Are there any water based creatures in The Lord of the Rings aside from the Watcher in the Water who attacked the Fellowship in Moria?
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26Gollum catches and eats fish as part of his regular diet.– System DownCommented Apr 25, 2013 at 15:02
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2@SystemDown: Yes, but those were freshwater fish, not "sea creatures".– Keith ThompsonCommented Apr 25, 2013 at 17:02
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2What's the scope of Lord of the Rings? Is it just the books? Or can it be anything in Middle Earth? I'm pretty sure there were sea creatures in ICE's Middle Earth Roleplaying (MERP), but I think they're based on the Silmarillion or random notes from JRRT.– valadilCommented Apr 25, 2013 at 19:59
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1Fish.. We see Gollum gnaw on them in the movies.. Deagol and Smeagol were also fishing, when they find the ring.. It would be pointless to go fishing, if there was no fish in the river.. But I guess you mean dangerous water creatures?– FuxieDKCommented Jun 26, 2013 at 7:51
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2@KeithThompson In The Return of the King, Gollum thinks about what he'll do once he gets his precious back. One of his thoughts was about having "fish, three times a day, fresh from the sea."– maguirenumber6Commented May 8, 2017 at 13:25
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2 Answers
Not specifically Lord of the Rings, but definitely Middle Earth; here we go!
The poem Fastitocalon describes a typical myth of sailors landing on the back of a sea creature, and is set in Middle Earth.
The Silmarillion describes great underwater weeds in chapter 3, and the earlier Lost Tales drafts make much reference to Ulmo's "Fishy Car" - so there are definitely salt-water fish in the Lost Tales (Ulmo being the Vala of the oceans).
There are definitely sea gulls - both Tuor and Legolas see and hear them. Looking at their diet, one may reasonably infer that sea creatures most probably exist to form part of it.
...and probably other references to fish that I've missed.
Finally, and given that we have explicit info from Tolkien that Middle Earth is our world, at an earlier stage of its history (see Letters for more on this), and also given that we have plenty of fossil record for sea creatures going back millions of years, we can quite reliably say that sea creatures do exist in Middle Earth.
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Well done. Didn't have my copy of the Silmarillion at hand, but you covered this better than I could have. Commented Apr 25, 2013 at 22:26
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2Quoting from the lotrplaza thread linked in comments to the question: "we know that the ship of Aldarion was called Hirilondë, but another name for it is the Wooden Whale, and that strongly suggests that there were in fact whales in ME".– user8719Commented Apr 25, 2013 at 22:40
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We may also assume that the inhabitants of the Forochel region have a typical sub-arctic/arctic diet - lots of fish, seals, etc.– user8719Commented Apr 25, 2013 at 22:44
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8Silmarillion: Ulumuri: Ulmo's conch horn made of shell. Olwe's mansion was made of Pearls. Uinen, the wife of Osse: "all creatures she loves that live in the salt streams"– horatioCommented Apr 26, 2013 at 18:04
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@horatio - good catch! ;)– user8719Commented Apr 27, 2013 at 1:04
Going by just The Lord of the Rings, the answer still appears to be "yes": in "The Council of Elrond" (Book 2, chapter II), Glorfindel at one point suggests throwing the Ring into the deeps:
‘... in the Sea it would be safe.’
‘Not safe for ever,’ said Gandalf. ‘There are many things in the deep waters; ...’
