Olog-hai

Origins

Appendix F records that at the end of the Third Age a troll-race appeared in southern Mirkwood and the mountain borders of Mordor that had not been seen before. Sauron bred them, whether from the old stock of Morgoth's trolls or from some other blending is not said, and the Orcs called them Olog-hai in the Black Speech. They were the troll counterpart of the Uruk-hai, an improved and disciplined soldiery replacing the dumb brutes that had served the Shadow before.

Nature

The Olog-hai were taller and stronger than the older Trolls, and their hides were hard as stone, but they were also agile and cunning, and fierce in war beyond anything the older breeds could show. They wore mail and bore huge shields and heavy hammers. Their greatest advantage was that they could face the sun, at least while the will of Sauron held them; they did not turn to stone as the trolls of the Trollshaws did. Some, like Treebeard, believed them to be great Orcs rather than trolls at all, but Appendix F states that they were trolls, with the troll's shape and nature, only quickened by Sauron's power. They had little speech but used the Black Speech, the tongue Sauron devised for his servants.

In the War of the Ring

The Olog-hai are not named in the narrative chapters, and the trolls that appear there, the mountain-trolls at the Gate of Minas Tirith and the hill-trolls of Gorgoroth at the Morannon, are not called by that name. But the scaled, armoured, hammer-wielding trolls that fought in daylight at the Black Gate answer exactly to the description of the Olog-hai in Appendix F, and it is reasonable to see them as the same breed.

Fate

The dependence of the Olog-hai on their maker was their undoing. When the Ring went into the fire and Sauron's will was withdrawn, the trolls at the Morannon ran witless or threw themselves down, and the breed died with Mordor. None are recorded in the Fourth Age.

Larger and stronger than the old trolls, with a hide of horny scales, more agile and better proportioned; armed with mail, great round shields and hammers. Unlike other trolls they could endure daylight while Sauron's power upheld them.

Drilled soldiers of Sauron, fighting in ranks alongside Orcs and Men of the East, obedient to his will and using the Black Speech for what little they said.

Sauron, in the last century of the Third Age, bred a race of trolls able to bear the sun and to fight with cunning, as he and Saruman had bred the Uruk-hai among the Orcs.

Destroyed or scattered at the destruction of the Ring; no Olog-hai are heard of afterwards.