Balrog

The drums come first. They roll up from the deep places of the mine, a slow double beat that makes the stone floor shake, and the Orcs who have been pouring through the halls of Moria fall back to the walls and go quiet. Then the thing they are making room for arrives at the edge of a burning fissure. It does not look for a way round. It jumps the fire, and the flames climb to meet it and set light to the mane on its back.

That is how the Balrog walks into The Fellowship of the Ring, published in 1954, and it is how most of the world met it. It is not a figure of inherited folklore. The Balrog is the invention of one man, the Oxford philologist J. R. R. Tolkien, and it can be dated with unusual precision. It first appears in “The Fall of Gondolin”, a tale he wrote around 1916 and 1917 while on sick leave from the Western Front, and which stayed unpublished until his son Christopher printed it in The Book of Lost Tales in 1984. The name is in his invented Elvish. In its settled form it is Sindarin for “Demon of Might”, and it has an older Quenya equivalent, Valarauko.

The Balrogs of that first tale are not the creature of the bridge. They come against the hidden Elf-city in their hundreds, riding on dragons of metal and fire, about twice the height of a man, with claws of steel, iron mail and whips of flame. They also die in useful numbers. The warriors of one Elvish house kill several in a single charge, which no one in Tolkien’s later writing would dream of attempting. Over the next forty years he kept the name and the whips and changed almost everything else.

In The Silmarillion, published in 1977, the Balrogs have become something much older and much worse. They are Maiar, spirits of the same order as Gandalf and Sauron, who existed before the world was made and were drawn to the rebel power Melkor, later called Morgoth, in the days of his first splendour. The text calls them scourges of fire. Their natural business is seen on the shore of Lammoth, when Morgoth is caught in the webs of the great spider Ungoliant and cries out. The Balrogs, sleeping in the ruins under his old fortress, hear him. They cross the country as a storm of fire and cut the webs apart with their whips, and Ungoliant flees in a cloud of black vapour. They are his bodyguard, his shock troops and his torturers, in that order.

Their numbers shrank as their stature grew. A late note that Tolkien pencilled in the margin of his Annals of Aman, printed in Morgoth’s Ring in 1993, says there should never have been more than three, or seven at the most. The published stories do not quite keep to this, and still speak of a host. He never finished tidying it up.

Only one Balrog has a personal name. Gothmog, Lord of Balrogs and high captain of Morgoth’s fortress Angband, gives the Elf-prince Fëanor his death wounds, and later kills the High King Fingon with a black axe after another Balrog has pinned the king’s arms from behind with a whip. Gothmog dies in the sack of Gondolin. The Elf-lord Ecthelion, his sword arm useless, drives the spike of his helmet into the demon’s chest and the two of them go into the king’s fountain together and drown. A second Balrog is killed in the mountain pass above the city by Glorfindel, who is dragged over the cliff with it. The pattern is set early. A Balrog can be killed, and it takes its killer along.

When Morgoth is finally overthrown, the Balrogs are destroyed, except a few that flee and hide in caverns at the roots of the earth. One of them lies under the Misty Mountains for more than five thousand years. In the year 1980 of the Third Age the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm, digging ever deeper after the silver metal mithril, wake it or let it out. It kills their king, Durin VI, and his son Náin the year after. The Dwarves abandon the greatest of their cities and it takes a new Elvish name, Moria, the Black Pit. The Dwarves never learn what the creature is. They call it Durin’s Bane.

It is this Balrog that the Fellowship meets, and Tolkien’s description of it is deliberately hard to see. There is a great shadow, and in the middle of it a dark form, shaped like a man and larger than one. Fire runs along it. It carries a sword like a tongue of flame in its right hand and a whip of many thongs in its left. The darkness around it spreads out like two vast wings, and whether those are wings of flesh or only a manner of speaking has kept readers arguing for seventy years. The text never shows a Balrog flying. Legolas the Elf drops his arrow and wails when he recognises it. Gimli the Dwarf lets his axe fall and covers his face.

Gandalf meets it alone on the narrow bridge of Khazad-dûm, a single span of stone with no rail over a chasm. Its red sword breaks against his. He strikes the bridge with his staff, the stone cracks at the Balrog’s feet, and it drops into the dark. As it goes, the whip lashes up and catches the wizard round the knees.

The rest is told later, by Gandalf himself. They fall for a long time and land in cold water at the bottom of the world, where the Balrog’s fire goes out and it becomes a thing of slime, stronger than a strangling snake. He chases it through tunnels that are older than the Dwarves, and then up the Endless Stair to the peak of Zirakzigil, where it bursts into flame again above the clouds. Those who looked up from far away thought a storm had settled on the mountain. He throws it down, and it breaks the mountainside where it lands. Then he dies.

Where the idea came from is partly on record. In the early 1930s Tolkien published a two-part study, “Sigelwara Land”, in the journal Medium Ævum, on an Old English word used for the Ethiopians. He argued that it had first named something else: fire-giants with soot-black faces and eyes that threw sparks, in his own words “rather the sons of Muspell than of Ham”. The scholar Tom Shippey, in The Road to Middle-earth, connects that lost fire-demon of the north to the Balrog. Joe Abbott, writing in the journal Mythlore in 1989, points to Surtr, the fire-giant of the Norse poems, who comes to the last battle carrying a sword and a burning switch. The Balrog was already on paper before the essay, so the scholarship fed a monster that had existed for fifteen years. It is still a monster with a footnote.

A Balrog’s strength follows from what it is. It is a spirit older than the world wearing a body of fire, and it wields flame, darkness and a terror that empties the hands of trained warriors. It can also work at a distance: when Gandalf tries to hold a door against it with a spell, it answers with one of its own and the door bursts. Its limits are just as plain. It has a body, and the body can be drowned, stabbed and broken. Water puts out its fire, though not its will. It serves and never rules, and once its master is gone it can think of nothing better to do with five thousand years than hide.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Balrog?

A Balrog is a demon of fire and shadow in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth stories. In The Silmarillion the Balrogs are Maiar, spirits who existed before the world and joined the dark power Morgoth. They fight with whips of flame and are among his most feared servants.

Did Tolkien invent the Balrog?

Yes. The Balrog is Tolkien’s own invention and is not a creature of older folklore. It first appears in “The Fall of Gondolin”, written around 1916 and 1917 and published in The Book of Lost Tales in 1984, and it reached readers in The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954.

Do Balrogs have wings?

Tolkien’s text does not settle it. In The Fellowship of the Ring the darkness around the Balrog spreads out like two vast wings, which can be read as real wings or as a figure of speech. No Balrog is ever shown flying in Tolkien’s stories.

Who killed the Balrog of Moria?

Gandalf killed the Balrog of Moria, known as Durin’s Bane. After both fell from the bridge of Khazad-dûm, Gandalf pursued the Balrog through deep tunnels and up the Endless Stair, and threw it down from the peak of Zirakzigil. Gandalf died after the fight.

How many Balrogs were there?

The number changed as Tolkien revised his stories. In “The Fall of Gondolin” the Balrogs attack in their hundreds, but a late note printed in Morgoth’s Ring in 1993 says there should never have been more than three, or seven at the most. Only one, Gothmog, has a personal name.

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Morgoth, Tom Bombadil, Warg, Wizard, Dwarf, Elf, Troll, Goblin, Surtr, Grendel, Demons, Ifrit