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Originally Posted by narfforc
Like I keep saying, people are quoting things that Tolkien may have wrote, but did not ultimately sanction, You cannot quote from The Silmarillion, it was published after his death, and you cannot know if seeing that sentence he would have been happy leaving it in, especially after what had already been published in LotR, the SHADOW spread out LIKE wings.
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Originally Posted by Feanor of the Peredhil
That's what erasers and pre-death publications are for. Regardless of how [horrifyingly] much writing someone's got laying around, if a writer has written something that he wants to change, he will track down the proper page[s] and rewrite it. If he died before he could change it, than it stays canon, because it is what was last written. You can't say "what he would want now" because he's not alive now to want it. Although I'll stick with not wholly trusting C's work, because it is obviously not J.R.R's, I still insist on wings, whether or not they were made of shadow.
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Tolkien himself, as his letters and his son testify, was very careful to stand by anything he had actually published. Consistency with the
Lord of the Rings (and to a much lesser degree considering the lesser degree of facts to be found, in the
Hobbit as well) was very important to Tolkien. Notice that he broke off his new theory about "the Problem of Ros" because it didn't jive with what he had written about Cair Andros.
Tolkien felt bound by what had appeared in print, hence the final editions of the
Hobbit and the
Lord of the Rings must be taken as solidly canonical. Anything else, while quite often demonstrably provable as Tolkien's last word on the subject, and quite often in step with his published works, cannot be given as high a proven standing, especially on matters where he changed his mind repeatedly, and did not seem to have made it up conclusively.
Therefore, with regards to the great Balrog debate, the only published references we have to go by are those in the
Lord of the Rings. As Mr Martinez in the above article notes, and as I believe is correct, at the time of writing, the Balrogs (whatever their in-story origin) were wingless, and couldn't fly, and Tolkien wrote the chapter "The Bridge of Khazad-dum" with this intent.
Since the author never changed these passages, it must be held the Balrog in the
Lord of the Rings is wingless. As already noted, the author spent great pains to keep his texts consistent. Thus, had he wanted winged Balrogs, he would surely have edited the passage in the Second Edition. Most likely, he never noticed the discrepancy, but that in itself is telling. I personally feel that it shows that Tolkien never changed his mind about Balrogs (whatever their origins) being wingless.