Q: Where do Balrogs March in the Silmarillion?
ANSWER: A reader asks: “Where in the Silmarillion can I find the line about Balrogs marching? I read about this on TV Tropes but cannot find the verse.” That is because there is no such line in The Silmarillion. The TV Tropes Website publishes a great deal of nonsense about Tolkien literature and should not be treated as a serious or reliable source of information. Nor should you be reading Wikipedia to learn about Tolkien’s Balrogs, for the Balrog article there is equally atrocious and filled with unbelievably inaccurate nonsense.
And what is it with people and Balrogs? They are one thing in The Lord of the Rings (which was written by J.R.R. Tolkien) and not quite anything in particular in The Silmarillion (which is a pastiche assembled by his son Christopher). There is a passage in Lay of Leithian, a pre-Silmarillion poem composed in the 1920s, where Tolkien wrote “the Orcs went forth to rape and war, and Balrog captains marched before”. These Balrogs were styled upon the Balrogs of The Book of Lost Tales, who though demons with “fiery manes” (and “claws of steel” in The Book of Lost Tales) were NOT (fallen/corrupted) Maiar. Tolkien had not imagined the Maiar at this time. He was writing a poem about a man (Beren) who fell in love with an Elven princess (Luthien) in an imaginary forgotten prehistoric land. In The Book of Lost Tales Beren was an Elf and much of the action of the story takes place in lands that are now England. In The Silmarillion England is nowhere to be found. But what few people seem to notice about “Lay of Leithian” is that it does retain some possible figurative connections with England, as Christopher points out in The Lays of Beleriand (Volume III of The History of Middle-earth):
My father never explained the name Leithian ‘Release from Bondage’, and we are left to choose, if we will, among various applications that can be seen in the poem. Nor did he leave any comment on the significance – if there is a significance – of the likeness of Leithian to Leithien ‘England’, In the tale of AElfwine of England the Elvish name of England is Luthien (which was earlier the name of AElfwine himself, England being Luthany), but at the first occurrence (only) of this name the word Leithian was pencilled above it (II. 330, note 20). In the ‘Sketch the Mythology’ England was still Luthien (and at that time Thingol daughter was also Luthien), but this was emended to Leithien, and this is the form in the 1930 version of ‘The Silmarillion’. I cannot say (i) what connection if any there was between the two significances of Luthien, nor (ii) whether Leithien (once Leithian) ‘England’ is or was related to Leithian ‘Release from Bondage’. The only evidence of an etymological nature that I have found is a hasty note, impossible to date, which refers to a stem leth- ‘set free’, with leithia ‘release’, and compares Lay of Leithian.
“Lay of Leithian”, along with “Lay of the Children of Hurin”, represents the mythological reboot of what most people now consider to be “the Legendarium”. Tolkien composed “The Sketch of the Mythology” explaining the history and world behind these two lays, and he described it as “the original Silmarillion”:
Original ‘Silmarillion’. Form orig[inally] composed c. 1926 — 30 for R. W. Reynolds to explain background of ‘alliterative version’ of Turin R the Dragon: then in progress (unfinished) (begun c. 1918).
Christopher dates the composition of the “Sketch” to early 1926. We could debate all day whether Tolkien had the mythology as described in the sketch completely in mind when he started writing the lays (Circa. 1918) and prove nothing; what we can be sure of is that the lays and the Sketch are inextricably connected with one another and provide the thematic and mythological foundation for much of what came after, including many elements contained in The Lord of the Rings.
But much was changed by the time Tolkien had the Balrog of Moria standing before the members of the Fellowship, with its wings of darkness stretching from wall to wall. This was not a Balrog from what was then The Silmarillion (the 1936 version and its predecessor texts). This was a new type of Balrog, a creature made not by Melko (of which he had a “host” or army) but self-incarnated by its own power in a man-like shape of flame and shadow, surrounded by a darkness that moved to its will. And to this day people believe they are being clever in asking why the Balrog (if winged) did not simply fly up out of the chasm. The answer to this red herring of a question has nothing to do with wingedness — Tolkien wrote the story so that the Balrog and its foe (Gandalf) fell an unknown distance at an unknown rate of speed until they landed in water and continued their battle for some days afterward. Why should the Balrog have to do anything other than what the author wants it to do?
Balrogs in The Book of Lost Tales were fierce creatures indeed, feared by Gnomes and Men alike. When they attacked Gondolin (numbering in at least the hundreds) they “were in stature very great” and blasted the defenders of the city with “darts of fire” and “flaming arrows”. They wielded whips of flame and used their steel claws to attack Turgon’s people. But Rog, leader of the Folk of the Hammer, led his battalion against the Balrogs:
…They battered them into nought, or catching at their whips wielded these against them, that they tore them even as they had aforetime torn the Gnomes; and the number of Balrogs that perished was a marvel and dread to the hosts of Melko, for ere that day never had any of the Balrogs been slain by the hand of Elves or Men.
Gothmog used some of his Balrogs to draw Rog’s battalion out into the open, and that worked. But Rog saw Gothmog’s intention and instead he attacked the decoy force and destroyed it. The Balrogs fled shrieking in terror from the Gnomes. Imagine dozens or hundreds of creatures like the Balrog of Moria fleeing in terror before the Elves of Gondolin. Do you really believe Tolkien had the same creatures in mind when he wrote “The Fall of Gondolin”?
The story published in The Silmarillion is a weak approximation of what J.R.R. Tolkien might have composed had he not been diverted from the task by so many other needs and fancies. He never finished retelling the story of Gondolin and we have nothing to look at except Christopher’s heavily compressed refinement of “The Fall of Gondolin” itself. If it is bad enough for anyone to use The Silmarillion as an insightful source of information about the nature of the Balrog of Moria, it is a complete dissemblance to point to pre-Silmarillion sources like “Lay of the Children” or “The Fall of Gondolin” and use those as justifications for making statements of fact about what the creature in Moria was or how many of its fellows were slain in Beleriand during the First Age. The story is incomplete, not completed by older texts that would have influenced it.
The Balrog of Moria is creepy and fascinating but it, Alas!, is the only one of its kind in the literary sense of any creature we actually meet in a composition by J.R.R. Tolkien. Christopher Tolkien set about the difficult task of publishing a Silmarillion that could be read but he knew as he completed that work that it needed explaining, much explaining, before he himself could live with the modifications and abridgments he had made. It is fair to say that the published Silmarillion attempts to complete the world that J.R.R. Tolkien created in The Lord of the Rings and the revised Hobbit, but it is a less-than-wholly-successful completion. If you feel wanting that is perfectly natural. But to attempt satisfy that need by using pre-Silmarillion texts to explain the elements of the story as if they have something to do with it is about as false and unjustifiable as you can be.
Unless some long-forgotten Tolkien text comes to light with the answers you seek, you will never find them. I think it’s best to stop searching and to enjoy what you have for what it is: a tale worth reading.
See also …
Do Balrogs Have Wings? Do Balrogs Fly?
Flying Away on a Wing and a Hair …
What is the Hithlum Passage and Why is It Important?
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Hmmm but then looking at it objectively can we say that Lay of Leithian can be a literary source for Middle Earth lore (let’s say with a bit of embellishment 🙂 )? While it is completely subjective I liked to compare Book of Lost Tales as a sort of ”fairy tales” of Arda 🙂 similarly to the Adventures of Tom Bombadil being based on legends and folklore but with a grain of truth (Man in the Moon Came Down too Soon shows clearly knowledge on geography of Bay of Belfalas and city of Dol Amroth and maybe, maybe some of the legendary creatures could have a source in the secondary reality of the tale 🙂 I don’t know maybe I just want to have Mewlips as real as Oliphaunts hahaha).
There is no Middle-earth in “Lay of Leithian”. These earlier works are set in entirely different fictional worlds from Middle-earth.
What Tolkien brought forward were ideas contained in those earlier stories and he created new expressions of those ideas in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.