[obloquy]

In my phatty thread (linked to above) I cite HoMe X, p165 (hardback edition) as the source for the term ëalar. It's possible that this is the only text in which it occurs, but I honestly can't remember.

Here it is:

Commentary on Chapter 3, ‘Of the Coming of the Elves'

LQ 1 is here again, as in the previous chapter, virtually the final text, for the later typescript LQ 2 was scarcely touched, and there was no further enlargement or expansion.

§18 In AAm §30 (p. 70) it is said that Melkor ‘wrought’ the Balrogs in Utumno during the long darkness after the fall of the Lamps; but in an interpolation to AAm there enters the view that Melkor, after his rebellion, could make nothing that had life of its own (§45, see pp. 74, 78), and in AAm*, the second version of the opening of AAm (p. 79, §30), the Balrogs become the chief of ‘the evil spirits that followed him, the Umaiar’, whom at that time he multiplied. The statement in QS §18 that the Balrogs were ‘the first made of his creatures' survived through all the texts of the later revision of the Quenta, but in the margin of one of the copies of LQ 2 my father wrote: ‘See Valaquenta for true account.’ This is a reference to the passage which appears in the published Silmarillion on p. 31:

For of the Maiar many were drawn to his splendour in the days of his greatness, and remained in that allegiance down into his darkness; and others he corrupted afterwards to his service with lies and treacherous gifts. Dreadful among these spirits were the Valaraukar, the scourges of fire that in Middle-earth were called the Balrogs, demons of terror.

The actual text of LQ 2 my father emended at this time very hastily to read:

These were the (ëalar) spirits who first adhered to him in the days of his splendour, and became most like him in his corruption: their hearts were of fire, but they were cloaked in darkness, and terror went before them; they had whips of flame. Balrogs they were named by the Noldor in later days. And in that dark time Melkor bred many other monsters of divers shapes and kinds that long troubled the world; and his realm spread now ever southward over the Middle-earth. But the Orks, mockeries and perversions of the Children of Eru, did not appear until after the Awakening of the Elves.

There is a footnote to the word ëalar in this passage:

‘spirit’ (not incarnate, which was fëa, Sindarin] fae). ëala ‘being’.