When The Lord of the Rings was published, some new varieties of Trolls were introduced. They had legs that were as thick as young tree-trunks and wore stony boots, and they had to be underground before the sun rose, or else they were turned to stone. They were described as very large persons (twelve to fourteen feet high), with great heavy faces, slow in the uptake, and mighty suspicious about anything new to them. The Trolls that the readers meet in The Hobbit are based on the Trolls that was known from norse mythology and fairytales.
The first book where Tolkien published anything about Trolls was in The Hobbit, although Trolls are mentioned already in The Book of Lost Tales: Men came to Tol Eressëa and also Orcs, Dwarves, Gongs, Trolls, etc.īoLT II, The History of Eriol or Ælfwine and the end of the Tales
