The world of The Lord of the Rings consists of many creatures that cannot always be discovered in the movies. The peoples within the world also have their own legends and sagas. This includes wereworms, but it is unclear whether they actually exist.
What are wereworms? The wereworms are mentioned by Bilbo in the Hobbit book. In a conversation with the dwarves, Bilbo says when discussing whether he will survive his journey: Tell me what you want, and I will try, even if I have to walk from here to the easternmost point of the east and fight the wild wereworms in the Last Desert
(Source: Nerd of the Rings on YouTube).
As a movie viewer, one could see the wereworms in the last Hobbit film, The Battle of the Five Armies
. There they are depicted as gigantic worms that can crush entire mountains. They strongly resemble the sandworms from Dune.
They are also portrayed in the game The Hobbit from 2003 and in the DLC Desolation of Mordor from Shadow of War (2018).
But what exactly they are is unclear. There is also the question of whether they actually exist.
Just an invention of the Hobbits?
What’s the question, they do exist in the movie? That’s true, but in Tolkien’s original works, the wereworms are only mentioned once in the previously mentioned situation by Bilbo. After that, there is no new information about the wereworms.
Thus, the question arises as to what Bilbo means by this. It could just be a saying or legend of the Hobbits.
What could the wereworms be? The Last Desert
is, like the wereworms, mentioned only once by Bilbo. This could suggest again that the wereworms do not exist at all. But like many sagas and legends, there may also be a grain of truth in this.
Robert Foster, an author who created a reference work for the universe of Tolkien, assumes in The Complete Guide to Middle-earth: from The Hobbit to The Silmarillion that the wereworms could be dragons that were not recognized by the Hobbits. Wurm
or in English “worm”/”wyrm” is a term often used for wingless dragons.
The dragon Scatha was referred to as a worm or lindworm among the dragons in The Lord of the Rings. Flying dragons are also occasionally described this way.
A legendary figure from the Gobi Desert
The original version of the passage could be a clue. As Nerd of the Rings explains in a YouTube video, Bilbo does not talk about the Last Desert
in the first version of the Hobbit book, but about the Gobi Desert and the Chinese. In the Gobi Desert, there is a legend among Mongolian nomads about the Alghoi Khorkhoi, the Mongolian death worm.
The death worm was first mentioned in 1926, 11 years before the first release of The Hobbit, by the paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews in the book On The Trail Of Ancient Man (via sueddeutsche.de). In the legends of the locals, it was described as a huge, deadly worm.
None of the theories can probably be proven. Whether they were dragons, a species of their own, or just an invention of pipe-smoking Hobbits, one will have to decide for oneself. What definitely existed in Tolkien’s universe was the mighty dragon Ancalagon: A dragon in The Lord of the Rings was so powerful that Sauron’s master used him as the ultimate secret weapon
