Trolls are fictional characters in J. R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, and feature in films and games adapted from his novels. They are portrayed as monstrously large humanoids of great strength and poor intellect. In The Hobbit, like the dwarf Alviss of Norse mythology, they must be below ground before dawn or turn to stone, whereas in The Lord of the Rings they are able to face daylight.
In Norse mythology, the god Thor talked to the dwarf Alviss to prevent him from marrying his daughter Þrúðr; at dawn Alviss turns to stone. Drawing by W. G. Collingwood, 1908
Tolkien based details such as the trolls' tiredness with mutton on William Morris's travels in Iceland. Drawing of Morris cooking in Iceland c. 1870 by Edward Burne-Jones
Tolkien's wordless trolls have been compared to Grendel, a monster in Beowulf. Illustration by J. R. Skelton, 1908
A cave-troll in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring
Middle-earth is the setting of much of the English writer J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy. The term is equivalent to the Miðgarðr of Norse mythology and Middangeard in Old English works, including Beowulf. Middle-earth is the human-inhabited world, that is, the central continent of the Earth, in Tolkien's imagined mythological past. Tolkien's most widely read works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, are set entirely in Middle-earth. "Middle-earth" has also become a short-hand term for Tolkien's legendarium, his large body of fantasy writings, and for the entirety of his fictional world.
A detail of Middle-earth in one of Peter Jackson's film sets
Medieval Christian cosmology: heaven above, earth in the middle, hell below. Vank Cathedral, Isfahan.
