Giants?
 

Where did the giants come from? What exactly were they? Where they like trolls, or were they like men, or were they like gods or something?

Which giants?

'Giants' were mentioned a number of times in the Hobbit and I think once near the beginning of the Lord of the Rings. It does seem that there is very little to no information in their regard but I do believe, if memory serves, that they were in part based on 'giants' in Beowulf.

Giants were trolls of some kind, the ones in the Hobbit lived in the Misty Mtns. and threw large rocks at Thorin & co.

It does not say in the Hobbit that the Giants were Trolls of some sort. In the Complete Guide to Middle Earth, stone-giants are described as Golfimbul being the Orc whom Bandobras Took beheaded in the Battle of the Greenfields with a club and the game of golf invented,

The thing about Giants is that they don't belong. The Hobbit is only about half-way in Middle-earth, the other half was (you could say) made up by Bilbo. Giants aren't real. During The Hobbit Bilbo is just a silly hobbit, new to the wide world, and he wasn't taking notes on his journey. What he couldn't remember he made up, and what wasn't cool he made cool.

So if The Hobbit is Bilbo's personal memoirs, would that mean the chapter The Riddle Game isn't what really happened?

So it would. However we know that the version in The Hobbit is accurate from Gandalf's comments in FoTR, something which Tolkien explains in the appendices to LoTR. Bilbo edited his memoirs for accuracy.

Not exactly. You can consider The Hobbit to be generally accurate, if a bit off in the details. For example, I don't know if Bilbo would have been quite so bold in the face of a dragon, even if he did have the Ring to protect him.

What is cooler, a rock slide or Giants tossing rocks at you?

I don't think it would be too cool to have giants throwing rocks at me...

Aldagrim

Actually, Tolkien rewrote that chapter a while after the book was published. His explanation was that Bilbo had an account he put in his book and told all his friends that was more glamorous, but he was forced to tell the real story when the Red Book of Westmarch was authored.

People who've been hit by big rocks tend to cool quite rapidly. Does that count?

Underhill, I'm sure you are referring to the heat caused by the friction between the giants' hands and the aforementioned rocks at the point of release. You appear to neglect thought of the cooling effect of the air rushing past the rock surface in-flight, however.

Added to which, given that some of those 'rock-strikes' would be near-misses, a 'cooling' breeze may well spring up in your vicinity.

For goodness sake, man, think!

But of course you're thinking of the later Myths Transformed version of Middle-earth where Tolkien expressed his regret for not including a more realistic set of thermodynamic laws into his created world and toyed with rewriting the legendarium to reflect them.

Since his efforts never passed the embryonic stage, we can hardly consider them canon, now can we, hmm? Therefore, I stand by my "uncool" theory, in keeping with the Valinor-based system of thermodynamics which was in place when The Hobbit was penned.

I'd provide some quotes, but unfortunately I don't have my HoME handy at the moment...

[ August 08, 2002: Message edited by: Mister Underhill ]

Mister Underhill, oh equus straddling wordsmith of such withering countenance, I guide your attention to Fëanor himself, at that time in Valinor when Finwe heaved a Silmaril at him in disgust.

More importantly, with reference to thermodynamics. The Hobbit was published in the 1930s, by which time the laws of physics, including those of friction, air resistance and the displacement effect of a foreign body, were much as we know them today. Tolkien, as an eminently bright man, would have known this and applied them thus.

Therefore I quibble with your post-Hobbit non-canonical status application with reference to twentieth century thermodynamics in the matter of giants throwing rocks in LoTR.

[ August 08, 2002: Message edited by: Stephanos ]

Ha! Your out-of-context quote does not reveal the characteristic sarcasm implicit in Fëanor's mocking reply. Everyone knows those Silmarils were like super-heated potatoes.

Do you mean to imply that the Earth was widely considered flat when Tolkien wrote the early versions of the Silmarillion?

[ August 08, 2002: Message edited by: Mister Underhill ]

Underhill: 1
Stephanos: 0

Their next head to head competition will take place three days from now in a topic yet to be determined. Stay tuned!

So it seems that "giants" refers to large beings in general, Ents and trolls primarily.

Perhaps burrahobbit's landslide was the production of the malicious intent of certain trolls, who would have been giants to a man, and certainly so to a hobbit.

[ August 10, 2002: Message edited by: The Silver-shod Muse ]

Except that Bilbo knew what trolls were.

Someone once told me that the bit in the old Zelda games when you're walking along a clif and rocks come tumbling down, is the Gorons defending their mountains.
Sounds familiar, eh.

Yes, but there are very many different kinds and sizes of trolls (i.e. cave, mountain, etc.) and if I remember correctly, the weather was very stormy and visibility was probably not favorable. I'm sure that if a large, indeterminate something were hurtling boulders at you in the middle of a raging storm, you might be inclined to feel that the situation is worse than it really is, if that is possible, hence Bilbo calling them "giants" instead of trolls.

Besides this, trolls were already used in Bilbo's little "story", and perhaps, as you said burrahobbit, "what wasn't cool he made cool."

On Giants,
[img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]
I'm pro-giant, after all, most of the time, whenever the fellowship visit a new place JRRT gives us a new society or creature to debate, so why not giants too?
Who knows what's lurking at the edges of the maps in Rhun and Khand, or even closer to home in Minhiriath for example?

In the Hobbit, Gandalf mentions the giants, commenting that one day he'd have to find a decent giant who would block up the goblin cave for him. Therefore, (if G was being serious), Giants aren't necessarily all bad, just a bit boisterous when there's a thunderstorm!

So how's this for a ridiculous theory...I have recently learned that one of the Old English words for giant is...get this... ent. Furthermore, I was wandering through the library, wandered past a copy of The Treason of Isengard, glanced into it, and immediately noticed a chapter entitled "Treebeard the Giant."

You don't suppose it was ents up there throwing rocks at them, do you? Maybe a couple half-crazed, disgruntledly wandering entwives who'd taken control of the mountain and whose postwar bitterness against all kelvar had led them to throw rocks at anything that moved??

All right, there are obviously more sensible explanations for this, but the entwife image doesn't really put me in a very sensible mood.... [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

--Belin Ibaimendi

That's great, Belin. I love it. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]
Why couldn't it have been Thor up in the sky, hurling lightning bolts that only seemed like rocks falling?

Okay, without having actually read the book I'm referring to, this feels like cheating, but...

I went back and looked at that page of the book again (It's "Treebeard Giant" incidentally and not "Treebeard the Giant") and there's a comment about Tolkien's distinction between trolls, stone-giants, and ents. So, I guess they're not ents (and here the entwife idea was so much fun, too!), but they belong to the same group, perhaps, like trolls, akin to them.. or at least, that's a skimmer's interpretation. So this is a drawn out and rather unnecessary way of saying that the Silver-shod Muse seems to have it about right.

--Belin Ibaimendi,
not really here.