The Wargs of Middle-earth are fearsome beasts.
They can stand five feet at the shoulder and measure eight feet from nose to rump.
Their short muzzles bristle with great fangs and their bite is crushing.
Small eyes sit on the sides of the head, while the ears are set far back upon the skull, shielding those vulnerable spots.
Their limbs are thick with power; when they run you can see the muscles bunch and coil, granting them a terrible speed.
In a short dash they can outstrip even a horse.
Moreover, the bones of their loins are exceedingly strong, unlike the dogs of our world, a Warg’s loins and its skull are near its stoutest bones.
Were it not so, the Wargs bred as steeds could never bear a hulking Orc.
In addition, a Warg’s body is covered with dense, short fur that greatly lessens the harm of tooth and claw.
The finest breed among them are the Wargs of the Orcs of Mount Gundabad.
Their pelts are paler, often grey or white.
These huge Wargs are fiercer still, and their speed and endurance are astonishing.
They can carry a tall Gundabad Orc at full run for a day and a night without rest.
It was such a Warg that Azog the Defiler rode, and his son Bolg after him.
Like the horned rams bred by the Dwarves, Wargs are exceedingly sure-footed upon mountain slopes.
Their powerful limbs allow them to leap and scramble up sheer rock faces with ease.
So be not amazed should you see a great wolf, thick-muscled and lightning-swift, bound upon a smooth cliff and spring ten meters onto a rampart.
For, welcome: you have arrived in Middle-earth.
“Let the arrows not cease!” Amínír sidestepped with effortless grace as a Warg that had gained the wall lunged at him.
He thrust the steel-tipped shaft smoothly into the beast’s eye, then with a blindingly swift pivot turned outward again.
His right hand flowed to the quiver, drew a fresh arrow, nocked and loosed.
A yelping howl, another Warg struck through the eye, and only then did the first beast, slain by the arrow driven into its brain, fall still.
Along the wall the Elves stood calm, nocking and releasing in steady rhythm.
Countless great Wargs, their eyes gleaming cold, crashed to the earth with arrows in their throats.
Yet ever more came on, dodging and weaving with uncanny speed, bounding over the carcasses of their fallen kind, scaling the rock face to spring onto the battlements.
One Elf, too slow, was dragged down by a slavering Warg that seized him by the throat.
In a flash Ilwen turned and loosed; her arrow buried itself in the soft flesh beneath the beast’s jaw.
The Warg crumpled lifeless atop its victim.
No time for grief or relief.
Ilwen drew her blade and spun like a dancer, evading another Warg’s lunge, and drove the cold steel through the gristle of its neck.
The beast gurgled, twitched, and the feral light in its eyes died.
When Wargs charge at full stretch they are most perilous; once they halt, the Elves have many ways to deal with them.
The trouble now was that, unlike the Orcs on the main front, the Wargs possessed terrifying speed and explosive power in vast numbers.
Though the Elves’ arrows sent more and more of them sprawling lifeless upon the cold ground, still more trampled the dead and leaped with greater ease onto the high walls, a feat the Orcs on the eastern front could not match.
Ilwen pulled her sword from the Warg’s carcass, and her gaze strayed unbidden to the Dragonborn.
She found him just lifting his warhammer from the ruined skull of another Warg.
The she-elf’s eyes softened a little.
But at once a wolf the size of a brown bear, mounting a heap of slain kin, sprang onto the wall and fixed its cold, merciless stare upon the Dragonborn.
To the Warg, this was a giant taller even than the great Orcs of Gundabad.
Clad in fair and holy-seeming armor, his colossal frame stood like a pillar that touched the sky, radiating crushing pressure.
His dread silver-white warhammer was clotted with the brains and blood of its kin, still wet and sticky.
The vertical golden pupils of his eyes stirred deep unease; a menace from the soul itself seemed to emanate from the man.
The Warg’s hackles rose and its fangs bared.
Dragonborn, for his part, steeled himself from the shock of his first battle.
His own cold golden eyes, deep beneath his helm, locked onto the Warg.
They moved as one.
The Warg sidestepped nimbly, dodging the giant’s somewhat clumsy hammer-blow, then shot forward like an arrow, hurling itself at him.
Dragonborn was amazed by the creature’s agility.
Swiftly he thrust his left arm across his chest, catching the beast by the lower jaw in mid-air.
In that instant, without thought, he seized it and hurled it down with all his might.
A thunderous crash.
The brute, weighing near twelve hundred pounds, was smashed into the stone; the ground seemed to tremble.
The Warg’s hard skull did not last a heartbeat, it burst like a rotten gourd, spilling red, white, black and purple.
Dragonborn, his face wooden, pulled his hand free from the pulped mess.
Unlike the Elves, every one of them a master of combat with reflexes honed to perfection, Wargs, for all their agility, could not transcend their animal nature.
In a true fight they were far inferior to the Elves.
Ilwen, when she sparred with him, never let both feet leave the ground, for she knew that would be inviting death.
Dragonborn shook his hand with disgust, a wave of nausea rising.
Yet reason told him this was no time to falter.
He forced his attention outward.
For him, this was no poor training.
No amount of practice could match a true battle!
He had already sensed that his doom was bound up with this land, and beyond the body blessed by Ilúvatar, he needed the strength to defend himself.
The Elves could not guard him forever.
So the black-haired Dragonborn’s heart grew steady, and he began to seek out the Wargs that gained the wall.
In defense, his master-forged heavy armor of Elven-smiths turned aside fang and claw without a scratch.
In attack, though his fighting skill was still clumsy, the might and reflexes of a dragon allowed him to strike at the Wargs’ weaknesses time and again, turning their own assaults against them.
With no fear for his own safety, he grew accustomed to the blood and brutality of the fray.
He stormed along the wall, warhammer swinging, a one-man onslaught.
Any Warg that could not leap aside was shattered: bones snapped, flesh pulped under the hammer; or else his iron-clad fist crushed skulls.
In a frenzy, the black-haired Dragonborn even throttled a slavering Warg with his left hand, holding on as the beast squealed and clawed vainly at his gleaming armor.
Wherever he went, a gale of slaughter followed, the ground heaped with wolf-corpses.
Slowly, even the Elves edged away from his battle-rage, daunted by the sheer destruction.
They glanced at his warhammer and wondered, in the back of their minds, if they could survive a single blow.
Soon, with the Dragonborn’s rampaging aid, the Elves drove every last Warg from the walls.
Whimpering and tails tucked, they fled far.
Dragonborn’s heart still hammered from the exertion and slaughter, his blood surging like molten ore; his breath steamed white from the heat.
Amínír looked at him with wonder and said gravely, “Let the arrows not cease!
Do not suffer the Wargs to come near the wall again.” With that, he sent a fleeing Warg tumbling with a single arrow.
Ilwen and the other Elves reformed their ranks, drew and loosed as one.
Shafts rained down again, and the wolves fled faster still.
From the high ground before the Council Hall of the Grey Havens, Círdan turned his gaze from the south with relief and looked grimly eastward.
There the battle raged at a white heat.
Countless hideous Orcs and wild men of the far north had broken through the Elven lines and gained the walls, fiercely contesting every stretch of rampart.
Seeing the wall near to falling, a company of Elves led by Gelmir drew swords and charged, hurling the Orcs back over the parapet, barely holding the eastern line.
Behind the lines, Azog the Pale Orc paced in fury.
“Send the order!
Push forward!
Orcs outnumber the pointy-eared scum, pile our dead high and shove the stinking Elves from the walls!” The Orc herald dared not argue and blew a deep blast on the horn.
At the signal, the thirtieth Orc battalion, a shambling tide, advanced upon the eastern front.
And in the Square of Falling Blossoms below the high ground, eight hundred Elven horsemen sat motionless upon their noble steeds, faces calm.
Azog paced his crude watch-post, his brutal eyes darting south, unable to fathom what had gone awry.
On the southern field, in the dark, Bolg blew frantically upon a bone flute, shrieking and cursing in the foul Black Speech of Mordor, a torrent of venom.
Amínír marked it keenly; he sought the wily Orc and at last spotted him over a thousand meters from the south wall.
He gauged the distance and shook his head with regret.
Whether the curses or the flute, the fleeing Wargs whimpering and slowly gathered again.
Just as all thought the Orcs would renew the assault, Bolg blew a strange signal, short and long.
The pack stirred, snarling and shrinking back in evident terror.
The Elves on the wall lost their calm; all turned their eyes toward the rugged mountain path of Emyn Beraid, the Tower Hills.
A wave of unutterable evil swept nearer.
“What is that?” cried Dragonborn, whose eyes were keenest.
Out of the broken mountain way slunk a creature vast as a full-grown elephant of the East, a hideous shape that stalked ghostlike into view.
It cast a scornful, savage glance at Bolg, yet when its eyes fell upon the bone flute, it yielded to the holder of that token.
It walked a few steps toward the Havens, then began to run.
A gasp went up from Amínír and all the Elves.
“Werewolf!” “Gaurhoth?” Dragonborn turned the strange Sindarin word over in his mind, not grasping its meaning.
But one thing he knew: when his eyes met those of the beast, a creature like a Warg magnified many times, yet filled with a deeper malice, fangs dripping venom, throat issuing a black and noisome vapour, every hair on his body stood on end.
Instinctively he tightened his grip on his warhammer.
His heart thudded like a war-drum.
“Nock your arrows!” shouted Amínír, who had lived through the darkness of the First Age, his voice betraying a tremor.
“Do not let this fell creature gain the wall!
Loose!” A rain of shafts hissed forth.
But the monster surged forward, its huge body no hindrance.
Swift as a thunderbolt it raced through the night, faster than Elven arrows could follow.
With a mighty bound it cleared a dozen meters, landing lightly atop the ten-meter-high rampart.
Its great jaws opened and snapped two unprepared Elves in half.
A sweep of its iron tail sent seven or eight more flying like rag dolls over the battlements.
Its forelimbs, massive and powerful, struck like hammers, and the keen claws tore several Elves apart.
Fenrir, the great wolf, threw back his head and howled, proclaiming the dreadful Lord of Werewolves returned to the world.
Círdan’s and Azog’s faces changed as one.
“Bolg has not failed me!
The pointy-ears’ doom is here!” The Pale Orc exulted, peering southward, and his hideous Black Speech carried far into the night.
“The stinking Elves cannot hold this city!
We strike from front and rear, they cannot defend!
Sound the horns!
Bring up all engines of war!” The horn-calls grew more frantic, and the last ten battalions of Orc infantry surged forward, along with siege engines and trolls.
The Elven line on the east wavered.
But the master of the Grey Havens was now wracked with dread.
He had not guessed that the “ravenous beast” spoken of by Manwë, lord of the air, wind and all birds, was the Werewolf Fenrir.
In the Year of the Trees 1330, the Dark Enemy Morgoth bred the race of Werewolves, and their sire was Draugluin, a monster imbued with terrible power.
After Draugluin, the most dreadful of his kind was Carcharoth the Werewolf.
It was he who, in the First Age, bit off the hand of Beren the Man that held a Silmaril, and swallowed hand and jewel, only to be consumed from within by the hallowed light.
Beren’s wife was Lúthien, daughter of Elu Thingol, King of Doriath, slain by Dwarves.
And Círdan was kin to Elu Thingol.
Fenrir the Werewolf was the descendant of Carcharoth.
Behold how fate weaves its circles, linking old bloodlines and ancient deeds anew.
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