XPost: rec.arts.books.tolkien
From: steuard@slimy.com
In message , Troels Forchhammer
wrote:
> Paul S. Person spoke these staves:
>> The classic method of killing a Balrog, of course, consists in
>> three steps:
>>
>> 1) Tightly grasp the Balrog.
>> 2) Fall from a great height, preferably into water.
>> 3) Die.
First, an aside: Paul, this bit (and your comments surrounding it) was
a great laugh: thanks!
>>> The Moria Balrog appeared to Gandalf to shift form; but if Balrogs
>>> were not incarnate, and only wearing fánar, then (a) there's no
>>> reason they couldn't fly, (b) kicking one off a mountain shouldn't
>>> kill it.
> The whole idea of Maiar and fánar were not present at the time when
> Tolkien described the Moria encounter. Yet later Tolkien wrote the
> _Ósanwe-kenta_ essay in which he, in a more or less incidental note,
> describes how the Ainur could become bound to their fánar and thus
> approach incarnation, but going there for interpreting the Moria
> passage is taking a ret-con on a ret-con ...
Oh, humbug. Half of Tolkien's writing consisted of ret-cons of
ret-cons of ret-cons: we can't throw it *all* out!
I agree that if we want to understand what was going through Tolkien's
head when he wrote the Moria passage (in its final form, just to be
specific), we clearly can't use much later writings as a reliable
guide. As you've said, at the time that passage was written Tolkien
had not revisited the First Age stories to introduce the idea that
Balrogs were Maiar rather than constructs.
But (speaking of views unpopular among serious Tolkien scholars!) I'm
quite fond of asking questions about the (purely hypothetical)
"canonical" Middle-earth: very roughly put, the form Tolkien's stories
might have taken if he'd had unlimited time to sort everything out. (I
won't repeat my entire "Tolkien's Parish" essay here.) My general
impression is that Tolkien felt largely bound by what he had already
published (to the extent that he felt compelled to invent a
story-internal reason for the pre-revision version of /The Hobbit/,
and to invent a backstory explaining his apparent error in naming
Thrain as king on Thror's map), but that he felt reasonably free to
revise things that weren't made explicit there.
So when Tolkien came up with the idea that Balrogs were really Maiar
(and later, the idea in the Osanwe-kenta that Ainur could become
habituated to a specific physical form), I have never doubted that
part of his thought process was a careful check to make sure that
those new ideas were as consistent as possible with the portrayal of
the Balrog in LotR. (We know from the final notes in "The Problem of
ROS" that he was willing to throw out an entire substantial new idea
if it ran into a contradiction with published texts.) Heck, I wouldn't
be surprised if he developed the ideas about Ainur becoming habituated
to specific physical forms in part after asking himself some of these
same questions about Balrogs that we've been asking here (and even
more about Sauron, of course, but he carefully didn't restrict his
language to that case).
That's my long way of saying that I doubt Tolkien would see anything
wrong with using the final Silmarillion drafts and the Osanwe-kenta as
part of our basis for interpreting the description of the Balrog in
Moria, even though they weren't in his head when he wrote that scene.
In fact, I'll go a step farther: I claim that if, near the end of his
life, Tolkien had randomly written a short story about the Balrog's
time in Moria, he would have based it on those new ideas and at the
same time would have considered it consistent with the published books.
Steuard Jensen
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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