The White Council

Re: How tough were orcs, trolls, and balrogs?

Tolkien and Inklings Discussion

: Fair enough, but actually Gandalf's duel is not that open to interpretation. Gandalf actually says "He was with me still. His fire was quenched, but now he was a thing of slime, stronger than a strangling snake. We fought far under the living earth, where time is not counted. Ever he clutched me, and ever I hewed him, till at last he fled into dark tunnels... Out he sprang, and even as I came behind, he burst into new flame. There was none to see, or perhaps in after ages songs would still be sung of the Battle of the Peak... I threw down my enemy, and he fell from the high place and broke the mountainside where he smote it in his ruin."

"I threw down my enemy" is still open to interpretation as either a literal statement or a literary device. It remains my opinion that the fall killed the Balrog, not a sword stroke from Gandalf. Had Gandalf been the superior warrior, why did it take him 10 days to destroy his foe? Recall their initial encounter on the Bridge of Kazad-dum during which Gandalf used magic to attempt to defeat his foe rather than swordplay; perhaps he knew that it required some sort of catastrophic damage (such as falling into the bottomless abyss) to kill, or even slow down, such a creature. After all, he had already buried the Balrog beneath tons of stone in the Chamber of Mazarbul, and the damned thing seemed to simply shake it off.

: As for the other two recorded instances of Balrogs being killed, Ecthelion killed Gothmog with the sharp end of his pointed helmet. Only Glorfindel's duel ended in a Balrog dying from a great fall. Judging from Gandalf's duel, they seemed to be able to withstand such a fall fairly well.

I'm only going on memory here, but I'm fairly sure that Ecthelion stabbed Gothmog with the spike of his helmet out of desperation, having no other weapon available. Gothmog then staggered and fell into the pool surrounding the King's Fountain, dragging Ecthelion into the depths with him. They then drowned due to the weight of their armor.

: Even if there only ever were 7 Balrogs, which the texts certainly do not make clear, this doesn't mean they were more powerful at one point in time compared to another.

Actually, the texts do make this plain; the quote can be found in Unfinished Tales, but I'll be damned if I can find it at the moment. It is basically a footnote to a footnote. Perhaps someone else could supply the location of the quote?

: By the way I have no idea why this post is all in italics.

My bad. A typo on my end. Unfortunately, HTML does not have a parser :)