Every time I’ve read the LOTR trilogy, when Sam and Frodo witness oliphaunts for the first time, I assumed they were elephants and that was just their hick pronunciation. A standard elephant would have been plenty fantastic to a rube who had only heard of them in poems.
I may have come to this conclusion because (I think) that other than magical, “fairy tale” type creatures (e.g., trolls, Balrogs, orcs), Middle Earth was populated with unremarkable animal specimens—horses, cows, birds, all the fauna we’d encounter in a stroll through the countryside.
The movies of course depicted them as elephant-like creatures, but monstrously large (even compared to an elephant) with more than the standard allotment of tusks. All the fan wiki pages I checked map to the movies’ depictions.
Did I just lack the imagination to understand these were not your garden variety elephants? Did Tolkien expand on this elsewhere? What gives?
ISTM that oliphaunt is to elephant as Mearas is to horses: i.e., a somewhat supernaturalized and superpowered variant of the familiar species that is nonetheless considered a real-world animal. Like the Mearas, the oliphaunts are described as a dwindling remnant of ancient might: “the like of him does not walk now in Middle-earth; his kin that live still in latter days are but memories of his girth and majesty” (end of Ch IV, Book Four).
According to the LOTR wiki (which is a thing, because of course it is), the Chinese translation of the books uses 猛獁象, which literally means “mammoth”.
The Japanese version, on the other hand, doesn’t attempt to translate the word at all and just uses オリファント, I.e. “oriphanto”, a phonetic transliteration of the word.
Even in our world, with our diminished elephants, the howdah carried by a war elephant might reasonably be described as a “war tower on its back”, especially by someone unfamiliar with them.
What we know about oliphaunts from the source material is that they were natural, mundane animals, that were nonetheless larger than any modern elephant, and a few other details like that they’re “grey as a mouse”. That’s it. We don’t know how much larger they were. I suspect that Jackson’s interpretation was larger than Tolkien’s, but it’s not inconsistent with the text.
Personally, I picture the typical oliphaunt being comparable to King Tusk (which was actually an Indian elephant, despite African elephants being larger overall), with some specimens being a bit larger or smaller. But they could have been mammoth-sized (though not mammoths themselves, because they’re grey and I think mostly hairless).
