This Lord of the Rings article contains spoilers for The Rings of Power.
But the inevitable future of Numenor isn’t the only thing teased in “Adar.” Galadriel also confirms what she’s suspected all along: Sauron is indeed still out there and amassing his forces to create a new kingdom in the Southlands of Middle-earth. Indeed, the sigil Galadriel found in the first episode turns out to actually be a map pointing towards the place that will eventually become Mordor, the land where the shadows lie.
It’s also during Arondir’s captivity in the Southlands that The Rings of Power introduces one of the fiercest creatures of Middle-earth, a bloodthirsty warg, the savage wolf-like creatures movie fans first met on the big screen in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. First introduced in Tolkien’s The Hobbit book, wargs have long been the beasts preferred by the Orcs and goblins of Middle-earth, and often use them as mounts to hunt down their prey. In the case of The Rings of Power, the Orcs send out a warg to chomp at their rebellious prisoners.
Although not actually mentioned by name in Tolkien’s three Lord of the Rings books, the wargs most famously appeared in one of the best action sequences in the second film. Fleeing from the capital city of Edoras as Saruman’s Uruk-hai army closes in on the kingdom of Rohan, King Theoden, Aragorn, and the rest of our heroes lead their people to the sanctuary of Helm’s Deep. This of course is just as Saruman hoped. The White Wizard sends out his warg-riders to hunt down the evacuating men, women, and children of Rohan before they make it to the distant stronghold in the mountains.
In the film, we watch as the wargs savagely shred their way through several of Rohan’s royal guards, with Legolas and Gimli winning a narrow but very costly victory. Since, as the last Orc and warg are cut down, they also believe Aragorn has been killed after falling off a cliff during the battle and into the watery depths below. We learn soon after, of course, that Aragorn has survived the fall, taking a ride down a river before rejoining his friends ahead of the big battle at Helm’s Deep in the third act.
While the more “hyena-like” wargs of Jackson’s adaptation are now generally the accepted version of these beasts in terms of appearance, including in The Hobbit films and The Rings of Power, they’re meant to look more like evil wolves in the original Tolkien. In fact, the word “warg” is the Anglicized version of the word “vargr” from Old Norse, which is the foundation for several of Tolkien’s fictional languages. If you want wargs that look more like the wolves they were meant to be, check out the 1977 animated adaptation of The Hobbit.
