The Nameless Things
the elder creatures deep beneath the roots of the world
Definition
The Nameless Things are the elder, unknown creatures of the uttermost deeps of Arda — beings of whom Gandalf, after his fall in Moria and his long war beneath the mountains with the Balrog, tells Aragorn and the Company: they are found “deeper than the deepest delving” of the Dwarves, in the pit blackness of the world’s roots, and they gnaw and rest there — older than the Shadow itself.
The Account of Gandalf
In The Two Towers, Gandalf speaks of the endless tunnel-ways far beneath Moria where the Dwarves never delved: “Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things.” Through ambushes of these “dark things” he passed and fled, until he met the fire of the Balrog and the struggle carried them at last up the Endless Stair. He calls them “Nameless” because no name of them is known or recorded — not in the lore of the Eldar nor in the legends of the Dwarves; they have no part in Sauron’s order, and are of an even older darkness than he.
Interpretation
The passage is one of the few glimpses in the legendarium of the pre-histories beneath the stories — a thought, running through the texts (and the mystery of “the nameless” of the deep places), of beings older than the Elves or Morgoth’s first works. Christopher Tolkien has noted that the phrase and its image — the gnawing, unrecorded darkness — descend from the older mythologies of the “underworld” that persisted behind the later and cleaner accounts of creation.
Significance
The Nameless Things stand for the unfathomed depth and strangeness of Arda: the world is older and darker than its histories, and there are corners of creation that even the Valar and the lorekeepers do not know — a deliberate stain of the old, pre-Eru dark at the roots of Tolkien’s ordered cosmos, kept deliberately unnamed.