Balrogs

Middle-earth's Balrogs can fly because they are Maiar, spirits who once served Iluvatar. They don't need wings to fly and they don't have to have flesh wings if they want to have wings. But the whole wings argument is nonsense because the wings on the Balrog in Moria are just parts of the darkness that surround it. The darkness reaches out the two wings form. They are just wings in the sense that two extensions from the darkness exist on either side of the main part of the darkness.

Many artists have drawn Balrogs. TheOneRing.Net has some great Balrogs in their Middle-earth Tours section. Tuckborough has a good recap of Balrogs without picking a side in the arguments. Tolkien Wiki has a good description of Balrogs. The Barrow-downs has another good description of Balrogs. Not everyone gets all wrapped up in trying to prove if the Balrogs had wings or not.

In J.R.R. Tolkien's world of Middle-earth, Balrogs are fallen angels who serve the Dark Lord Morgoth. They are called spirits of fire who take on dark man-shapes. Their once holy fire because an unholy dark fire. When the Fellowship of the Ring passes through Moria, Gandalf confronts the last surviving Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-dum. Gandalf and the Balrog fight for 11 days until Gandalf kills the Balrog on the top of the peak of Zirak-Zigil. The dying Balrog falls from the mountain.

Tolkien first introduced Balrogs as an army of hideous creatures in The Book of Lost Tales, a mythology he created for England in the early 1900s. The Balrogs served Melko, the god of evil, in the mythology for England. There were many Balrogs and they were not very powerful compared to the later Balrogs. Around 1940, while writing The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien decided to make the Balrogs much more powerful creatures. They became the demons who served Morgoth in the First Age, wielding darkness and unholy fire.

Gothmog was the Lord of Balrogs in the First Age. He was also one of Morgoth's chief captains, leading armies against Morgoth's enemies. Gothmog may have been as powerful as Sauron in the First Age. When Christopher Tolkien wrote The Silmarillion, he needed to adapt his father's earlier mythology for England to the Silmarillion mythology that J.R.R. Tolkien had tried several times to write. So Christopher borrowed ideas from The Book of Lost Tales, including the stories about Ecthelion of Gondolin slaying Gothmog and about Glorfindel of Gondolin sacrificing himself to save Tuor and the survivors of Gondolin by killing himself and another Balrog.

For many years, fans of J.R.R. Tolkien have argued about whether Balrogs have wings. Some people say the Balrogs do not have wings because Tolkien was just using a metaphor to describe the darkness. But other people say that the Balrogs have wings made of darkness. The only passage where Balrog wings are mentioned in the chapter "The Bridge of Khazad-dum" in The Fellowship of the Ring. The book says the darkness surrounding the Balrog takes on the shape of wings and that these "wings" stretch out to span the cavern from wall to wall. This is not a metaphor. It's just a way of describing the shape of the darkness surrounding the Balrog. The wings are only extensions of the darkness and not supposed to be "real" wings.

The truth about Balrogs and their wings was published by Michael Martinez on MERP, where he wrote: "Tolkien's use of simile to show a transition from vagueness to clarity was clever in that it left a great deal to the reader's imagination." If Tolkien was just describing the parts of the darkness that extended out to the walls of the cavern, he really wasn't trying to leave much to the reader's imagination at all. People just made a big deal out of nothing for no good reason.

Martinez wrote another essay about Balrogs a few years ago that talks about the history of the Balrog wings argument. This essay is not as well written as the one on MERP but it explains the history of Balrogs in Tolkien's works. Many people think The Lord of the Rings is the mythology for England, but that is wrong. Tolkien created more than one mythology. The Book of Lost Tales is the mythology for England and The Lord of the Rings is part of the Middle-earth mythology. Tolkien used Balrogs in both mythologies but the Balrogs in the first mythology were different from the Balrogs in the Middle-earth mythology.