The Complete Size Guide of the Creatures of Middle-Earth | Middle Earth Lore

hello and welcome to the broken soul today we are comparing the different sizes of the creatures and beings in tolkien's world the blade so today i tackle a subject that can very much split people's opinions in parts the sizes of the different races and creatures of tolkien's creations now first of all i want to say that with me putting together this list i have tried to take everything from the words of the books not from the adaptations by peter jackson i understand why he changed things but peter jackson did tend to increase the size of the majority of the monsters in his movies so these iconic images that a lot of people think of may well just be exaggerated versions of what tolkien had actually described therefore i understand some people may find a few of the sizes i mentioned perhaps weird but hopefully you all understand why i have gone for the sizes that i do and also to add before i get into this as well for the majority of the creatures i will be showing the average sizes like most things there can be taller or shorter beings of the same races so by going with a rough average i feel it will make everything a little bit simpler so i hope you enjoy seeing all these creatures side by side and now let's get into it starting with the small bird creature that is a big help to those in the hobbit so let's start with a creature that might be considered quite random but one that plays the important role in the hobbit and that is the thrush this little bird is the creature that alerted thorin's company to the keyhole to the secret entrance of the lonely mountain on jiren's day as well as passing on the information to bard of smaug's weak spot so that he could bring down the dragon with an arrow so they may be small at only one foot but they play an important role so then second we have the halflings of midler who played a pivotal role in the downfall of sauron and even though they played such a vital role they were still a small race they were generally between three and four foot tall although it is stated that their height became less than three feet in the later days as well the tallest of the hobbits ever live ended up being none other than marion pippin after they drank the end draft in fangorn forest they end up grown to the great height for a hobbit of four and a half feet growing taller than the previous holder of this title bolvoya tuk who himself had stood at four feet five inches and now we move on to the first of the evil beings in middle earth the orcs and these are described as on average being smaller than a man whose average would be about six foot there may have been the occasional chieftain who would approach closer to a man height but they were more of an exception than the norm a good thought is that when immortal frodo and sam had managed to disguise themselves as orcs therefore a good deal must have been similar to hobbit height or at least enough that even on the short side it was not unusual to see orcs walking around at that short height but in general we can assume that they were around four to five foot in height and then next we have the dwarves these are ever present throughout middle earth history after being created by the valor owlet after he had grown impatient waiting for the waking of the children of iluvatar so despite not counting as children of illupita eru still gave them life and included them in his plans for arda the dwarves all tended to be around four and a half feet but could also grow as large as five feet now as we address one of the first evil creatures on this list the warg these wolf-like creatures were allies to the goblins and orcs who would often ride them they would generally be around five foot in height as well as being around eight foot long meaning that if they were to stand on their back legs they would be incredibly intimidating creatures but as they were four legged creatures five foot is the height we are going with moving on to the fighting urakai these servants of sauron were basically a new breed of orc that was created in the third age these terrifying enemies of good were generally just upgraded orcs therefore they were faster smarter stronger and larger however they were still said to be shorter than men so that means that their height lies somewhere between that five and six foot point so you could probably say about five foot six on average even though that may be a bit of a generalization logically that's what i'm going with now we have the first of a couple at six foot starting with the barrow whites and these are the undead beings that the four hobbits are saved from by tom bombadil in the fellowship of the rink book apart from being evil their true origins are uncertain it is thought to be possible that they were anything of perverted maya orcs men or even something else it could be considered men is the most likely thing due to their height being considered around six foot tall just like men however this also comes from tolkien initially suggesting that there is a link between them and the nazgul with them being around the same height therefore we move on now to the nazca who were considered to be around this height of six foot as well this leads on again to the link between these dark beings and the average height of men again which is also six foot after all the nazgul were those who received rings from sauron became corrupted and eventually faded away until they became wraiths so if the men on average were six foot logically the nazgul on average should be around the same at least the nazgul that didn't come from numenoreans who we will also get onto in a moment which means as hinted this is a fairly simple one now with men averaging around six foot in tolkien's world albeit there are other groups of men which we will again reference shortly this is the general height of what men would be so slightly taller than perhaps real life but this is how they were for tolkie now we have the second group of the children of iluvatar with the elves these were said to be tall in general so slightly taller than men but not by much so here is a bit more of a logical guess but averagely i would say they're probably just a couple of inches taller so i'm gonna go with again on average about six foot two and this leads us on back to the race of men for a moment with the numenoreans these men of numenol were taller than the average man in midlir generally considered to be six foot six or taller the great kings could even reach heights well over seven foot with an example being the first high king of the dunadine allendale also known as elendil the tall reaching the height of seven but eleven we move back to the creatures now and this is a bit of a hard run with horses horses can be a wide variety of sizes depending on their breeds but for this video i am going to use the mirror ass as in my example after all they are considered to be superior to normal horses with the likes of shadow facts and snow main being examples of these that we meet so again this is just a bit of a logical assumption but it appears that they could be around the height of an average numenorean so also six foot six next we come to the skin changer bjorn and this is the one that we meet in the hobbit here on the list he belongs in his human form standing around roughly eight foot tall as he was considered a giant of a man but we shall come back to him again in a little bit for his other form but before we do that we reach our first of the troll race on our list and this is with the olog high they were said to be larger in size and power than urakai but not to the degree of a full troll therefore i feel it makes sense to go in the middle of the heights of the urukai and the trolls which is where we get our idea of a rough height of around nine foot tall but now we are back to beyond again but this time with this alternate form of a bear i will admit i do not know much about bears but after having a look there are bears that when stood up can reach heights of 8 to 10 feet and bjorn was considered particularly large in general so i believe as his human form was around 30 to 35 taller than a normal human and the bear form would likely be around the same therefore if we take the middle ground of nine foot for a bear add on 30 to 35 i can make my logical guess that bjorn's bear form would be around 12 foot tall now we get onto a subject that is really going to cause some mixed opinions with people and that is with the battle box i will explain why i have gone for the height of about 12 foot for the average height of a ballrook tolkien appears to have purposely left the size of these corrupted maya a bit vague perhaps to increase their mystery and added to the feeling of their size as opposed to a physical size but that kind of idea is a whole subject for another day the main thing that we can be certain of is that they are greater than man sized so greater than say six foot six and if we look specifically at the lord of the balrog's gothmog who was killed by xthalion outfloor of gondolin he was said to be about twice his height so if you assume the outfloors very conservatively could have been around six foot then gothmog would have been around 12 foot now i know there is a lot of debate around the size of these creatures and to be honest i would maybe side more with them being smaller than this probably more around eight to nine foot but when it comes to having more evidence behind it the gothmog example is the best i can find at this point so i do apologize if this one is a little bit more vague but one thing we could be sure of is that tolkien did definitely not mean for the barrow to be the size that peter jackson made it despite how amazing it did look next we move on to another creature that was debatably enlarged for the movies sheila it is said she is around 8 foot tall and 17 foot wide for the movies but she is never described at being that size in the books albeit her size is never really confirmed at all so it's hard to say right or wrong but when you consider the smaller areas that she had to fit through when living in the area that is kirithungal but at the same time also living off the likes of men and elves as her food she needs to be big enough to both fit in those places and big enough to kill those beings there's even a point she attempts to crush sam with her body which is what leads her to getting stopped by sting so with that information my guess is that she lob would actually be around the size somewhere of a warg to a horse so using the same scale as the movie i would guess around six foot in height therefore about 13 foot in width so although not as big as peter jackson's that is still a very big spider now we move on to the trolls and i know that there are several different types of trolls like the oleg hai that i've mentioned earlier as well as the likes of cave trolls mouth controls and many more but for this i will just generalize a bit as including every single different type might just feel a bit repetitive and so i'm just gonna take an average so going off the height of the urukai to olokai difference that would then obviously put trolls at generally around 13 foot tall although again this would vary another reason i believe they would be around this height is due to something that tree beard says and that is the trolls were created in the mockery of ends just like orcs were to elms now going on this you could assume they may be a similar height but most likely slightly smaller which is what then leads us on to the x once again i must say yes ends vary in height and size they are not all exactly the same you know just like trees are they are said to be on average around 14 foot tall as this is the description that tree beard is given of being at least 14 foot high and it's never said that he is considered to be anything different or special in regards to his size so that means the logical answer is around 14 foot which means going back to the trolls again being slightly smaller that's why we chose 30. i hope those ones make sense to you and this is where we start getting on to their much larger creatures starting with the eagles these great birds were great help when they came to the aid of the forces of good possessing the wingspan of around 30 foot white however although this was the average there was once a great eagle known as therondale who was the greatest of the eagles that was sent by manway who was said to have had a wingspan of 180 foot now that is a large eagle but the rondelle was only around in the first age so the great eagles that we come to meet with the likes of gwy here means that we will stick with this 30 foot in size and to go along with the eagles we will now move on to the fel beasts and this size was actually gathered from a slightly different place to normal and by that i mean the width is gained from the middle earth role-playing game that was released between 1982 and 97 where it gives a good description of the foul beasts saying that they are likely to be distinctive relatives of the ancient cold drinks and grow to lengths of 30 feet with around 30 foot wingspans so this size makes sense for these creatures as they were there to counter the eagle so having them about the same size like the kind of link between the ends of the trolls is at least something to me that makes that make a bit more sense to me so that's why 30 foot for the foul beasts now moving on to the mumma kill the description of a mummy kill is never really accompanied with a precise size either generally all we get is that they are just much taller than real life elephants so if a real life elephant can be around say nine to ten foot tall and also taking into account that they need to be large enough to carry men of harrod on their backs too i would make the logical jump that they could be somewhere well around 30 to 40 foot tall in size again this is about half the size of what peter jackson made them but i feel like it may be a bit closer to what tolkien had imagined himself again this is all just me trying to make a more logical guess so if you do have more information on not just movement kills any of these creatures of what points to a slightly different size to what i say then please let me know those in the comments below and we move on this time to the watcher in the water and again i'm repeating myself once more but the size of this creature is never fully known the creature is never even seen in its entirety as it always remains at least partially underwater so it really ends up being a complete guess so this time i will just go with how we see this nameless thing in the movie with that being around 60 foot in size with that being when you take into account all of its tentacles sadly i can't get any closer than that now we move on to the first of our dragons and here is another case of the movie smaug being much larger than the book smile in the hobbit movies he's made out to be around 130 meters long from head to tail which is so much greater than he was ever intended to be if we look at information given to us from karen fonstax the atlas of middle earth it is said smaug is actually about 20 meters long so really about a sixth of its movie size but still massive if you really want to picture a 20 meter long dragon so again although i understand why peter jackson made the changes to make the dragon more intimidating and well massive he really did go a bit overboard moving on once again now we are at the large end of the scale we keep coming to the issue of creatures being described as well large but with no real scale to go with these things this is also true with the great evil spirit that resembled the spider mongolia the size i have gone for with her is after she had absorbed the light of the two trees of valinor as it said she grew far larger and stronger from doing so my guess is when you take into account what kind of size it would take to scare the likes of morgoth is that she would have reached around the size of a hundred feet wide i believe this is the kind of scale that it would take to achieve such a feat now we continue back in the times of the silmarillion with the first of the dragons gallaurung glaurung was a fire breather with four legs but had no wings so could not fly but nonetheless he was one of the greatest servants of morgoth during the first age now as for his size again measurements are never really given but we have got a drawing of glaurung from tolkien himself to help us a little so he's actually pictured by tolkien more like a chinese dragon in design this therefore means he would have been very long compared to his whip now going with the assumption everything in the first age is generally greater than the third plaun must be a good size bigger than smoke probably three to four times the size so in my thoughts i would put clowns somewhere around that 200 to 250 foot long mark now finally we move on to the last entrant in this video and with that another dragon and this one being the largest of them all and caligon the black he was the greatest of all morgoth's dragons and the greatest fire breathing dragon to ever live too there is much debate over his size with some people believing his size was so large as when he found it was said he fell upon the towers of thangara dream and they were broken in his ruin meaning that they believed he could have been larger than thangarajam to actually be able to break it but to be honest i do not quite agree with this in a literal sense i tend to believe more that if glaurung was around three to four times the size of smaug then in my head i go and caligon is also then three to four times the size of glauron which means he would potentially be about a thousand foot long in size so once again this is all a bit of a theory in my head just something i tried to logically work out but we do have to remember there is no definitive answer on this whether it is right or wrong i really am curious to know your thoughts on this in the comments section too so with ankalagon being thought to be the largest creature that tolkien created this is where we end this scale let's just take a moment now to zoom back out and have a look at the entire list with all of these images [Music] again [Music] so there we have it a look at the selection of toggies creatures and just how all their sizes compare i would like to emphasize again a lot of these beings are never given anything like a specific height or size so a lot of it comes down to try and think logically about how big they may have been described compared to other things the age that they existed in or perhaps just the feats that they may have accomplished i fully understand people will have differing opinions to me on these but this is what actually leads me on to my question for you all today and that is how do you feel about the sizes that i have shown would you change any of these perhaps a little perhaps drastically just any changes at all i do find it amazing how people can read the same words off a page but come up with completely different images in their heads so i would really love to hear all of your thoughts on it so please let me know your thoughts and opinions on this in the comments section below and now that we've reached the end of the video i would also like to remind you all that we don't just have this channel we have two others as well the sixth ranger for power rangers content and history of dragon ball for dragon ball content links for both of those channels will be in the description below as always if you would like to watch and support us on those as well and now we will finish off as we always do with thanking our patrons those of you who've stuck with us during this tough time we cannot thank you enough now specifically to shout out our highest tier members with firstly being our divine power team members of kevin michael abraham matt angloff and all of gondolin you are all awesome and also a big thanks to our five demon team members of nasheed lorenzo denver steele and gregory and as well i cannot forget there was a staff to your member of andrew to go along with these you are all true legends of the broherum finally if you have not already as well please do all that great stuff hit the like button on the video subscribe to the channel hit the bell icon for notifications to help us reclaim up those youtube rankings in fact if you enjoyed the video why not give it a share somewhere as well and so now that i've reached the end i would just like to give you a massive thank you especially if you have managed to reach the end of this video with me and we will see you next time on the broken sword

Channel: The Broken Sword

Views: 143,086

Keywords: The Broken Sword, History of the Ages, History of Middle Earth, The Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings, Lord of the Rings Lore, Middle Earth Lore, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, Tolkien Lore, how big are the dragons in middle earth, middle earth dragons size comparison, middle earth creature size comparison, tolkien size comparison, tolkien dragon size comparison, how big was smaug, how big are balrogs, what size is the balrog, ancalagon the black size, smaug size, hobbit

Id: 5D2WgTEB4Nw

Length: 21min 1sec (1261 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 07 2021