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Gimlet definition:

A small dwarf.

A tool for boring holes i.e. leather working.

A drink involving gin or vodka and lime juice.

Pick One!

Hermes Serpent wrote:Gimlet definition:

A small dwarf.

A tool for boring holes i.e. leather working.

A drink involving gin or vodka and lime juice.

Pick One!

Or all 3: it's an old dwarf hazing ritual: you get a young dwarf on your mining crew, you get him pickled on hard spirits and use him for a boring tool.

So is a "Gimlet" a type of dwarf? One that's particularly well suited for squirming through small tunnels and thus, apparently, used to seeing in the dark?

I've always thought of wargs as huge bestial wolves, big enough so that human sized riders can ride them into battle. They are different from regular wolves, which are just common predators.

Eirik

I believe Tolkien was using the word gimlet in the sense of an awl.

Wargs are probably up to pony-sized, I think of them as patterned after the ice age dire wolf, not Jackson's hyaenas.

As for the spiders, those I recon come in all sizes from little ones about the size of your hand. All the way up to Shelob who was big enough for Sam to stand under. Yes, I think Shelob was the only one that big left in Middle Earth, and Ungoliant was bigger.

Elfcrusher wrote:And what, exactly, is a gimlet?

We need a stat block for gimlets. Special ability: See in the dark like themselves.

"There's only one thing those maggots can do: they can see like gimlets in the dark."

It's an older English figurative, like an idiom. A gimlet-eye is a squinty eye or an eye that is spying on you. Someone who is gimlet-eyed is very keen-eyed, and goes out of their way to discern small details or nuances others would overlook.