[jallanite]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

To take this more seriously than is necessary, I am reasonably sure (although others may know better) that the term 'Maiar' was not even used by Professor Tolkien to refer to the lesser Ainur until after the composition of The Lord of the Rings.

I believe you are right. The first published mention is, I believe, in Clyde S. Kilby’s book Tolkien and the Silmarillion, published in 1971, which mentions “Melian the Maia”.

You can peruse the first pages of the book Breaking The Tolkien Code in an amazon preview at http://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Tolki...der_1501056883 . The Balrog anagrams are supposedly:

MINE HOLE FALL, HELD LEFT WING

and

WELL DONE, MINE FALL. FLIGHT EH

It reminds me of an encounter with a Tolkien fan on another website who was trying to explain Quenya by translating it into Hebrew using a concordance of Hebrew roots from a family Bible. He was amazed by his results. I tried to convince him that his results were mainly from his forcing the most interpretable results from the concordance which allowed him to pick and chose words, not from anything Tolkien wrote. But the forum administrators banned the fan as posting obvious religious crackpottery before I had come close to convincing him that God was not speaking to him and anyone who knew Hebrew through Tolkien’s Quenya, even though God was not making much sense.

Balfrog, I find, normally posts at The Lord of the Rings Fanatics Plaza where he is credited with 139 posts. His other posts seem to me to be sensible ones. For his post there on Breaking The Tolkien Code see http://www.lotrplaza.com/showthread....et-Hidden-Code . The two responses don’t indicate much interest in the book.