Warg

• 1. Introduction

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  The warg, as Tolkien imagined it, is a wolf that can speak, plan raids, and carry an orc rider into battle. Ten-year-old Rayner Unwin was taken enough with the creature to name it in a school report on an unpublished manuscript. He wrote that the hero "had a very exciting time fighting goblins and wargs." His father, the publisher Stanley Unwin, read that report and decided to print the book, though he still doubted its commercial prospects. The creature that charmed the boy was not invented from nothing. Tolkien built his warg from two ancient languages and from a Norse mythology with strong opinions about wolves, outlaws, and the end of the world.

• 2. Two Ancient Words

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  Tom Shippey, a Tolkien scholar, identifies Tolkien's spelling "warg" as a deliberate blend of two older words. Those words are the Old Norse vargr and the Old English wearh. Both carry meanings that drifted apart over centuries. Vargr means "wolf" but also "outlaw"; wearh means "outcast" or "outlaw" but has shed its earlier wolfish sense. Vargr traces back to a Proto-Germanic root reconstructed as wargaz. That form descends from the Proto-Indo-European root wergȴʰ-, meaning "destroy." It arose as a polite substitute for úlfr, the plain Old Norse word for wolf, a way to name the creature without invoking its full force. Shippey also draws attention to an Old English verb, awyrgan. It holds three related meanings: "to condemn an outcast," "to strangle an outcast to death," and possibly "to worry a sheep, to bite to death." Shippey writes that Tolkien's concept of wargs amounts to "wolves, but not just wolves, intelligent and malevolent wolves." His word, Shippey adds, "clearly splits the difference between Old Norse and Old English pronunciations." The Norse root, vargr, was already charged with mythological weight long before Tolkien touched it.

• 3. Wolves of Ragnarök

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  In Norse mythology, the wolf Fenrir kills the god Odin in the final battle of Ragnarök. Fenrir's children, Sköll and Hati, spend eternity pursuing the Sun and Moon across the sky. These three wolves are the Norse mythological figures that gave Tolkien his warg. Odin's own relationship with wolves carried a stark internal contradiction. He kept two wolves, Freki and Geri, both names meaning "Greedy," as his war companions. Yet his ultimate fate was to be killed and consumed by Fenrir. The Rök runestone uses the phrase "Gunnr's horse" as a poetic name for wolf. That phrase marks a tradition in which wolves served as literal mounts for dangerous beings. In the Lay of Hyndla, the seeress Hyndla herself rides a wolf. At the funeral of the god Baldr, the jötunn Hyrrokkin arrives on wolfback. The medievalist Marjorie Burns would later argue that Tolkien found a use for every part of this paradox.

• 4. More Than Mere Beasts

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  Marjorie Burns, a medievalist and Tolkien scholar, argues that Tolkien used Odin's dual relationship with wolves in a particularly innovative way. In her reading, both the Dark Lord Sauron and the evil Wizard Saruman carry "attributes of a negative Odin." Saruman commands wargs in his army. Sauron deploys a battering ram named Grond against the main gate of Minas Tirith. The ram is fashioned in "the likeness of a ravening wolf." On the other side of that mythological equation, the benevolent Wizard Gandalf fights wargs in The Hobbit using fire. He also understands their language. In The Fellowship of the Ring, Gandalf drives off a wolf that Tolkien calls "The Hound of Sauron." Burns notes that the wolves' attempt "to devour Gandalf hints at Odin's fate," recalling the myth of Fenrir and Odin. In The Hobbit, wargs gather to plan "a great goblin-raid" on the woodmen's villages, speaking in their own tongue. The critic Gregory Hartley describes them as "personified animals," observing that Tolkien grants them verbs like "plan" and "guard." Hartley views them as "more than mere beasts" while arguing they do not "possess autonomous wills." T. A. Leederman calls them "a species of semi-intelligent but evil-aligned mount wolves." He suggests they may have descended, within the fiction itself, from First Age werewolves like Carcharoth. Leederman also notes they may have developed their own "proto-language." Gary Gygax was paying close enough attention to bring these creatures into his own fantasy world, a choice that would eventually prompt a lawsuit.

• 5. From Warg to Worg

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  Gary Gygax brought wargs into Dungeons & Dragons in his 1976 supplement, Swords and Spells. A lawsuit from Tolkien's estate prompted the game's publishers to rename several Tolkien-derived creatures. Wargs became worgs, balrogs became balors, ents became treants, and hobbits became halflings. The first edition of the Monster Manual, published in 1977, listed the renamed creature under the wolf entry as "dire wolf (worg)." By the 2014 edition, worgs had earned a dedicated entry of their own. Unlike most animal-type creatures in the game, worgs can speak. They command their own language, as well as Goblin and Common. George R. R. Martin, working on his own series of epic fantasy novels, would take the name "warg" in a direction that had nothing to do with wolves as mounts.

• 6. Skinchangers and Screens

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  George R. R. Martin's series A Song of Ice and Fire uses "warg" for something that has little to do with wolves directly. In Martin's world, a warg is a skinchanger. That means entering an animal's mind, seeing through its eyes, and controlling its body. Bran Stark represents the most extreme case. Bran enters the mind of Hodor, a person rather than an animal. The television adaptation Game of Thrones brought this version of the word to a global audience. Wen Spencer's Tinker series, set in the world of Elfhome, takes a different approach. Spencer's wargs are large, magically engineered wolves. The Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, and World of Warcraft all include wolf-like creatures drawn from the Tolkien tradition. World of Warcraft goes further, featuring both four-legged warg monsters and a race of anthropomorphic werewolves called the Worgen. The spelling chain from Tolkien's warg to the tabletop worg to World of Warcraft's Worgen traces a clear line of cultural inheritance. Each step adapted the name just far enough to stand apart.