Balrog's Wings

The following is the fourth essay coming from a thought process that's very much still in progress, and I'll return to the topic at times during 2003, the year of J.R.R. Tolkien's 111st birthday. To read the first essay in the series, click here. For the essay just prior to this one, click here.

Is Middle-earth Real?

IV. Why We'll Never Know

If Balrogs Have Wings

Exactly a year ago, I wrote an essay about newbies and some of the problems they can encounter when they leave the fictionalized Middle-earth of the LotR movies and step into the real thing (the reality of Tolkien's subcreation comes through loud and clear every time a Tolkienite compares the movie to "what really happened"). That essay's in the archives now, but you can link to it here. One of the difficulties I mentioned was that the real Middle-earth isn't only more complicated than the version shown in the movies, but also that it's not "neatly tied up," as many people are used to having their fiction.

One incident that brought this home to me was another experience with a newbie on a message board (one who, I have the feeling, turned around and went back to the more limited version of Middle-earth). He asked... well... one of those questions. I don't remember which one (it wasn't about Balrogs' wings), but you know the kind of question I'm referring to: ones that Tolkien readers have been debating for close to 50 years and haven't come any closer to solving.

So, this being a Tolkien-related message board, the rest of us did what Tolkien readers do--started discussing it! One person offered her favored explanation, someone else looked at it a different way, another person commented on both of those, and it went on to become a delightful discussion (for us, anyway). Then the newbie came back in and effectively killed his own thread by declaring, "Well, I thought someone here would know the answer!" I laughed 'til I cried.

But, afterward, I also reflected on something serious: that people who "get into" Tolkien have to be people who enjoy the questions at least as much as the answers. It's the questions that open up the vistas of Middle-earth and reveal things we haven't seen before. Even more, they show us the horizon beyond which the world continues even if we may never travel that far. Someone who likes neatly-tied fiction can certainly enjoy The Hobbit or LotR as an adventure story, but that person's probably not going to be discussing the authorship of The Red Book, or what the Ring's power says about evil, 25 years later, if you take my meaning.

As I said in the first essay of this series, a true subcreation is never finished. An author, in order to discover a true subcreation, has to accept that and not limit its existence in a misguided attempt to complete it. It seems to me that one of the most necessary gifts for a subcreator is the willingness to let that creation have a life beyond his or her own. And I believe everything in this paragraph is also true for a reader who's on the same quest of discovery.

So Middle-earth will always have unanswered questions. Some of those still discussed are ones that Tolkien was trying to discover the truth of at the time he died (Galadriel's actual life history, for example). But when I hear someone say, "It's too bad Tolkien didn't have time to figure it all out," my response is that even if he'd had the immortality of an elf he never would have "figured out" everything about Middle-earth. Exactly the opposite. As with anything living and real, each answer leads to more questions. At the time he died, JRRT had been studying Middle-earth's history and people for over 50 years. If he'd had more time, he could have answered a few more questions--but then there would have been new ones to work on. It's in the very nature of a subcreation, which is becoming a bit clearer to me as I write these essays.

And there are questions that Tolkien himself could never have answered because the information wasn't available to him. This is within the constraints he set for himself in using The Red Book and Translations from the Elvish as his sources, constraints that came with his role as Middle-earth's historian. Of course, he could sometimes find previously-unknown versions, as he did with the Ring story from The Hobbit. But that didn't always work (nor, apparently, did he want it to always work). When asked if the entwives were still in existence at the time of LotR, JRRT replied that he didn't think so; he could make a studied guess from what he knew of Middle-earth, but he couldn't know with certainty. One reader asked him about Gollum's fate after death, and Tolkien said that was beyond his scope. Certainly everyone hopes Frodo found healing and happiness in the West, but that's also unknowable, because no one ever returned to bring the answer. Life has these kinds of questions. There would be a sense of "unreality" if all the answers were available.

And what's so maddeningly wonderful ("how did he do it?") about Tolkien is how consistently he follows that rule. There's a question about the actual historicity of some of the stories in The Silmarillion because they're legends. But once we get to the end of the Third Age we're definitely dealing with history. The narrator in The Hobbit and the earliest part of LotR is a storyteller, so we don't take it amiss if he embellishes a little. But as soon as the storyteller's voice gives way to the historian's (before the three walkers reach Crickhollow), we don't learn anything that the narrator had no way of knowing. And the narrator had no way of knowing whether Balrogs have wings (or, to be exact, whether the Balrog the Fellowship encountered in Moria had wings).

Of course, the question's become a joke, and only people who've newly discovered the ambiguity think there's an answer. But why? The whole issue is contained in two sentences: 'His [Gandalf's] enemy halted again, facing him, and the shadow about it reached out like two vast wings,' and several sentences later, '…suddenly it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall…' That's all there is, and people have been arguing about it for decades. Are there real wings, or just smoke and shadow that look like wings? For decades!! Why? And I don't mean, "Why do people argue about it?" which is fairly obvious (the "people" are Tolkien readers, after all). I mean, "Why did Tolkien write it that way?"

One answer I've heard--and completely reject--is that it's "sloppy writing." Uh-uh. As a would-be fiction writer myself I marvel at the subtle construction of it. There's nothing sloppy there. It's planned and purposeful and precise (as Tolkien's use of words almost invariably was, no matter what someone might think about other aspects of his writing style). For some reason, JRRT very precisely gave us ambiguity here. Why? When first pondering that question, I guessed he was playing a bit of a word game, which he seemed to enjoy doing on occasion. But would he really play a game with the reader at such an emotionally desperate moment in the story?

There are other things about the Balrog that are ambiguous. '…it was like a great shadow [again, like a shadow, not necessarily really a shadow], in the midst of which was a dark form, of man-shape maybe [but maybe not?], yet greater.' And a little later, 'The fire in it seemed to die, but the darkness grew [what does that mean?].' Now, I don't know about you, but the first time I read "The Bridge of Khazad-Dûm," I didn't notice the ambiguities. The entire description of the monster fused into one vision of something so horrible it could barely be described (actually, it still does, when I'm not trying to dissect it).

How does the narrator know about this event? What's his one source for a description of the Balrog? The Red Book. Who wrote the section of The Red Book that would give him that information? Frodo. What state was Frodo in at the time? 'The Company stood rooted with horror staring into the pit… With a cry, Aragorn roused them.'…… 'They stumbled wildly up the great stairs beyond the door…At the top was a wide echoing passage. Along this they fled. Frodo heard Sam at his side weeping, and then he found that he himself was weeping as he ran.'

Even if all eight remaining members of the Company had sat down and discussed it later, I don't think they could have agreed on whether the Balrog had wings (not that it would have been a burning issue for them). A clear description of it would be completely unrealistic, reminding us that someone is "making up" this story.

So Tolkien, very precisely, told us exactly what the narrator should know, but not a bit more. He wasn't inventing strange beings; he was discovering as much as he could about them from what sources he had. So what he gives us isn't an exact representation of what the Balrog looked like, as if it were a picture in a biology book or on a movie's storyboard. What he shows us is the Balrog as Frodo saw it, and as he later wrote about it: a vision of something so horrible it could barely be described. I don't know about you, but that's what I saw.

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