**Spoiler Warning** Rings of Power S2E8 - "Shadow and Flame"

[Oddwen]

Originally Posted by Huin

NOPE GALADRIEL GOT STABBED WITH A HAT. That is the single most lethal hat in all of Middle-earth.

A Maia being undone by a hat isn't totally unprecedented, Ecthelion of the Fountain killed a Balrog in the fall of Gondolin with the spike of his helm.

[Galin]

Originally Posted by Oddwen

A Maia being undone by a hat isn't totally unprecedented, Ecthelion of the Fountain killed a Balrog in the fall of Gondolin with the spike of his helm.

Pedantry Alert

The Balrogs were not Maiar when JRRT wrote this.

That said, I'd agree that Tolkien, in the early 1950s, still meant for Ecthelion's helm to spike a Balrog, given that the helm is described in the updated (but all too soon put aside) Fall of Gondolin (Unfinished Tales). Ecthelion's helm is beautiful, but deadly, especially if one knows the early tale.

But were the Balrogs Maiar even when Tolkien wrote this FOG update?

We know that, despite the emergence of the idea that Melkor could not "make" Orks for example (but must corrupt something rather), in the Annals of Aman as first written Morgoth still "wrought" the Balrogs. In the Annals of Aman typescript (made by Tolkien himself) however, they are said to be spirits that followed Melkor.

Okay.

But here Christopher Tolkien can only guess at the dating of this typescript: he thinks it belongs with the writing of the Annals of Aman manuscript rather than to some later time, although in any case, it includes the idea I'll call the "Numenorean Transmission of Texts".

Anyway, even if what I've said is correct or close to correct (although I could be forgetting something here), one could argue that Tolkien intended Ecthelion to helmet-spike a Balrog even after Balrogs "became" (externally) Maiar.

I mean, why not?

So here's my pedantic and mostly meaningless post!

[William Cloud Hicklin]

FWIW, Ulmo's speech to Tuor feels like it belongs to the period after Tolkien had really re-thought his cosmology, and thus with or after the AAm typescript. No proof that I can point to, just that the atmosphere is really "post-LR." At any rate, I think that after writing the Moria chapters, there was no way that Ecthelion's Balrog was going to be anything less than an epic boss, not one of the disposable mooks of 1917.

[Mithadan]

one of the disposable mooks of 1917

LOL.

Can you imagine the visual effect of an army of slightly downgraded Balrogs attacking an Elvish host? Isn't that a director's dream?