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Re: Many Many Balrogs
Sorry if the frequency of my posts has somewhat declined; I've just started college, which, alas, means forcible separation from several of the HoMe books. I'll try to keep up here as much as possible, but with classes starting tomorrow it's going to be sort of tough.
Anyway, about the whole Bob/HerenIstarion suggestion:
First, to HI's most recent comment: I don't think we can really take Elvish philology too far in this direction. Just because two words come from the same root does not mean that there is any kind of fundamental connection between those two words. Moreover, the Elves themselves probably didn't learn anything about Balrog and Orc origins until they reached Valinor - a fairly late stage in their lingual development.
As to the body of the 'Elucidation' as jallanite calls it: I'm inclined to agree with jallanite; while an interesting suggestion, it simply doesn't have enough support from the texts. Keep in mind what our goals are here. We're not writing a speculative essay on Middle-earth; we're trying to establish an authoratative canon. We simply cannot pick up on this interesting but dubious interpretation and try to assert that it is THE truth.
However, while I don't agree with most of the suggestion, there is one piece that has aroused some interest in me. It occurs to me that an intermediate option between strictly following the '7' note and basically disregarding it is this: we could take it to mean that only seven Balrogs fought and were killed in the War of the Powers, though others existed that were encountered later. It's not a reading that I particularly like, but it's another option if we find that keeping the number to 7 simply can't work.
I think we need to step back from the Fall of Gondolin project a little and think again about the Principles, and what this little exercise has told us about them. Perhaps we shouldn't use the Lost Tales material as extensively as we had planned, if we can't really make the Balrog situation work.
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