Quote:
Originally Posted by Juicy-Sweet
It's quite a gruesome plotline now.
The dwarves desperately try to fight the Balrog - trying to contain it by caving in rooms, closing off sections, luring it near water reservoirs and trying to drown it etc. (The parts visited in LOTR were undamaged, but the fighting probably took place deeper down.). The King sits in the command room getting the MIA list of names every day and making desperate plans.
Another things has dawned on me - there were survivors, but nobody knows it was a Balrog. The elves would surely had recognized it, if the story got around that it was a shadowy-flamy figure that sorta looked like it had wings, but maybe it didnt have them, wielding a whip of fire. I dont find it credible that the dwarves kept the description of the attacker a secret - and i dont find it credible either they forgot it. Its a mayor event in their legends. So I suppose NO SURVIVORS SAW IT. Each and every dwarf that met and saw the balrog died, and the survivors could just count the bodies, not even knowing what was attacking them. Maybe the small groups of dwarves sometimes just disappeared without a trace - the balrog could toss them into the wells for instance. The Balrog would want to remain secret, lest the elves would go looking for it. Maybe a few dawrves saw glipses of it and such - but noone got a good look so they could describe it.
It's completely like the 1979 ALIEN movie now - just with a Balrog instead of the alien, Moria indtead of a spaceship (both are confined artificial structures), "someplace deep" instead of an unknown planet as "the place they should not have disturbed".
Except it took a whole year and thousands were killed bit by bit. I imagine the surviving dwarves had sorta strained nerves when they left and one or two had developed a solid paranoia. Yeech.
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I'd never thought of the loss of Moria this way, but assuming as I generally do that the Balrog didn't have an army with him it does appeal to me. It's an image which I'd never really considered; I mostly just picture Durin VI having an epic duel with the Balrog. But of course I'd never really accounted for the time which passed before the Balrog slew Nįin I and the Dwarves finally abandoned Moria. The idea of the Dwarves holding out as this demon stalked them for a year is a satisfyingly harrowing one.
Also no matter how many Dwarves it actually killed (there were enough survivors to colonise Erebor and the Grey Mountains) one could image a point where the aura of terror it exuded was too much for the Dwarves to resist which might help to account for how it was able to destroy this great kingdom single-handedly.