Answer from Michael Martinez | White Council Forum Archive - msg 14460

White Council: The Tolkien Forum archive_72 on this day of

Answer from Michael Martinez | White Council Forum Archive - msg 14460

White Council: The Tolkien Forum archive_72

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Topic: Answer from Michael Martinez
Reply to: Message 14459
Posted: June 03, 2000 at 15:52:05: by Mamuka
: Why are the Balrogs in the time of the Silmarillion so much weaker then the Balrog in the time of LOTR? Have Elves and Men grown so weak that they then seem almost invulnerable or are they another kind of Balrogs? Please help, I can't find the answer anywhere!

This answer comes from Michael Martinez's Letter, when I asked him about Balrogs and clearly solves the problem: "The Balrogs originated as made or bred creatures in the original mythology for England (which has been published as THE BOOK OF LOST TALES). Tolkien stopped working on that mythology around 1925. Those Balrogs were ferocious creatures, standing maybe twice the height of a man, and they had claws but no wings. They were armored in iron, too, but could still leap incredible distances. There were hundreds or thousands of them. Many years later, as Tolkien was writing THE LORD OF THE RINGS, he began to merge the world of 'Quenta Silmarillion' (which replaced BOOK OF LOST TALES as his great mythological endeavor, but without the references to England) ith the world of THE HOBBIT to create a new world, and he greatly expanded the merged world as well. In doing so, he revised many ideas which had begun to emerge in 'Quenta Silmarillion', among them the notion that the Valar and their followers were angelic beings, and that Melkor's first and most powerful servants were corrupted members of this angelic order, of a similar nature to him but having less power. The Balrogs became members of this group of corrupted Maiar, and their physical form was substantially changed to become that semi-amorphous creature encountered in "The Bridge of Khazad-dum". Tolkien's decision to limit the number of Balrogs came after THE LORD OF THE RINGS had been published, when he had made them more terrible and powerful than they had originally been. But as he never finished rewriting THE SILMARILLION for publication, Christopher Tolkien was forced to blend several sources together to produce the final book, and hence one gets the impression still that there were many more Balrogs than seven."


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