Q: Why Do You Say That Balrogs Evolved? When Did They Evolve?
ANSWER: I never said that Balrogs evolved (within the in-story Middle-earth mythology). I was quite taken aback by this question as I could not imagine where someone would get the idea that I ever said Balrogs evolved (in-story). I believe the misunderstanding was posted some years ago in an obscure forum discussion about Balrog wings, where someone misquoted or mis-summarized what I wrote in my early Balrog Wings essay.
What I have said often enough — and which is true — is that J.R.R. Tolkien’s idea of Balrogs evolved from mythology to mythology. That is, in The Book of Lost Tales (the mythology for England) the Balrogs were created or manufactured or bred creatures who served Melko and there were many hundreds of them, perhaps 1,000 or more. These creatures were used as fearsome shock troops in Melko’s battles with the Elves and the other Valar.
By the time J.R.R. Tolkien introduced a Balrog into The Lord of the Rings he was deeply immersed in an evolutionary phase of his literary ideas — his imagined Legendarium was expanding and changing. He found the old description of Balrogs (which had more-or-less been carried forward to the “Silmarillion” mythology or phase of the Legendarium) was not suitable for his new story. So he changed the physical appearance of the Balrog of Moria and gave it that dark emanation that he described as “a shadow” — and, of course, the controversial wings were formed by this shadow-like darkness as it expanded outward when the Balrog pressed toward the Bridge of Khazad-dum in its pursuit of the Company of the Ring.
The evolution of Balrogs in Tolkien’s thought (and Legendarium) did not stop with a change in physical appearance. He eventually included them in the ranks of the Ainur by declaring that they were in fact fallen Maiar who rebelled against Manwë to serve Melkor (or, rather, who shed their tenuous allegiance to Manwë and the other Valar to support Melkor when he fully broke away from them). This decision — as best can be determined from the texts provided by Christopher Tolkien in The History of Middle-earth — appears to have been in 1948, after he completed work on the primary narrative of The Lord of the Rings. At that time Tolkien turned back to working on “Ainulindalë” and related works, updating them to reflect his new concepts. He made subsequent changes to various texts in the following years to clarify his alteration of the Valar and their companions from pagan gods to angelic beings sent to inhabit and watch over Time and Space by Ilúvatar. According to Christopher Tolkien’s analysis in Morgoth’s Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien probably concluded there were no more than 3-7 Balrogs around 1958 while he was working on “Annals of Aman”.
In the various arguments that I have written about (Balrogs, wings, Maiar, and whatnot) I have (referred to, described, and documented in various ways) the changes in Tolkien’s thoughts about the Balrogs. These kinds of literary mappings become long, convoluted, and quite boring for most people. It is no simple task and in fact one which has been bungled more than once by Tolkien archivists across the Web; we all make mistakes. It doesn’t help if the arguments I present require refinement; which is to say that I have always been dissatisfied with that first essay and have at times pulled it from the Web, made minor modifications to it, and I even rewrote it for my book Visualizing Middle-earth.
In one of my attempts to restate my views and the logical analysis of the whole “Balrog of Moria” dispute I sent a document to Turgon at TheOneRing.Net some years ago which clearly stated:
Q) What were the wings made of?
We don’t know. Quite probably “shadow-stuff”, whatever it was which the Balrogs used to cloak themselves in darkness. They probably were not made of flesh and blood, or feathers, and need not have been membraneous (skin stretched across appendages).Q) Did Balrogs fly?
Not in the 1916 story “The Fall of Gondolin”. However, in a passage of “Quenta Silmarillion” which was not completely included in the published SILMARILLION, Tolkien wrote the following sentence: “Swiftly they arose, and they passed with winged speed over Hithlum, and they came to Lammoth as a tempest of fire.” To date, all attempts to show that this passage can mean something other than that the Balrogs were flying have been unsuccessful. The sentence indicates the Balrogs were travelling very fast (“swiftly”, “winged speed”), but their arrival in Lammoth indicates they came out of the sky (as a “storm of fire”). “Tempest” can mean something other than “storm”, most notably “tumult”, but a tumult is a great noise or confusion, and the sentence makes no sense if you substitute “tumult” (or great noise) for “tempest”. Since the Balrogs were flying, “winged speed” may be more literal than figurative. Hence, Tolkien’s use of the phrase here is another indication of the wings on the Balrogs.
I thought at the time that would suffice. However, Turgon added the following comment which I found very puzzling: “And even the point on ‘winged speed’ is not really conclusive — a person riding a horse could be moving at winged speed.” While that is true (and there is even a passage where Fingolfin’s horse passes with “winged speed” over the charred remnants of Ard-galen) he seemed to take my reference to “winged speed” as a point in favor of flying or winged Balrogs. As I have noted elsewhere, Christopher Tolkien dropped “winged speed” from the published Silmarillion text; the crux of the argument for Balrogs flying over Hithlum is that they arrive in Lammoth as a tempest of fire.
Given Turgon’s confused response to what I thought was a precisely-worded statement, I eventually came up with the following more brief declaration in The Truth About Balrogs (Again), which I published on the Tolkien Studies on the Web blog:
There are, in my mind, three points of view on the matter of Balrog wings:
- The Balrog had wings
- The Balrog did not have wings
- Tolkien used the word “wings” to refer to the darkness surrounding the Balrog that extended outward to the walls of the cavern in “The Bridge of Khazad-dum”
I’m firmly in the third camp although the anti-wing propagandists have argued for years that I am a pro-wings apologist. You will find that myth in just about every major Tolkien fan site (and others) that attempts to concede there are two points of view on the matter.
Honestly, I don’t know if I can state my position more succinctly than that. It accurately reflects what I have been arguing for years but for some reason people can’t see past the ridiculous debate over the use and meaning of “winged speed”.
So we can certainly say that my attempts to clarify my position in the Balrog Wings Debate have evolved.
During the original Balrog Wings Wars I often stated that it’s perfectly acceptable to refer to the darkness described as “wings” (because of their apparent shape or function) as wings simply because that is what they were — in the same sense that two outstretched portions of a building, airplane, or army are referred to as wings. You can also call them “extensions”, “portions”, “subsections”, or many other things — but Tolkien used the word “wings” and he most likely wanted the reader to picture the darkness as assuming vast wing-like proportions. Here is an example of Tolkien using “wings” to refer to parts of a building:
Even from the outside the inn looked a pleasant house to familiar eyes. It had a front on the Road, and two wings running back on land partly cut out of the lower slopes of the hill, so that at the rear the second-floor windows were level with the ground…
Emphasis is mine. Much to his shame, Tolkien continued to use “wing” to refer to a part of a building: “…we’ve got a room or two in the north wing that were made special for hobbits….” (emphasis is mine).
A purely metaphorical usage of “wings” is found in “The Council of Elrond”: “Of Númenor he spoke, its glory and its fall, and the return of the Kings of Men to Middle-earth out of the deeps of the Sea, borne upon the wings of storm.” Emphasis is mine. And poor Galadriel sings about the wings of trees, if Tolkien’s translation of her Quenya song is to be accepted: “`Ah! like gold fall the leaves in the wind, long years numberless as the wings of trees!'”
There is no end to Tolkien’s use of “wing”, “wings”, and “winged” to describe things, as when Pippin overhears Orcs arguing: “‘I came across,’ said the evil voice. ‘A winged Nazgûl awaits us northward on the east-bank.'” Are we to suppose or debate whether Nazgul have wings? There is more than one reference to them: “…ought to know that they’re the apple of the Great Eye. But the winged Nazgûl: not yet, not yet. He won’t let them show themselves across the Great River yet, not too soon. They’re for the War-and other purposes.’…” Gandalf later referred to the first “winged Nazgul” as “the Winged Messenger”.
It’s interesting how the word “wings” evolves under Tolkien’s hand, but no one really stops to ask if the Nazgul are actually winged — and that is because the narrative makes it clear that the Nazgul was mounted on a flying winged beast which Legolas shot — but at first the Company of the Ring did not know it for what it was. They merely saw a dark shape flying above the river and Legolas fired an arrow at it.
Therefore, we can debate about Tolkien’s use of wings in various ways and still not come to any general agreement on much of anything. My interpretation of the scene in “The Bridge of Khazad-dum” is that Tolkien wanted the reader to infer that the Balrog was using its darkness to assume a large, terrifying shape that was meant to overawe its enemies. This was an act of pure intimidation, much as like when a very large man suddenly stands up and towers over someone sitting right next to him, bending down toward that other person in a very menacing fashion. It should feel a very terrifying thing to anyone who is uncertain of what they are about to face.
The darkness surrounding the Balrog is like a cloud that suddenly expands outward. And I’ll even go so far as to suggest that Tolkien may have witnessed or heard about very similar expansions of cloud-like vapors in his wartime experience, when poison gas clouds would spread across the battlefields. The soldiers of the First World War knew very well what breathing that mustard gas would do to them and they must have been afraid of those clouds. We do not have to assume that Tolkien would have literally seen any mustard gas clouds “reaching out like two vast wings” to know a similar feeling. (NOTE: You can watch a historical video here that depicts a controlled release of mustard gas during the Second Italo-Ethiopian War.)
Tolkien’s description of the Balrog as it approaches and presents its full terrifying presence to the Company of the Ring is one of the most perfect of many transitions from vagueness to clarity with which he enrichens his literature. And I think it should be noted that many people have compared the appearance and enlargement or transformation of the Balrog of Moria (its transition from vague, distant threat to close, identified terror of an ancient age) to the “Night on Bald Mountain” sequence in Disney’s 1940 movie “Fantasia” (the only Disney movie about which J.R.R. Tolkien had anything positive to say, so far as I know):
Which is not to say that one should necessarily picture the Balrog as looking like Chernabog the demon, but did you notice how he extends his power through that shadow-like darkness toward the town and the graves? In fact Chernabog himself assumes the shape of a mountain peak, so the entire sequence is about transitions: from peak to demon, from day to night, from darkness to light, from light to darkness, from demon to peak, and from night to day. I have always wondered (as have others) if this sequence did not have a profound impact on J.R.R. Tolkien’s imagery.
Nonetheless, to return to the original question, I did say that Tolkien’s conception of Balrogs evolved (changed) but I only meant that the evolution occurred as part of the process of developing the world of The Lord of the Rings. The story itself does not portray or imply that the Balrogs experienced any form of evolution within their in-story history. And I know there have been discussions of shape-changing Balrogs — an idea I put forth myself (because when its flame was extinguished, according to Gandalf, “it became a thing of slime”). But even if Tolkien’s conception of a Balrog included a shape-changing ability (and there are other examples of such abailities in his Middle-earth texts — in fact, as Self-Incarnates Balrogs would have had the ability to begin with) I would not consider that to be “evolution”.
It has always seemed unnecessary to me for people to imagine that the Balrog had physical wings — much less that it would have needed wings to move through the air. There is nothing in the text that refers to a flapping Balrog wing used in creating lift or otherwise propelling a Balrog across the landscape or through the sky. So all those Websites that prove I am wrong to argue in favor of such wings are tilting at windmills.
Given such Don Quixotish scholarship and rebuttal, I rarely rise to the challenge any more of correcting these nonsense arguments; nonetheless, people keep bringing them to my attention. If I could erase the misattributions from the Web I would. Those who have published those misattributions should remove them, but I doubt that will ever happen by intention.
See also
What is the Hithlum Passage and Why Is It Important?
How Long did Gandalf and the Balrog Fall?
How Did Gandalf Kill the Balrog of Moria?
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