Ok lets think this through morgoth mocked life right?

Orc=elves
trolls=ents
balrogs=???dragons possibly

if this is true we can assume balrogs have wings on the basis that dragons(most notibly smaug) had wings and as for wing folding that depepends on the wing strutcure it could indeed fold quite tiughtly though i do agree that is a dangerous blow to the wing theory however considering a balrog flight is quitew possible with wings thinking it through most biords ride on air current which has to do with hot air and such doesnt the bakrid provide its own rising heat to glide upon.

Scientificly speaking were looking at raptor like wings made for gliding not so much flapping which would make them more leathery and in fact thinner because there would be less need for muscle in the wing which in turn would make it easier for the wings to be folded into smaller area of space.

Another thing however against wings is the fact that balrogs live underground(Im talking moria if you know more about other balrog locals please tell me) and if all balrogs were to live mainly underground isnt it in fact useless to form with wings.

However no conclusion ever will be reached I myself believe balrogs have wings.

Morgoth did not create Balrogs ...

true but one would assume he had a hand in shaping them

edit:this isnt cryptic clues you dnt have to continuously shoot me down :rolleyes: just kidding

I thought he did create them but at any rate wouldn't he have helped shape balrogs?

Uhh...no. Whatever his reasons in corrupting balrogs, mocking dragons were not among them because Morgoth had not conceived of breeding/corrupting dragons yet.

The thickness of the material is not so much the problem. It is the length of the wings that causes the issues. In fact, thinner wings would only compound the problem because the more easily the wings fold together the longer the wings will be vertically (making it harder to get through doors) rather than distributing some of the wings horizontally.

Why would easier folding make them longer? thats a confusing argument the easier they fold they smaller space they would fold into...let me demonstrate take a piece of paper fold in in half its still pretty big fold it though four times when expanded same space when retracted smaller...i dont want to sound condesending it just the only way i could think of to explain my point....why would easier folding make them longer?

I mean even this is a possible(however much less likely) idea th4e fact that the balrogs smoke becomes wings...if they are indeed magical and can make weapons from fire(sword whip) whos to say they can't form wings with smoke? that way when not needed they disapate and voila wingless balrog like i said this second theory is less likely...much less likely

With all due respect, I've never been much impressed by these arguments. They rely on conjecture about so many things.

For starters, how can you draw anatomical conclusions regarding lift and mass about a creature that exudes flame and shadow, even if we did have anything more than the barest of hints as to its proportions (how tall is a "great height"?)?

The Chamber of Mazarbul is a "large" square chamber, with a "high" door opening off of a "wide" corridor. Clearly there's some room to work here. What do these adjectives mean? Any dimensions you produce are pure guesswork.

The Second Hall is "cavernous", but "loftier and far longer" than the one they slept in (which again is given no certain dimensions). Is it as wide as the original chamber? Less so? How wide is that? All guesswork.

Bottom line, this whole wing mass argument doesn't make me hum and haw, it makes me say: all pure speculation.

But it's fairly clear that Balrogs were incarnated and thus bound to physical laws. Is there suspicion that the physics of flight in Middle-earth may differ from those in the modern world?

The rebuttal to this line of reasoning that I have seen points to the definition of "chasm" which is described as "narrow." To be considered "narrow" it would need to be longer than it is wide, and we do have a figure for the span of the bridge, although I can't recall exactly what it is. 50 feet?

You're right, but I think it's logical speculation.

Edit: Yeah, I'm not sure which dictionary qualifies chasms as narrow. Maybe it's a myth.

I don't know. Has anyone ever done any calculations on what Smaug's wingspan would need to be? What are the physics of Legolas being able to walk on top of snow? I feel comfortable discarding these suppositions about Balrogs, especially when they proceed from such little starting information. How tall, exactly, is a Balrog? What does it weigh? What anatomical device allows it to exude flame and shadow? You can't start doing math on completely conjectural figures and convince anyone who has any kind of a textual commitment to the wings debate. Hmm... just glanced over the passage -- the bridge is "narrow", but I don't see the adjective applied to the chasm. If I've missed it, I'm sure you'll provide the cite. :)

Besides, I think it's the walls of the Hall that the wings are spread to, not the sides of the chasm, however big it is (we don't know). There's no textual evidence here at all as far as I can see, and not even enough of a basis for logical supposition or inference.

Well I think most of us just assumed that Tolkien's imaginary history of our earth conforms to the same laws of nature. That Smaug was appropriately proportioned for flight is evidenced by the fact that he flew. The actual calculations don't really matter, unless someone challenges the logistics of him being X big, thus having Y wingspan, and still fitting into Z cavern. The same goes for his fire-breath: we assume there was some physiological mechanic that allowed for it, from the gland that shoots the flammable substance, to its ignition, to the fire-resistant flesh that must have coated his snout. The Balrog's flame and shadow may have been something different, something related to the eala's fiery nature. The math and biology of these things doesn't come into question, however, since reasonable assumptions can be made about them without creating conflicts.

If there's a tiny little bridge across the gap I think it's reasonable to suppose that the gap, too, stretches from wall to wall. Otherwise there'd be less perilous ways to cross near the walls. If the bridge spans a 50-foot chasm, and if a chasm is, in fact, defined as "narrow," then the width of the room would necessarily be greater than 50 feet, and therefore so would the Balrog's literal wingspan. Such a wingspan would be unwieldy for a being that could fit through the man-sized doorways and halls of Moria. But I didn't mean to imply that the text called the gap "narrow," only that I once read an article that cited a dictionary entry qualifying chasms as such.

I guess my point is that you can't make a convincing argument that the Balrog couldn't enter such and such a room when you don't know:

• Anything about the Balrog's anatomy except that he's in shouting distance of man-height (and has wings ;)).
• The size of the door.
• The size of the room.

You can make stuff up until the cows come home, but the only thing we know for sure is that the bridge span across the chasm is about 50 feet long.

I'm a bit confused on your extrapolation about the chasm, the bridge, etc. The Balrog stands at the foot of a bridge. The bridge reaches 50 feet to the far side of the chasm. Given that its wings spread "from wall to wall" perpendicular to the bridge, how can we infer anything about its wingspan from this information?

The idea is that if the bridge spans 50 feet, and a chasm is by definition "narrow" (longer than it is across), then the chasm must be more than 50 feet long and thus the room is more than 50 feet wide. If the Balrog's wings were literal, then they literally stretched the entire width of the room ("width" being the space that is perpendicular to the bridge's span), making his wingspan greater than 50 feet.

I guess I just don't get (1) how you deduce that the chasm is narrow one way or another or (2) even if it is, how this affects the question at hand. I've done up a little thumbnail sketch and attached it to show where I'm coming from.

Yeah, I dunno. The article supposed that the room's dimensions were the opposite of how you've presented them. I can't remember if it offered any argument to support the position. Maybe someone else read it and remembers.

Anyway, I've been in the no wings camp for a while based on my impressions of Balrogs as a whole, but I can't deny that Tolkien most probably envisioned the Balrog scene with literal wings. It's definitely how I imagined it when I first read LotR.

My computer has gone all wonky and is in a bed at a computer hospital so I don't have time to answer in detail at the moment, but there is one thing I'd like to say...

The Balrog just can't fold its wings in half. If it folds the wings it has to do so up and away from its arms in order to give its arms enough room to move about and flail with that whip. That means the wings must go up when folded.

More speculation. You can't say with certainty based on the text how the wings "must" function.

The article I referred to here was presented over at GreenBooks at TheOneRing.net. I'll reproduce it here to keep the thread self-contained, but the site is here.

Child of the 7th Age referred to this same argument several pages back in the thread. I believe her source was the somewhat summarized version at The Encyclopedia of Arda.

A chasm does not necessarily have to be narrow. The dictionary definition that I have simply refers to a chasm as a "deep fissure". But, even accepting that the chasm was narrow, it does not follow that the length of the chasm was delineated by the width of the chamber. The chasm might well (and probably did) continue beyond the bounds of the chamber. It is entirely feasible, therefore, that the width of the chamber was equal to or less than the width of the chasm.

Say the chamber was 40 foot wide (and the double line of towering pillars is not incompatible with this, particularly if its height was greater than its width) and the Balrog therefore had a 40 foot wingspan, that would, according to the ratio you have given, make the Balrog 14 foot tall, which is the assumption of the remainder of the argument.

Although I cannot resist making one further point:

Not if it had wings ... :D

This is all that is required. If one imagines it with wings then, in the absence of any firm evidence to the contrary, one is quite entitled to continue imagining it as such.

There are so many unfounded assumptions in that article that it would take a post of a similar length to rebut them all -- "narrow" as an essential part of the definition of chasm? And even so, who says the bridge spans the chasm's width, and not its length? "Minimally, for something to be called narrow its length must be at least twice its width." Huh? According to who? His deductions about the door of the Chamber of Mazarbul are pure invention. One can wedge a door that's thirty feet wide and thirty feet tall as easily as one that's five by five. Tolkien's talking about wedging, not barring, as occurs in the movie.

Fortunately, SPM has already rebutted the only faulty assumptions that really need to be addressed. :)

Valid points. I'm not sure which dictionary the author of the article is working with.

Yeah, but I also imagined the hall much wider than 40 feet. :P

So did I as it happens, but then imagination and enchantment are rarely fettered by such mundane matters as cold logic. ;)

Dear Mister Underhill, I think you're missing the most important and convincing point in the article: he quoted Marcus Aurelius.

I do think he envisions a much larger room than I ever did. Still, we can make reasonable assumptions about how wide the room is based on the fact that there were two rows of mighty columns upholding the roof. It seems very unlikely that the room was a mere 30 feet wide, and that these columns were only a couple feet in diameter and stood only 5 feet or so from each wall and each other.

I can't grasp the difficulty in this. What part of the books are you people who think there are wings taking off of? Where are wings mentioned when Balrogs are mentioned other than in the LotR? Tell me where to look them up, look them up yourself, consider the way Tolkien writes about the Balrogs and study the way he mentions his wings. Obviously there have to be other places than in The Bridge of Khazad-dum where wings on Balrogs are mentioned or else this wouldn't be such a difficult problem.

My lack of knowledge of his other books bother me greatly.

- Folwren

I've always imagined the (non-existant) Balrog wings to be leathery. Certainly they are portrayed so.

Now, Balrogs are creatures of fire and shadow. Leather wings would simply burn off. Ergo, Balrogs don't have wings. Well, not leathery ones.

Either that or they're fireproof, and Balrogs don't have nerves.

oblo -- fair point. The bottom line is that we can't draw any definitive conclusions about the sizes of various rooms, doorways, chambers, or wingspans, so arguments which claim that "the Balrog couldn't fit in there if it had wings" just don't hold water.

P.S. -- I was a little shaken up by that Marcus Aurelius quote. I was going to counter with a Moe Howard quotation, "You moron!" -- but since the author of the article doesn't post here, I didn't bother checking my sources.

There isn't a single mention of Balrogs having wings in the whole of the Legendarium (not even in LotR, if you read what Tolkien actually said). On the other hand, he clearly states that The Prancing Pony had wings, so I was wondering if anyone could work out how that flew......

Of course you have to take this with a grain of salt coming from the man who doesn't consider The Hobbit to be a Middle-earth book. :p

We're not talking about TH here. And I notice again that you ignore the fact that I've made a convincing argument. :p

The Prancing Pony is clearly stated to have wings. Therefore, by your literalist reading of the text, it must have been able to fly.

Actually I once again find your argument unconvincing: "wing: 6 : a part or feature usually projecting from and subordinate to the main or central part <the servants' wing of the mansion>".

The point is that the description of the Balrog can be (and has been) interpreted by many readers as portraying a winged Balrog. Moreover a significant number of people (even those who are now non-wingers) seem to have imagined a winged Balrog when they first read the book. Most artists portray a winged Balrog. So I would answer your question with another question: Where does it state conclusively in any of Tolkien's works that Balrogs did not have wings? :p ;)

As for references to Balrogs other than Durin's Bane, is there any particular reason to conclude that different Balrogs did not take slightly different physical forms?

The Balrog's West Wing
 

"Difficile est saturam non scribere" - Juvenal.

So in actual fact, the shadow of Durin's Bane spread out like two vast subordinate architectural components, which suggests that Tolkien imagined it to look something like the Ashmolean Museum. No wonder the poor creature couldn't fly.

Like Estelyn, I've never really thought much about the balrog wings issue. I've always assumed that the reference to 'its wings' in The Bridge of Khazad-dûm is simply the result of a lapse in concentration. Thinking that the audience will understand that he's still talking about some amorphous shadowy projection, Tolkien then turns his wing simile into a metaphor, forgetting that ambiguity is the mother of contention. Without this slip I doubt that the passage in the appendices would have been read as anything but an example of Tolkien's fondness for the fast-disappearing use of 'fly' to mean 'flee' which Child pointed out earlier in the thread. In other words: no, Durin's Bane at least had only a threatening shadow which spread out like wings.

So much for my opinion, which is nothing new or original, nor particularly worth posting on its own. What I do have to relate is that tonight, in a fit of insanity, I decided to look at the earlier drafts of The Bridge of Khazad-dûm in The Treason of Isengard to see if they confirmed my theory. I expect that what follows has probably been said more than once before as well, but not, I think, in this thread.

Christopher Tolkien mentions three drafts prior to the published version. The earliest of these, 'A', has:A pencilled annotation to this manuscript reads "Alter description of Balrog. It seemed to be of man's shape, but its form could not be plainly discerned. It felt larger than it looked."

The 'B' version has the Balrog stand facing Gandalf, but still makes no mention of wings. These enter the passage in the third draft, which has "...the Balrog halted facing him and the shadow about him reached out like great wings."

Christopher Tolkien notes that the 'him' here is Gandalf, since the Balrog is always referred to as 'it'. The contentious literal reference to 'its wings' enters the text in the final version only, and I think that the development of Tolkien's thinking is quite clear: the Balrog must somehow feel greater than it actually is; it does so through the use of shadow; the shadow spreads like wings. When writing the final version, Tolkien made an understandable mistake in thinking that it would be a really good idea to refer to this shadow directly as a set of wings, possibly because this identifies it as something which is definitely a part of the Balrog and under its control. That this was not one of his better ideas is borne out by the last fifty years of discussion.

Of course it's always possible that this is all an obscure joke at the expense of obsessive compulsives. Perhaps HoME XXXI will have something to say on the subject: "My father's earliest typescript of this passage has finally come to light beneath a floorboard at our old house in Northmoor Road. Beside the description of the Balrog as written in version 'C', he has written hastily in pencil: 'Make Balrog appear to have and not have wings. Cf. angels on pin-head. Keep them talking forever."

My question is answered. I remain stead fast in my opinion of non-winged Balrogs.

There are more than one definition of 'wing' in the Webster Dictionary of the English Language. Look it up. Mister Underhill had the awesome idea of doing so without being told and giving you the 6th definition that explained the winged Prancing Pony.

I've said so before, and I'll say so again, with Tolkien being the writer and English major and teacher that he was, he wouldn't write one sentence in the LotR in which the Shadow is his subject and the Wing his adjective and intend for a Balrog to have wings. And if he did, than C.S. Lewis, who read all of his stuff and critiqued a lot of it (I don't know if he was his editor for the LotR) would have caught it likewise.

Don't have time to explain myself any more.

-Folwren

Welcome to the nuthouse, old boy. I'm sure we have a dank padded cell and a spare straitjacket which will accomodate you. It's funny, those passages in HoME VII -- you can sense the care with which CT dances around the wings issue without offering an opinion one way or the other.

Vis a vis the Pony's wings -- I give davem credit for not being that deliberately obtuse and for arguing, as Juvenal suggests, satirically; my reply was made in the same spirit.

CJRT on the fence
 

I had much the same impression of HoME VII. It's obvious that CRT is aware of the argument, but he seems reluctant to commit himself. This is a wise policy, and one which I'd happily followed for fifteen years until last night. Of course, father and son may have had a secret pact never to tell anyone about the wings: a punishment for those telephone calls at three in the morning, perhaps.

Saucepan, you're absolutely right: I don't remember any direct statement from JRRT that Balrogs don't have wings. There's also no particular reason to assume that individuals don't differ, so even if we could prove that the Balrog of Moria was bereft of wings it still wouldn't close the issue. Therefore, wrong and illogical though I believe the artists to be, anyone is welcome to believe what they like on this subject. That is, of course, one of the ingredients of irresoluble debate.

Throwing in your lot with the no-wingers after such a cursory examination of the evidence, eh? In that case, we'll get you a room in the "special" wing (wing! -- oh, the irony!), extra medication, and a restricted diet to go with that straitjacket. Mind you don't mess up the newspaper if Sharkû will be reading it after you, and for your own good I advise you not to get into a comparison of Hobbit vs. LotR geography with davem. You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.

Could I have a room with a view?
 

You know me, Underhill: post now, research later.

It will be good to have more time to draw pictures of Florence and listen to The Goldberg Variations. Perhaps, too, the audience will be captive enough to listen to my new theory: if one were to put all of Tolkien's writing from all sources into chronological order, take every twelfth word and write them as one continuous stream of letters, then take every twelfth letter of the sequence and translate the resultant words from their respective languages, it will give the sinister connection between the Cotton Library fire of 1731, this picture by Louis Wain, a freemason's headstone in Repton churchyard and the disappearance of the S.S. Waratah. The Medici popes and the Kennedy assassination might be involved too, but that depends on the size of the publisher's advance.

I don't remeber any direct statement from JRRT that Hobbits don't have wings, either - & Gandalf did clearly tell them to 'Fly!' I think we have to ask what Hobbit wingspans might be...

strangely we have an "elastic statement" I notice both sides use the same quote to support their ideas.

but here's what it all comes down to:

It would be...oh I'd say......three and a half feet tall so about 9 foot wing span? :p

Here's the thing if you were to think of a bird....the wingspan is usually(now I'm estimating) about three times longer than its height... so A Balrog at 15 feet tall..

Keeper ofDolGuldur said this

One would assume the wingspan at about 45 feet

http://forum.barrowdowns.com/attachm...tachmentid=182

considering they fold away from the body kind of like a vulture they would go down to 20 feet across... and still leave room or whip snapping and sword wielding.

now The Guy who be Short brought up an interesting point
as for the material one would assume they have glands which secreet flame resistent chemicals kind of like sweat.

Perhaps they wore Kevlar? :D That wasn't really meant to be taken seriously though - I'm quite sure the majority of those "Winger" oddballs believe the wings are made of shadow and fire like the rest of the 'Roggies, thus the inability to fly

If the Balrog had wings, why that terminology? Why liken shadow to wings if the Balrog already had wings? Surely Tolkien could just say "The shadowy wings reached out" or something like that? Bottom line, why use a simile for something that exists already.

Do you mean like when he says about the Balrog when we first see it: ""it was like a great shadow..."?

Exactement. Obviously the Balrog wasn't a great big shadow, thus the use of simile.