Luthien Before Morgoth, by Cuarthol
One of the First Age tales in The Silmarillion is how Luthien, an elf, falls in love with Beren, who is human, and aids him in his quest to recover the three Silmaril jewels from Morgoth. This part of The Sil has a more fairy tale flavor than the rest of the book, involving overt magic use, transformations, and a structured quest. In one part of it Luthien, on facing the dark lord, performs an enchanting dance routine that puts him and all his entourage asleep, enabling her and Beren to steal back the jewels.
The artist above interprets the scene in ancient Egyptian style. Morgoth wears the three Silmaril atop his crown of cobras, while Luthien has bat wings because she’s snuck into Thangorodrim in the guise of a vampire. Vampires were only mentioned in this story and in the stanzas of a few Elven poems. They were not in The Hobbit or LOTR, at least as far as I can remember. I guess the use of this supernatural creature fell by the wayside as the author’s style evolved.
And to tell you the truth, vampires don’t really “fit” into Middle-earth anyway, even as the creations of Morgoth which they are said to be. It’s their overt Christian tone. Even though Tolkien’s vampires are more like giant vampire bats who can change into humans, the name itself conjures images of Dracula and his anathema to crucifixes to most Western readers. (No Jesus in Middle-earth.) Not to mention bloodsucking, hypnosis, and sexual predation.
Another creature that doesn’t fit is the werewolf, though, again, Tolkien’s conception was different: these were evil spirits in the bodies of monstrous wolves. They differed from wargs, which were an evil race of actual wolves, the non-supernatural kind. Tolkien’s werewolves did not have an alternate human form, nor did they infect others with their bite or fall under the moon’s influence. Again he seems to have appropriated the name for dramatic effect, that of bolstering the bad guys’ evil.
Interestingly, fellow Inkling C. S. Lewis also threw in some werewolves when writing Prince Caspian, the second book of The Chronicles of Narnia. As in Tolkien’s tale it was a one-off. Werewolves were not mentioned in the later books and, to me at least, seemed out of place Narnia’s mythos. I think it’s likely the two writers indulged in some less high-minded pulp fiction together and took inspiration from that.
Real-life bats and wolves have received much-needed rehabilitation to their images in recent decades: wolves as intelligent, socially complex apex predators and bats as vital and versatile members of the ecosystem who work to keep destructive insect populations down. Not to mention being faster flyers even than birds and some species being insanely cute.
