![]() ![]() A Balrog carries Gandalf down into the depths in the Mines of Moria in The Lord of the Rings, although other Balrogs turn up in The Silmarillion, Tolkien’s life’s work which builds up the mythology of Middle-Earth. We’ll conclude this list of fictional monsters with another from Tolkien’s work: the Balrog, the tall, fearsome being with fiery whip-like tentacles. We had to include one dragon on this list, and although this one may not be the most fearsome dragon in all of literature and myth, Smaug has become one of the most famous. Smaug is the dragon that guards the hoard of treasure that Bilbo Baggins, and the party of dwarves, go off in search of in Tolkien’s original story, The Hobbit (1937), a novel we have analysed in more detail here.ĭrawing on his intensive knowledge of Nordic folklore, Tolkien made a children’s story (that also stands up to being reread in adulthood) out of centuries-old legend. Let’s conclude with a couple of the best-known monsters from Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. Now it’s readily available again, and well worth reading, not least for its horrific title character. The Beetle, written by ‘Richard Marsh’, was initially more popular than Stoker’s creation when it was published in 1897, although that soon changed, and the novel was long-forgotten and out of print. Seen by Jonathan Harker climbing the walls of his castle in Transylvania, Dracula can transform himself into bat and human at will.Īnother fictional shape-shifter who made their debut in print in 1897, the Beetle is a female entity, born of the cult of Isis (no relation), who can be both beetle and human, and who arrives in the city of London hell-bent on exacting a terrible revenge upon a British politician. ![]() ![]() Dracula, however, was a richer and more complex creation than most, fusing the history of the fifteenth-century ruler Vlad the Impaler with folklore and contemporary fears surrounding ‘the Other’ as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Dracula needs little introduction, although it’s worth pointing out that vampire fiction in Britain was well-established by the time the Irish-born Bram Stoker published his famous novel in 1897. ![]()
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