Do Balrogs Have Wings?

[Feanor of the Peredhil]

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

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.

Before I thought of the wings in terms of an ostrich, or a dodo (<-also explains that inconvenient extinction), but after Saucie's article, I'm all for too big to fly around under ground.

Sorry if this post is a little admonishing, hurried, or offensive to anyone, but I'm in a bit of a hurry and have about 20 seconds before I have to leave.

Regards,

Fea

[Aiwendil]

Davem wrote:

The Balrogs were 'born' on the battlefields of WW1 & I can't help feeling that however much Tolkien's thoughts about them & their nature may have developed over the course of his life, what they meant & their appearance would have changed little in essence.

I think you are right. Still, unless one accepts something like HerenIstarion's theory that there were in fact two quite distinct types of creature referred to as Balrogs/balrogs, there is some major change in Tolkien's conception of them represented by his correction, in the Annals of Aman, of a reference to a "host" of Balrogs, with the note that there were only "3 or at most 7".

Anyone who's really interested in that issue might want to look at this discussion in the New Silmarillion project.

HerenIstarion wrote:

+ rauko and arauko (< *grauk-) 'a powerful, hostile, and terrible creature' is both powerful and terrible/hostile

Yes, but if "Balrog" is the cognate of "Valarauko" then the "Bal" comes not from NGWAL- but from BAL-.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

If we imagine German troops approaching through the mist & smoke of no man's land, spraying flame from their dreadful Flammenwerfers, I think its easy to see where Tolkien got the idea from.

Only if the German troops were flying toward the Allied lines with great big, entirely functional, wings.

(Very interesting link and information, though.)

narfforc: from LotR, written by J.R.R. Tolkien and published in his lifetime:

it stepped forward slowly on to the bridge, and suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall.

[Neithan]

OK Fordim, you are just trying to annoy us no wingers aren't you? I must admit I gritted my teeth when I first saw what you wrote, you know full well the argument about the meaning of that quote so I will not bring it up again.

[Fordim Hedgethistle]

Originally Posted by Neithan

OK Fordim, you are just trying to annoy us no wingers aren't you? I must admit I gritted my teeth when I first saw what you wrote, you know full well the argument about the meaning of that quote so I will not bring it up again.

I am well aware of the argument indeed:

1) The statement "and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings" conclusively proves that there are no wings, only shadows that look like wings. (This is a common occurence in the English language, in which the following sentence, "That animal looks like a dog" conclusively proves that said creature is a cat.)

2) Having proved incontrovertibly with the above sentence that the great shadowy forms that look like wings are in fact not wings, we can finally interpret the extraordinarily ambiguous claim that "its wings were spread from wall to wall" as meaning "its great wing-like shadows spread out from wall to wall".

How could anyone disagree with such unassailable logic?