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Originally Posted by Bęthberry
Reading over the Sinking of Numenor thread and then coming to this thread puts ideas in my head.
Tolkien loves the sea--witness Ulmo and the elves--but does he have any terrifying sea creatures? Any leviathans or barracudas in Middle-earth? Now that would truly be terrifying: a token monster whose nature we don't really know. A faceless evil of the deeps.
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Actually, I believe he has some - although unspecified - monsters of the deep seas. Because however positive his views of the water are, there is one rather - well, yes, why not to use the word - scary moment in the description of what Tuor sees when Ulmo lets him "see" for a moment something from his own realm (among other things):
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Originally Posted by Unfinished Tales
The Great Sea he saw through its unquiet regions teeming with strange forms, even to its lightless depths, in which amid the everlasting darkness there echoed voices terrible to mortal ears.
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There is no explicite mention of sea monsters, but the implications are pretty strong, I would say. And yes, maybe I should have noted this one among the "top ten" of mine, however I am not really scared of it, the passage has very close to it - maybe had it not been about water... (And I would also like to mention at this place that this sentence, especially its first part - the second is "classical Tolkienesque" - and the sentence which follows right behind this one, sound rather Lovecraftian. It's one of the weirdest things in all of Tolkien, to me.)