Hardly a month goes by where someone doesn’t send me a Balrog Wings Debate email. A great deal of propaganda and misinformation has been passed around the Internet for years concerning Balrogs, fantasy creatures about which Tolkien wrote very little.
Some really bad analyses of Balrogs dip into stories from The Book of Lost Tales with virtually no regard for the fact that the Balrogs of those stories had absolutely nothing to do with with the Balrog of Moria in The Lord of the Rings. And it is the Balrog of Moria that causes all the fuss. I don’t understand why but people just cannot seem to share the Balrog with opposing points of view.
There are, in my mind, three points of view on the matter of Balrog wings:
- The Balrog had wings
- The Balrog did not have wings
- Tolkien used the word \wings” to refer to the darkness surrounding the Balrog that extended outward to the walls of the cavern in “The Bridge of Khazad-dum”
I’m firmly in the third camp although the anti-wing propagandists have argued for years that I am a pro-wings apologist. You will find that myth in just about every major Tolkien fan site (and others) that attempts to concede there are two points of view on the matter.
I tried to set the record straight about Balrog wings (and me) in “Flying Away On A Wing And A Hair”, an essay I wrote for MERP.com a few years ago. In that essay I pointed out that people who obsess over the (non)existence of Balrog wings don’t seem bothered by the “shadow” surrounding the Balrog even though Tolkien only says “it was like a great shadow” (emphasis is mine). “Like” is the word Tolkien uses to introduce a simile: shadow. Since we don’t have a real shadow what does it mean when Tolkien later refers to the shadow that “reached out like two vast wings”?
Through the years I have asked people to accept that there was no shadow. It was a darkness not a real shadow. People seem okay with that. But when you then ask people to believe that this darkness extended outward from the Balrog in two directions and that Tolkien labeled the extensions of the darkness as “wings” with no more intention than to refer to them by that word people get upset.
Why? Do you feel that saying these two regions of dark-whatever-it-is cannot be called “wings” is reasonable? People don’t have a problem with referring to the wings of a house the wings of an airplane or the wings a pilot wears. None of these “wings” enable any living creatures to fly except airplane wings and they don’t have blood flowing through them nor skin nor feathers. So are any of them “real wings” or as someone recently put it to me “actual wings”?
We don’t have to call the extensions of the darkness “wings” if we don’t want to but Tolkien did. So what’s the problem? It doesn’t mean the Balrog is a winged creature or that the Balrog flapped its wings in the wind. It just means that Tolkien (as on so many other occasions throughout the book) took a perfectly good word which lent itself to many uses and used it in a new way.
If you want to fuss over what constitutes simile and metaphor do so but that has nothing to do with the truth about “Balrog wings”. Most people cannot accurately describe how simile and metaphor are used. But you don’t need to win any arguments one way or the other concerning how English idiom works in order to get through this one passage in the book.
Surveys indicate that about 75% of all people believe the Balrog has wings. They form that impression from nothing more than what is written in the book. The remaining 25% or so believe something else (I would argue that most of them believe there are no wings).
There are wings they’re just not what most people would accept as “body parts” of the Balrog — at least not if you accept that the wings are simply the two extensions of darkness that reach outward from the Balrog. Tolkien’s armies have wings (an Adrahil was “Captain of the Left Wing” of the Northern Army of Gondor in one story for example) but that doesn’t mean the armies fly, flap, or reach out from wall to wall anywhere.
You don’t need to write long-winded nonsense essays that dredge up every published Tolkien passage in which the word “balrog” occurs in order to show how J.R.R. Tolkien intended the reader to follow the story in “The Bridge of Khazad-dum”.
You don’t have to get out your tattered copy of Internet Lies Slurs and Insults for the Easily Offended and warm up the old flame machine in order to disagree with people either.
For that matter you don’t need to prove anything about whether Balrogs do or do not have wings because frankly most people don’t care and of those who do care it seems that fewer than 1% change their minds on the basis of what they read on the Internet.
So while I do appreciate hearing from other Tolkien fans from time to time I really really have tried to put the Balrog Wings War behind me. I haven’t changed my mind on the matter in a long time because there is no need for me to do so.
If you find some Website that says I’ve written a pro-wings essay don’t believe it. I’ve written more than one essay that supports the third point of view. I hope this time I’ve finally presented it in a way that leads people to realize that I’m really really really not interested in picking and choosing between pro-wings and anti-wings arguments.
Both sides lost my support years and years ago. And please don’t take that personally — that’s just how I read the book. There’s no need for any of you to be upset — at least not with me particularly not about Balrog wings.
The truth about Balrog wings is that I like the book the way it is without all the rewriting and propaganda.