbuck’s colonization

14:23 of the land between Brandywine and the Old Forest,

14:26 when the Hobbits of Buckland felled the forest to make their new homes

14:30 and build “the hedge,” a large wall separating their country from the woodland.

14:35 As Merry explained, when the trees grew too close to the hedge,

14:38 the Hobbits cut down the nearest ones and formed a clearing using a bonfire,

14:42 causing them to become more hostile.

14:45 It seems much less likely that Morgoth or Sauron played any role

14:49 in imprisoning a spirit within a tree to form Old Man Willow,

14:52 and more plausible that the creature was an Ent or a Huorn,

14:56 bitter over the destruction of its Old Forest.

14:59 Tom Shippey analyzes Old Man Willow as a folkloric holdover,

15:02 akin to the Green Man or Scandinavian tree-spirits, in The Road to Middle-earth.

15:07 Shippey argues it represents nature's indifference to humanity.

15:11 Flieger views Old Man Willow as a symbol of "entangled

15:15 time,” its ancient grudge against

15:17 two-legged creatures stemming from prehistoric deforestation,

15:19 per Green Suns and Faërie.

15:21 Fimi compares Old Man Willow to the sacred oaks of druidic lore in Tolkien,

15:27 Race, and Cultural History.

15:29 Fimi posits Tolkien subverted romanticized nature,

15:32 making Old Man Willow a critique of anthropocentrism.

15:36 Narratively, Old Man Willow serves as a pivotal early antagonist,

15:40 bridging the pastoral innocence of the Shire

15:42 with the darker perils of the wider world.

15:45 As the hobbits' first major encounter with hostility beyond their homeland,

15:48 it underscores themes of nature's latent

15:51 dangers and the consequences of environmental disregard.

15:53 Jane Chance, in The Lord of the Rings: The Mythology of Power,

15:58 notes how Old Man Willow's hypnosis mirrors the Ring's allure,

16:02 challenging the hobbits' innocence and forcing them to confront external evils.

16:06 Conclusion Tolkien's unexplained monsters– the Watcher, Nameless Things,

16:10 and Old Man Willow– serve as vital counterpoints to his more defined lore,

16:15 embodying the inscrutable aspects of existence that defy categorization.

16:19 They highlight themes of ancient chaos, environmental retribution,

16:23 and the boundaries of knowledge, enriching Middle-earth's depth.

16:26 Scholars universally praise how these entities draw from diverse mythologies,

16:32 infusing Tolkien's Catholic worldview with pagan mystery.

16:36 As Shippey and Flieger emphasize,

16:38 their ambiguity invites ongoing interpretation,

16:40 ensuring the legendarium's timeless appeal.

16:43 Ultimately, these monsters remind us that true wonder lies in the unknown,

16:48 urging us to respect the world's hidden perils.

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