Monstrous and destructive creatures of legend and folklore. In fact, it is doubtful whether Ogres ever existed in Middle-earth. Tolkien mentions them only once, in The Hobbit, during Bilbo's Riddle-game with Gollum. In his attempt to solve Gollum's fifth riddle, Bilbo '...sat in the dark thinking of all the horrible names of all the giants and ogres he had ever heard told of in tales...' (The Hobbit 5, Riddles in the Dark). Since no Ogre is ever again mentioned, it is entirely possible that they were a mythical race even to the inhabitants of Middle-earth.

One tenuous possibility is that the Ogres of Hobbit legend represented a remote cultural memory of the Oghor-hai, the fierce woodland people otherwise known as Drúedain or Woses. It's hard to defend this idea linguistically, since 'ogre' would be an English translation of an unknown Westron name, unless Tolkien intended us to imagine that our own word 'ogre' is itself an echo of the distant Oghor-hai. This is less far-fetched than it might seem, because actual folk-tales of Woses do in fact exist. It's hard to be sure whether any of this was Tolkien's intention, but the similarity of the two words at least raises the possibility of some kind of a link.