Tolkien inhabits his world with many different monsters, all with the capability to easily end a person’s life. If this were the extent of the damage these monsters could cause, I think there would be at least some merit to Edmund Wilson’s claim that these creatures are not scary. However, I think Tolkien makes it clear that the true fear his monsters invoke is not merely that of physical harm but of something far deeper, namely the threat of the corruption of the soul.
Nearly every monster I can think of across Tolkien’s legendarium had their beginnings in corruption. Orcs, balrogs, Nazgul, dragons, and many more were all the direct result of Melkor’s corruption. In turn, many of these creatures seem to possess some ability of corruption in their stead. When Frodo and Sam follow Gollum into Shelob’s lair, we’re told that “they walked as it were in a black vapor wrought of veritable darkness itself that, as it was breathed, brought blindness not only to the eyes but to the mind, so that even the memory of colours and of forms and of any light faded out of thought. Night always had been, and always would be, and night was all” (LOTR, Book IV, Chapter IX). Just being in Shelob’s lair coats the mind in darkness, not just removing their ability to see light but even all memory of it in the first place; it’s a corruption of the mind, holding the potential to change the very way a person sees the world, to remove all hope or knowledge of good or joy in the world. That’s the brunt of the fear that Shelob invokes, the fact that she’s also a giant venomous spider being the icing on the cake.
We see this with the Nazgul too when they stab Frodo, the shard of the dagger lodging inside him, threatening to turn him into a wraith, to serve Sauron with no free will of his own. This threat is so advanced that the only thing that can save him is the healing of the elves. If it wasn’t for them, all hope would have been lost. What’s at stake is not just life or death in the physical sense but the spiritual as well, the danger of losing one’s own soul to this corruption, to be doomed past what the physical body can suffer. Even balrogs have a unique sway over people’s souls. When Gandalf attempts to magically seal a door shut in Moria, he notes that “the counter spell [from the balrog] was terrible. It nearly broke me.” (LOTR, Book 2, Chapter 5). Gandalf is not speaking of physical damage here but something more innate, a sorcery that counters his own to nearly break him on a deeper, spiritual level. Yes, not every creature displays such a power in Tolkien’s legendarium, but even if they don’t it remains a consistent theme nonetheless in their creation, and we see the effects of this kind of corruption among them.
Sauron had put so much of his own will into the One Ring that it served as an extension of himself. We see this most fully when the ring is destroyed, immediately resulting in his own demise. As such, it seems that Tolkien meant for the ring to serve as an extension of Sauron’s will. Gollum, exposed to that ring for centuries, morphs into a creature that can’t even be considered a hobbit anymore. When we see him in the Lord of the Rings he’s a wicked creature, sickly and thin, who cares about nothing except for that ring. This is the danger of the ring and, by proxy, the danger that every monster presents, certainly in their origin and often in their ability, the danger that one’s own soul should be so corrupted that it would be unrecognizable, changed beyond repair. That danger is much more sobering than anything physical.
But what is the significance of this corruption? In Wilson’s critique, and many others, the idea of monsters is taken as a childish one, conjurations of the imagination that serve as nothing more than a means to scare children into behaving. They’re not real, and as such don’t deserve any real study or focus. Tolkien himself dispels this belief in the essay, “The Monsters and the Critics”, maintaining their importance to the story and our study of it. In the essay, he defends Grendel and the dragon as being fitting benchmarks for Beowulf to face, with Grendel being more human and the dragon more elemental. However, Tolkien appears to go beyond this framework in his own view of monsters with the frequent power of corruption they hold. The difference is the framework of sin and the fallen world that sin creates.
Writing with deep Catholic roots, Tolkien fills his world with the Luciferian Melkor, and it is through his corruption that nearly all of the world’s monsters can be traced back to. If Melkor is meant to embody Lucifer, as Tolkien makes clear in the Ainulindalë where Melkor's rebellion against Ilúvatar mirrors Lucifer's rebellion against God, then all of the corruption he inflicts on the world can be read as sin, twisting and changing the nature of different creatures away from what Iluvatar had intended for them. These monsters, then, are proof that Arda is fallen, that sin has entered the world. As such, the danger these monsters impose is that of sin, of bending the mind away from Ilúvatar, away from everything that is good and right within Tolkien’s legendarium. Shelob threatens to make her victim forget all light ever existed, the Nazgul corrupt the soul, the balrog threatens to break Gandalf’s will, and the One Ring succeeds in that endeavor in Gollum. All of these corruptions are a bending of will, a turning of the soul away from light and into the darkness of sin.
In Tolkien's essay, “On Fairy-Stories”, he notes that one of the primary uses of fairy stories is one of recovery, illuminating truths about our world that have been lost or obscured through overfamiliarization by depicting them in a new light. This is the purpose of these monsters, to illuminate the truth of sin Tolkien believes to exist in our world. Wilson critique engages these monsters only at their surface, namely their role as fiction. Monsters aren’t real, but monsters are sin, and that sin, to Tolkien, is very real, and should be feared.
-MC
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