Stone-trolls

The breed

Stone-trolls are the trolls of the hills and woods of eastern Eriador, especially the Trollshaws between the Hoarwell and the Loudwater, and the Ettenmoors to the north, whose name preserves an old word for giants. They are the old kind of Troll as Morgoth made them, without Sauron's later improvements: huge, thick-hided, slow-witted and ravenous, and helpless before the sun, which turns them to stone. The three trolls of Bilbo's adventure, Bert, Tom and William, are the type.

Speech and manners

Unlike most of the Shadow's creatures the stone-trolls spoke a recognisable Westron, coarse and comic, and they had names of the same rustic kind as the Men of Bree. They lived in caves stocked with plunder, cooked their prey over open fires, and quarrelled constantly over it. They came down out of the mountains when food was scarce, and Bert, Tom and William had eaten a village and a half between them before the Dwarves came along. Their weaknesses were greed, vanity and stupidity, and Gandalf turned all three against them by keeping them arguing until the dawn.

The troll-hoard

The cave of the three trolls held their loot, and in it lay the swords Glamdring and Orcrist, made in Gondolin in the First Age, and the knife that became Sting. How those blades came from the ruin of Gondolin to a troll-hole in Eriador is not told; the trolls had presumably taken them from earlier victims or from some plundered tomb. Their discovery armed Thorin, Gandalf and Bilbo for the whole of the quest.

Later appearances

When Aragorn led the hobbits from Weathertop toward Rivendell they passed through the Trollshaws and came on the three stone figures, now overgrown and used as a landmark. The Rangers of the North watched the region, and Aragorn spoke of the country as still dangerous. The trolls of the Ettenmoors are elsewhere described as hill-trolls, and the two names overlap; the stone-trolls are simply those trolls of Eriador whose fate in daylight is best remembered.

Enormous, heavy-limbed and thick-hided, with great faces and small eyes, standing far above a Man. Their skin is like stone, and at the touch of the sun it becomes stone in fact, so that the petrified troll keeps its last posture.

A brigand's life in caves and holes with a hoard of stolen goods, cooking over fires, quarrelling, and singing crude songs. They knew nothing of their master or the wars, and served only their own bellies.

The old trolls of Morgoth's making, scattered into the wild after the fall of Angband and surviving in the mountains and moors of the North.

Still present in the Trollshaws at the end of the Third Age; Bert, Tom and William stood turned to stone from 2941.