Balrog

• 1. Introduction

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  'Fly, you fools!' was Gandalf the Grey's last cry at the Bridge of Khazad-dum, as a Balrog's whip dragged him into the abyss below. The creature pulling him down was wreathed in fire and shadow, carrying a whip of many thongs. The Elf Legolas recognized it the instant it appeared. Gandalf had already told the Company: 'This is a foe beyond any of you.' What Tolkien placed at that bridge was no ordinary villain. A Balrog was something stranger: a corrupted angel, shaped before the world existed and hidden in the dark for thousands of years. How did Tolkien conceive this creature? Where did its name, its fire, and its terrible whip originate? And why did he spend decades rethinking whether seven of these beings had ever existed, or hundreds?

• 2. From Maiar to Monster

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  A host of a thousand Balrogs appears in Tolkien's Quenta Silmarillion, giving some sense of how he first imagined them. In the early mythology, these were numerous demons, roughly twice human size, rarely killed in battle. Hundreds of them rode on the backs of Dragons at the storming of Gondolin. Morgoth used them to torture captives.

  Christopher Tolkien noted a crucial shift between these early versions and his father's later thinking. A very late marginal note, never incorporated into any published text, stated that 'at most seven' Balrogs had ever existed. Yet Tolkien's Annals of Aman, written as late as 1958, still described Melkor commanding 'a host of Balrogs.' The contradiction was never resolved.

  In the published Lord of the Rings, Balrogs gained a far more unsettling nature. They became Maiar, the same order of angelic spirits as Gandalf and Sauron. Melkor had corrupted them before the making of the world. Christopher Tolkien described the earlier versions as 'less terrible and certainly more destructible.' As Maiar, only the physical form of a Balrog could be destroyed. Their spirit endured.

  Even the Balrog's physical appearance was left imprecise. In the Chamber of Mazarbul, the creature entered a large square room. At the Bridge of Khazad-dum, that same creature drew itself to a great height. Its wings spread from wall to wall in a vast hall. Whether Balrogs had wings, and whether wings meant flight, Tolkien never made plain.

  The most fully realized individual Balrog in Tolkien's work was Gothmog. He held three titles simultaneously, and his death required a Noldorin Elf-lord willing to trade his own life.

• 3. Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs

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  Gothmog held three titles simultaneously: Lord of the Balrogs, High Captain of Angband, and Marshal of the Hosts. One version of the character placed him at twelve feet tall, wielding a black axe and a whip of flame.

  In the Second Battle, Dagor-nuin-Giliath, Gothmog led a force that ambushed Feanor and wounded him mortally. In the Fifth Battle, Nirnaeth Arnoediad, he commanded Balrogs, Orc-hosts, and Dragons as Morgoth's field commander. He slew Fingon, the High King of the Noldor, in that same battle. He also captured Hurin of Dor-lomin after Hurin killed Gothmog's personal guard of Battle-trolls.

  At the Storming of Gondolin, Gothmog served as Marshal of the Hosts. He was about to kill Tuor when Ecthelion of the Fountain, a Noldorin Elf-lord, intervened. They fought in single combat. Both fell into the king's fountain in Gondolin. Both drowned.

  In The Book of Lost Tales, Tolkien wrote the earliest version of Gothmog as a son of Morgoth. The ogress Fluithuin, also called Ulbandi, was named as his mother. The original name in this version was Kosomot, often considered Gothmog's Quenya name. The Quenya name-list of The Fall of Gondolin gives yet another form, Kosomoko. Gothmog in Sindarin means 'Dread Oppressor.'

  Tolkien's early Lay of the Children of Hurin names 'Lungorthin, Lord of Balrogs.' Christopher Tolkien thought it more likely that Lungorthin was simply 'a Balrog lord' rather than another name for Gothmog.

  One Balrog survived the downfall of Morgoth by hiding deep beneath the Misty Mountains. It would wait there for more than five millennia without detection.

• 4. Durin's Bane

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  For more than five millennia, a Balrog lay hidden at the roots of Caradhras, deep within the Misty Mountains. It had survived the defeat of Morgoth in the War of Wrath by escaping to those depths. No one knew it was there.

  What disturbed it was avarice. The Dwarves of Khazad-dum dug too deep in their pursuit of mithril. The Balrog killed Durin VI, the Dwarf-King of Khazad-dum, and the Dwarves named it Durin's Bane. Durin's successor Nain ruled for only a single year before the same fate found him.

  The Dwarves tried to fight back, but their power was no match for the creature. Survivors fled. Word reached the Silvan Elves of Lothlorien, many of whom fled what they called the 'Nameless Terror.' From that point, Khazad-dum was known as Moria, a Sindarin word meaning 'Black Pit' or 'Black Chasm.'

  For five hundred years, Moria stood empty of Dwarves. Orcs crept in soon after the Dwarves were driven out, prompting the flight of Nimrodel, according to Unfinished Tales. During the reign of Thrain II, the Dwarves attempted to reclaim Moria in the War of the Dwarves and Orcs. The Battle of Azanulbizar was a Dwarf victory. Dain II Ironfoot, having slain the Orc Azog near the eastern gate, perceived the Balrog's terror within and warned Thrain that Moria was unachievable. The Dwarves departed and resumed their exile.

  Balin made another attempt despite that warning. His party established a colony in Moria. They were massacred a few years later.

  The Fellowship of the Ring traveled through Moria on the quest to destroy the One Ring. Orcs attacked them in the Chamber of Mazarbul. Gandalf tried to place a shutting spell on a door to block the pursuit. On the other side, the Balrog entered and cast what Tolkien describes as a 'terrible' counterspell. Gandalf spoke a word of Command; the door shattered and the chamber collapsed.

  At the Bridge of Khazad-dum, Gandalf faced the creature directly. He called it 'flame of Udun,' the Sindarin name of Morgoth's fortress Utumno, and broke the bridge beneath it. As it fell, the Balrog wrapped its whip around Gandalf's knees. Both plunged into the darkness below.

  They crashed into a deep subterranean lake, and the water extinguished the Balrog's flames. It became, as Tolkien wrote, 'a thing of slime, stronger than a strangling snake.' They fought in the water. The Balrog clutched at Gandalf to strangle him; Gandalf hewed the creature with his sword until it fled into the primordial tunnels beneath Moria. Gandalf pursued it for eight days.

  They climbed to the peak of Zirakzigil. There the Balrog's body erupted into new flame. They fought for two days and nights. Gandalf cast it down, and it broke the mountainside where it fell in ruin.

  Gandalf himself died shortly afterward. He returned to Middle-earth with greater powers, as Gandalf the White, 'until his task was finished.' The critic Jerram Barrs recognized this as a transfiguration similar to that of Jesus Christ, suggesting Gandalf's prophet-like status. The critic Clive Tolley noted that the bridge contest echoes shamanistic traditions in some respects. He found a closer parallel in medieval vision literature, giving the examples of St Patrick's Purgatory and Dante's Divine Comedy.

  The name 'Durin's Bane' appears nowhere in Tolkien's etymological notes for the word 'Balrog.' That etymology traced back much further, to a forgotten Old English word Tolkien studied intensively in the 1930s.

• 5. The Name and Its Roots

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  Tolkien was a professional philologist, a scholar of comparative and historical linguistics. In the 1930s he published a detailed study of the Old English word Sigelwara. The word appeared in texts such as the Codex Junius and meant 'Aethiopian.' Tolkien suspected it had once carried a different meaning entirely.

  He emended it to Sigelhearwan and examined its two parts. Sigel, he argued, meant 'both sun and jewel.' The sun meaning came from the word's role as the name of the Sun rune, *sowilo. The jewel meaning came from Latin sigillum, a seal. He connected Hearwa to Old English heorð, meaning 'hearth,' and ultimately to Latin carbo, meaning 'soot.'

  From this analysis, Tolkien concluded that the Sigelhearwan implied 'rather the sons of Muspell than of Ham.' Muspell was a class of demons in Northern mythology. They had red-hot eyes that emitted sparks and faces black as soot. The scholar Tom Shippey argued that this work 'helped to naturalise the Balrog.' Shippey also noted that it contributed to the Silmarils, which combined the nature of the sun and jewels. The Aethiopians of the original word suggested to Tolkien the Haradrim, a dark southern race of men in his mythology.

  The name Balrog itself appears as early as around 1918, in The Fall of Gondolin. An early list of names described it as 'an Orc-word with no pure equivalent' in Tolkien's invented language of Quenya. In Gnomish, another invented language, the name parsed as balc, meaning 'cruel,' plus graug, meaning 'demon,' with the Quenya equivalent Malkarauke.

  By the 1940s, when Tolkien began writing The Lord of the Rings, he had revised this. He now read the word as Noldorin balch, 'cruel,' plus rhaug, 'demon,' with the Quenya form Malarauko. That form derived from nwalya-, meaning 'to torture,' plus rauko, meaning 'demon.' The final etymology, published in The Silmarillion, derived Balrog as the Sindarin translation of the Quenya Valarauko, meaning 'Demon of Might.'

  Norse mythology offered a real-world echo long before Tolkien's invented languages existed. An epithet of the god Odin was Baleygr, meaning 'fire-eyed.' Joe Abbott, writing in Mythlore, noted that the Old Norse Voluspa describes the fire-demon Surt carrying both a sword and a sviga laevi. That sviga laevi was a deadly whipping-stick or switch. Abbott called it 'a short step' from that description to the Balrog's flaming whip.

  Abbott also drew a line from the Balrog to the monster Grendel in Beowulf. Tolkien himself had written that Grendel was 'physical enough in form and power, but vaguely felt as belonging to a different order of being.' He described the creature as 'one allied to the malevolent ghosts of the dead.' Abbott compared this with Aragorn's description of the Balrog as 'both a shadow and a flame, strong and terrible.'

  In an early draft of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien contemplated a cosmic edict concerning Balrogs. In that draft, Gandalf challenges the Balrog by invoking an ancient prohibition. It was 'forbidden for any Balrog to come beneath the sky since Fionwe son of Manwe overthrew Thangorodrim.' Tolkien never incorporated that challenge into the published text.

  Tolkien's scholarly reading ranged from Old English battle poems to classical Greek epics. Both traditions left their mark on how he staged the Balrog's encounters with heroes.

• 6. Literary Echoes

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  Alexander Bruce, writing in Mythlore, argued that Tolkien used Gandalf's stand at the Bridge of Khazad-dum to correct a historical error. The error was made by Byrhtnoth, an Anglo-Saxon ealdorman at the Battle of Maldon. Tolkien felt acutely that Byrhtnoth had blundered.

  At Maldon, Byrhtnoth allowed the Vikings to step ashore, and the English army was defeated. Bruce argued that Tolkien contrasted this pride-driven choice with Gandalf's selfless stand at the bridge. The scholar Janet Brennan Croft also drew that contrast.

  The Fall of Gondolin and the fall of Troy, as told in the Iliad, share multiple parallels. Bruce compared Ecthelion of the Fountain's combat with the Balrog Gothmog to scenes from the Greek epic. He saw Ecthelion's charge against Morgoth's forces as parallel to Aeneas rallying the Trojans, who fails and watches Priam perish. Bruce read the same logic into Gondolin's fall.

  Tolkien began a poem in alliterative verse about the battle of Glorfindel with the Balrog in The Fall of Gondolin. In that poem, both Glorfindel and the Balrog were killed by falling into the abyss. In The Lord of the Rings, both Gandalf and the Balrog fell the same way from the Bridge of Khazad-dum. The structural echo between these two stories is direct.

  No filmmaker had yet attempted to put a Balrog on screen when Ralph Bakshi began his 1978 animated version.

• 7. Beyond Tolkien

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  Ralph Bakshi's 1978 animated version named the creature Durin's Bane and gave it large wings like those of a bat. Peter Jackson's films, The Fellowship of the Ring in 2001 and The Two Towers in 2002, used a similar winged design. Jackson's team based the look on the work of Tolkien illustrator John Howe, making the winged Balrog the standard visual reference. Earlier artists such as Ted Nasmith had depicted Balrogs without wings. Jackson's interpretation expressed the creature's 'satanic, demonic nature' through those wings, in the same way his films made pointed ears the standard for Elves. A Balrog appears in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power streaming series with a similar visual design to Jackson's version.

  In the real-time strategy game The Lord of the Rings: The Battle for Middle-earth, the Balrog can use its wings in short leaps. Its sequel carried the same mechanic. In The Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, the Balrog uses its wings to fly into the air. It comes crashing down, sending a wave of flames at the player. In The Lord of the Rings: Conquest, the Balrog is a playable hero character.

  King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard featured a Balrog in their 2017 album Murder of the Universe. Songwriter Stu Mackenzie explained the character: 'It might not be the Balrog from Middle Earth, but he is a sort of fire demon.'

  Early Dungeons & Dragons books featured Balrogs alongside other Middle-earth characters such as Hobbits and Ents. After a lawsuit brought by the Tolkien Estate, the Tolkien-specific names were changed. The Balrogs became the Balor, named after the one-eyed monster of Irish mythology.

  A now-defunct fantasy writing prize called the Balrog Award was named after the monsters. The Japanese anime series Restaurant to Another World introduced a Balrog as a butler described as polite. In the indie game Cave Story, a character simply named 'Balrog' appears as an antagonist. Cave Story's developer described the character as an anthropomorphic bar of soap, with no resemblance to Tolkien's monster. The only connection was the name.