Balrogs

The word Balrog is Sindarin, and the Elvish name-lists preserved with the Silmarillion break it into two familiar elements: bal-, the root of power that also stands at the head of the name of the Valar, and raug or rog, a term for a demon or a cruel spirit. The Quenya equivalent is Valarauko, plural Valaraukar, formed from the same pair of elements, and it is this High-elven form that the Valaquenta sets beside the Sindarin one when it turns to Melkor's servants. Both names are descriptions rather than personal names: they classify a kind of being, not an individual, and the Elves who coined them were naming an enemy by the terror it carried. The same passage speaks of them as scourges of fire and as demons of dread, which is closer to a gloss than to a title. English renderings such as Demon of Might follow the sense of the compound rather than translating any single Elvish word.

On where they came from, the Valaquenta is explicit: they were spirits of the Maiar order, drawn to Melkor's splendour in the days before the shaping of the world and corrupted to his service, and afterwards clothed in shadow and armed with whips of flame. That account places their fall among Melkor's earliest works, long before any Elf or Dwarf existed to name them, and it makes them kin in origin to the Istari and to Sauron rather than bred things. The narrative chapters of the same book, however, describe them chiefly as troops: they issue from Angband in numbers when Morgoth's armies are pressed, and they are loosed with Orcs and dragons against Gondolin, which reads less like an order of great spirits than like a corps of captains. The published texts therefore hold two emphases together without reconciling them, and no passage states how many there were.

The Lord of the Rings, the only work of the group Tolkien himself published, offers no such genealogy. In Moria the creature is identified by Legolas, who cries out the Sindarin word and needs no further explanation, and Gandalf names it as a flame of Udûn, a name that binds it to Morgoth's ancient underground stronghold without saying what manner of spirit it is. The Dwarves, who had no Elvish lore to draw on, called it Durin's Bane after the king who met it, and the Appendices report only that what they had roused in delving for mithril was a Balrog of Morgoth. Readers of the published books thus meet the name before any account of the thing it names.

The only sustained physical description in the published books is the one given in Moria, and it is deliberately imprecise. The creature is roughly manlike in outline but larger, and the darkness that surrounds it defeats sight: the narrative reports that what stood within the shadow could not be made out, only that it was formidable. Fire streams from it, the air around it burns, and its right hand carries a many-thonged whip while a blade of flame appears in the other. The dark cloud about it stretches out to either side until it fills the width of the hall, a spread the text likens to wings and then says nothing further about. Its approach silences and unnerves an experienced company before any blow falls, and Aragorn and Boromir, who do not lack courage, are driven back with nothing accomplished.

The Beleriand narratives show what such a being could and could not do. A company of them was enough to break Ungoliant's hold on Morgoth, and a group of them overcame Fëanor in the open field, though he was the mightiest of the Noldor; their lord Gothmog killed Fingon in the Fifth Battle and took Húrin alive rather than killing him. But they were not invulnerable. Ecthelion killed Gothmog during the sack of Gondolin and died in the same struggle, and Glorfindel and the Balrog he fought in the mountain pass fell together to their deaths; in each case the demon was destroyed by an Elf with a weapon, at the cost of the Elf's life. The kindred was effectively ended in the war that closed the First Age, when all but a few were destroyed and the survivors hid themselves deep underground.

The Moria episode sets out the same balance in miniature. At the chamber door the contest is one of will and word rather than strength, and Gandalf, who holds the door with a spell, is answered by a counter-spell that nearly breaks him and shatters the door and part of the wall. On the bridge the demon proves heavy and solid enough to fall when the stone under it is broken, and its fire is put out by the deep water at the bottom of the shaft, though the being itself survives the quenching. Gandalf's later account describes a long pursuit up through the mountain, the fire rekindling at the summit, and an end in which the thing was thrown down and destroyed. Whatever order of spirit it belonged to, it was bound to a body that could be grappled, drowned, and killed.

The Balrogs' first recorded intervention comes late in the Years of the Trees, and it is preceded by a long silence. When the Valar broke Utumno and led Melkor away in chains, they did not search out all his works, and the Balrogs withdrew into the deep vaults beneath Angband, which was left standing; there they waited, unfound, through the whole of the Noldor's time in Valinor. They stirred again only when Morgoth came back over the northern ice with the Silmarils and found Ungoliant unwilling to release him. His cry carried into the pits, and they came up in fire to his rescue, driving her off with their scourges. Thereafter he rebuilt Angband above them, raised the towers of Thangorodrim over its gates, and had his old captains back at the head of his armies.

Their first meeting with the Noldor followed almost at once. In the second of the wars of Beleriand, fought under starlight before the Sun rose, Fëanor drove the fleeing Orcs too far northward and was cut off within sight of the mountains; the Balrogs came out against him there, and Gothmog dealt him his death-wound. For the long peace of the Siege of Angband they do not appear in the record at all, and they return with the breaking of it: when the northern plain was flooded with fire and Glaurung came out full-grown, the Balrogs came behind him, and the leaguer of Morgoth's fortress was never restored. In the great defeat that followed years later, the fifth battle, they were used as shock troops and as executioners of captured princes, and Angband ended that day with the field and the north in its hands.

The last of their great actions was the destruction of Gondolin. Morgoth had at length learned where the hidden city stood, and he sent his Balrogs against it together with Orcs, wolves and dragons; they came over the encircling mountains and into the streets, and the fighting in which Ecthelion and Gothmog killed one another, and in which Glorfindel fell in the pass with the demon that barred the fugitives' road, belongs to that night and the morning after it. From that point the kindred is not shown acting again in Beleriand. When the Host of the West came at the end of the Elder Days and Morgoth's power was thrown down, the Balrogs perished with the rest of his strength, all but a very few; those few escaped the wreck by going down, and hid themselves in caves at the roots of the mountains, where they were neither hunted out nor heard of for an age.

One of them was still there when the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm cut too far and too deep beneath Caradhras in search of mithril. In the year 1980 of the Third Age their delving broke into whatever held it, and it came up into the halls; Durin VI was killed that year, and his son Náin I in the next, and in 1981 the Dwarves abandoned the mansion altogether and went into exile. The alarm spread beyond them: many of the Silvan Elves of Lórien fled south in the same year, and Amroth and Nimrodel were lost. Khazad-dûm became the Black Pit, shunned by its own people and left to the creature that had emptied it, with Orcs settling into the upper levels in later centuries. Balin's attempt to recolonise the place five years short of the millennium's end lasted about five years and ended with his people wiped out.

The end came in the last winter of the Third Age. The Company of the Ring crossed Moria from west to east in January 3019, and on the fifteenth the Balrog overtook them at the bridge over the chasm before the eastern gate; Gandalf broke the span, and both went down together. What followed is known only from Gandalf's own account, and the chronicle dates it: the pursuit through the tunnels and up the Endless Stair ended on the peak of Zirak-zigil on the twenty-third, the fighting there lasted two days, and on the twenty-fifth the Balrog was thrown from the summit and destroyed, Gandalf dying with it. No other survivor of the kind is named anywhere in the records of the later Ages.

Gothmog is the only Balrog in the published legendarium with a name of his own. The Silmarillion styles him Lord of Balrogs and high-captain of Angband, a rank that sets him above Morgoth's Orc-commanders and answerable to Morgoth alone, and he is the only one of the kind the narrative follows as a person rather than as part of a formation. At the Fifth Battle he is shown doing a captain's work, driving a wedge into the Elven host to cut the King of Hithlum off from his own people before the demons closed round him; the weapon named in his hand there is a black axe rather than the whip and burning blade the kind is otherwise known for. Beyond his titles and the handful of scenes he appears in, nothing is told of him: no description, no account of how he came to lead. No other Balrog is individuated at all — the one that barred the high pass above Gondolin, and those that issued from the gates of Angband, are counted but never named.

The Moria demon has no personal name in any published text. Every designation it carries is somebody else's description of it, and the Dwarvish by-name commemorates a dead king rather than identifying the creature. It is nonetheless treated as an individual with a local history: in Lórien Celeborn says that the Elves there had long feared that a terror lay sleeping under Caradhras, which makes it a suspected neighbour rather than a surprise, and his first response is to reproach the Dwarves for having wakened what should have been left alone. Galadriel answers him in the Dwarves' defence, and the matter is dropped without either of them naming the thing.

Gandalf's own reckoning of it comes later, in Fangorn, and it is guarded. Pressed for the story, he first forbids the name to be spoken, and what he then says concerns the depths rather than the duel: “Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things.” Even Sauron, he adds, does not know them. Of those he will say nothing further. He speaks of the Balrog only as his own adversary, and leaves it there. The name Gothmog reappears in the Third Age, borne by the lieutenant of Minas Morgul who took over command on the Pelennor after the Witch-king fell; nothing connects him with the Lord of Balrogs except the word itself.

In The Lord of the Rings the Balrog exists to remove Gandalf. Up to the bridge in Moria the Company travels with a guide who has answers, opens doors, and can be relied on to know what lies ahead; from the moment he falls, the burden of decision passes to Aragorn, who must lead a leaderless and stunned party out into the open and southward without the counsel that had shaped the journey so far. The narrative treats the loss as a real wound rather than a plot turn: the survivors weep on the stairs outside the East-gate, and in Lórien they are still unable to speak of it plainly, so that Frodo and Sam make a lament instead. When the wizard reappears in Fangorn changed, the Balrog is the reason, and it is the only adversary in the book that costs a member of the Company his life and returns him altered.

It also carries the book's argument about digging. Gimli enters Khazad-dûm remembering a kingdom of craft and song, and the chapter lets him have that memory before it shows him the ruin his people left; Gandalf's verdict is that they delved past their depth and greed brought up what had been sleeping under the mountain. The terror is not an invader but a survival, something the Dwarves themselves uncovered while chasing the one metal no one else could get, and the price is a mansion emptied and a people scattered. Evil in this book is very often old and buried rather than newly made, and the Balrog is its clearest instance: an enemy out of a war ended an age before, still waiting where nobody looked.

In the older matter the Balrogs serve a different narrative purpose. Morgoth himself leaves his fortress only once, to answer Fingolfin's challenge, and after that he keeps behind his walls; the Balrogs are what stands in for him on the field, the part of his own strength that can be met and struck at. They are held in reserve and released at the moments when the story needs his hidden power made visible — against Ungoliant, against Fëanor, at the breaking of the Siege, at Gondolin — and each release marks a turn from which the Elves do not recover. Their presence is the signal that the reckoning has stopped being with Orcs.

The earliest sustained account of the kind belongs to the Lost Tales version of the fall of Gondolin, and it differs from the later conception in nearly every respect that can be counted. There the Balrogs are creatures Melko made rather than spirits who fell to him, and they are reckoned in hundreds rather than as a handful of great captains; the tale arms them with whips of flame and claws of steel, sets them riding on the backs of the iron and bronze monsters that break the city's defences, and allows Elvish warriors to kill them in numbers, the household of Rog destroying more of them in one action than were ever slain before or after. Gothmog appears there too, but as a son of Melko by an ogress and captain of the hosts of hell, not as the chief of an order of corrupted spirits; the parentage was later abandoned and only the rank survived into the published text.

The revision ran steadily towards fewness and towards spirit. In a late marginal note to the Annals of Aman, Tolkien set a hard limit on their number, writing that no more than three, or at most seven, should be supposed ever to have existed, and the same body of late work fixes them as Maiar corrupted at the beginning of things, which the early material had not said. Nothing of that restriction reached the narrative chapters, which descend from the older Quenta tradition and continue to release the Balrogs as a body of troops. The published Silmarillion therefore carries both layers at once, the late doctrine of their origin standing beside battle scenes written when they were still a numerous kind.

The Moria episode has been carried into every screen and radio version that reaches it, and in each the creature is mute, so there is no speaking credit to record. Ralph Bakshi's animated film gave it its first screen appearance, with Gandalf voiced by William Squire; like much of that production the sequence was built over live-action reference footage rather than drawn free. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation, the longest of the older adaptations at twenty-six parts, has no visual problem to solve and renders the thing entirely in sound against Michael Hordern's Gandalf, keeping both the confrontation at the bridge and the wizard's later account of what followed close to the order the book gives them. Peter Jackson's trilogy realised the demon digitally, again without a credited performer, and made its clearest structural change in the handling of that account: where the novel leaves the pursuit through the mountain and the fight on the peak to be reported in retrospect, the films show the fall and the running battle directly, beginning the second instalment with them.

The compression is a consequence of the show's own timeline rather than an isolated invention, but it detaches the waking from the delving-too-deep that the book makes its cause. A separate liberty in Jackson's third film touches this entity only through its name: the orc-commander on the Pelennor, played by Lawrence Makoare under prosthetics, is called Gothmog, a name the older legendarium attaches to the Lord of Balrogs and which the novel gives to an unseen lieutenant of Minas Morgul.