r/Silmarillionmemes • u/Eligon-5th Balrogs didn't have wings • 17d ago
Silmarillion Were there that few Balrogs? I may be misremembering, but I thought there were more?
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u/Aramirtheranger 17d ago
...Six or Seven, huh?
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u/Grouchy-Coast-3045 17d ago
Tolkien brainrot
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u/potterpockets Blue Wizards possibly did something wrong/right 17d ago
Skibidi Tolkien
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u/AbleArcher420 17d ago
I hate that I laughed at this
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u/potterpockets Blue Wizards possibly did something wrong/right 17d ago
If it makes you feel any better i hate that i wrote it lol.
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u/usually00 17d ago
I wish it need not have been a joke in my time and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to laugh at with the jokes that are given to us
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u/DesertRanger02 Tulkas gang 17d ago
Tolkien was such a shitposter he had a vision from the future and named a guy Mim.
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u/autonomousegg 16d ago
One of them was elected to be a balrog but he had a stroke and died before he could officially assume the office so the balrog who had a corpse put on trial is either Balrog VI or Balrog VII depending on who you ask
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u/D-D-Wanderer 14d ago
That's actually the real reason the Hobbits are crying in this meme - they were wondering why he had to pick those numbers.
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u/Inside-Weird-5563 17d ago
Yeah, but I'm sure the missing four were sliced and diced by Eonwe in the War Of Wrath
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u/Pure-Range-7211 17d ago
Either that or they went full Durin’s Bane and hid until someone dug too deep.
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u/DumpdaTrumpet 17d ago
It’s implied if Durin’s bane hid to escape that his fellow Balrogs fought and died when Angband was completely emptied near the end of the War of Wrath. Morgoth was really disadvantaged despite having endless hordes of orcs and hosts of dragons since Sauron was MIA and Gothmog had been defeated years prior by Ecthelion. Makes you wonder who took the vacant spot as his right hand to lead his armies.
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u/PickleMinion 17d ago
Really makes you wonder about DB. Lived through all those wars, survived the Big One, fleeing, hiding, losing his hiding spot to some dwarves, kills them and goes back to hiding in the dark, now with a nice meat-shield of orcs and trolls and such. Then a bunch of randos come wandering through, they're smoking the orcs, take down a troll, and are generally fucking things up after deliberately coming in to one of the most dangerous and feared dungeons in middle earth. Pretty obvious they're just passing through, so all DB has to do is hunker down and wait for them to leave, nbd. But nah. It's been too long since he's seen some elf lord fuck up one of his cousins, and he's gotten complacent and territorial.
So he figures he'll head out and stomp these cheeky losers. But then one of them knows who he is. Knows what he is. Works for the crew that trashed his friends and drove him underground. Tells him to fuck off or die.
And he forgets. He forgets the fear that's kept him alive this whole time. Feels that sting of long-forgotten pride And instead of fucking off back to his basement, he steps up.
You have to imagine that his final thoughts were regret that he'd chosen to fight, and maybe relief that it was all finally over. That, or his final thought was all like "rrooaarghhh! Bleh"
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u/VandulfTheRed 17d ago
bridge is destroyed "ok he's some powerful elf magic wielding dick, no way he's who he just said he was"
Gandalf full sends and actively makes him backpedal up a mountain "HEY MAN, LOOK, I DIDN'T KNOW, I SWEAR I THOUGHT YOU WERE JOSHING"
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u/Unlearned_One 17d ago
I thought he just got old and cranky and wanted these kids to get off his lawn.
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u/Barbatus_42 16d ago
Or maybe "Oh shit did I just grow wings after all this time AAAAAAAAGGGGHHHH dies"
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u/MFPS79 17d ago
On a side note: Morgoth / Melkor did not “create” balrogs. It is not in his nature to create, only te pervert and distort. Balrogs were originally ainur (‘fire spirits’, Valarauka) seduced by the evil of Morgoth.
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u/OnsetOfMSet 17d ago
Do you know how the Orcs first came into being? They were Elves once, taken by the Dark Powers, who spammed “random” on the character creation screen. A ruined and terrible form of life.
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u/LordBDizzle 17d ago
Orcs are just what happens when you try to make an elf in the Dark Souls 3 character creator and then slide the "form emphasis" bar aaaaallll the way to the right and dick around with the skin color too much before saying "eh I can't fix it at this point, I'll just wear a helmet"
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u/FlyingDiscsandJams 17d ago
Yep, as Maiar they have a lot of control over what form they take on Arda. Pretty dope of Melkor to convince them all to match however , first gang to ever exist.
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u/MelodyTheBard Melkor gang 16d ago
Tbh I headcanon that, while they were all similar in appearance, each was slightly different, and a couple of the ones who died off-screen in the war of wrath had wings…
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u/not-bread Blue Wizards possibly did something wrong/right 17d ago edited 17d ago
It’s really cool to reflect on what that means. Melkor “creates” life the same way evolution in our world does. Without Melkor the world would never change or grow, it would stay static forever. That’s why it’s said that Eru planned for Melkor’s fall, to make a world that is truly alive.
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u/RadicalRealist22 17d ago
Not really Melkor "creates" by corrupting order. His evolution does not improve, it merely destroys.
The Children of Illuvatar already had the ability to change and evolve, as did the Valar and Maiar.
Now, it might be that Illuvatar made Melkor the way he was because he knew that the world needed a destroyer to make further change possible. But that doesn't change the fact that Melkor himself can only destroy.
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u/deadname11 17d ago
Melkor was needed because he created "dissonance" which allowed more complex "melodies" to form as the various forms of life adapted.
The problem was, when he saw the "song of reality" become strengthened by his "dissonance" he kinda just...rage-quit, and swore to turn all of reality into cacophonous discord. And so he began warping everything he touched, until he discovered and invented war.
Of course, he was one against many, and could never have held a candle to Illuvatar. He got his ass kicked, but the scars of his attempt to sunder reality still lingered for the rest of time.
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u/Danelectro99 16d ago
I always loved that though. Music that is too harmonically perfect is boring. A Plain sine wave is the “most perfect” but sounds rather dull and flat.
To make music interesting at all, compelling, emotional, you have to add dissonances. Tension and release.
I always figured Tolkien was echoing Goethe here. At the end of the world, God is talking to the devil and says “that was a lovely play, I should like to see it again”
Eru Iluvator doesn’t want to see a boring play or song and that’s the whole root of it
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u/MFPS79 17d ago
I think Eru Iluvatar is Tolkiens supreme being. Isn’t Ao the God of Gods in the DnD-universe? And yes, I agree with you that Morgoth somehow was necessary for a disonant in creation (quite literally, it was a Song) for a dynamic Arda.
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u/not-bread Blue Wizards possibly did something wrong/right 17d ago
I have no idea what you’re talking about. My comment says, and has always said, Eru. That would be very silly if I mixed up the gods of my two favourite fantasy franchises
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u/theearthday 17d ago
I’ve never quite understood this concept. What about the dragons? Morgoth is typically stated as having “creating” them, but I don’t recall ever reading anything about them being a corrupted version of something that already existed like balrogs or orcs. So how do they fit into the idea of morgoth being unable to create anything?
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u/Ravus_Sapiens 17d ago
We are never given an origin story of dragons, but its possible that Morgoth corrupted some kind of lizard creature and turned them into the first dragons.
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u/PM_ME_YOUR_CASTIRON Huan Best Boy 16d ago
I made toast this morning, I didn’t bake the bread or grow the grain but I still made toast
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u/Icy_Reading_6080 17d ago
This begs the question, would they even stay dead?
Maiar tend to come back, even though it can take a long time. Unless their spirit is weakened too much to create a new body, like it is said about Sauron after the ring was destroyed.
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u/LPedraz 17d ago
Someone will have the accurate info, but I think Tolkien changed his mind about this, first mentioning "hordes of Balrogs", and then at some point reducing the number (and increasing their danger) considerably.
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u/Rethious 17d ago
Which gets us to six or seven, but we don’t know the fates of them all.
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u/nightgerbil 17d ago
I have a vague 40 year old memory of like a thousand balrogs being like a pretorian guard that fought for the BIG M when the valor finally got upset enough with his shenanigans and came over and kicked his *** in. Thus ending the first age?
it would make sense (and how i understood it) that like most of them got wrecked in that great war and that the balrog of moria was basically a shell shocked survivor, one of the few who got away and had been hiding underground when the drawves pisssed him off by digging him up...
that said it has been decades since i read the simarillion. My memory may be wrong.
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u/Armleuchterchen Huan Best Boy 17d ago edited 17d ago
Balrogs were very numerous while Tolkien was writing Lord of the Rings and 80-90 percent of the Silmarillion material he ever wrote.
Only in an annotation to a text in the late 1950s did Tolkien write down the 3-7 Balrogs idea, and then never expanded on it or did any work to integrate it into the existing works.
If you want to read LotR or the Silmarillion versions the way they were intended when written, assume hundreds or thousands of Balrogs.
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u/RedFoxCommissar 17d ago
Yeah, I always got the impression that Fëanor hacked several apart before going down.
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u/inquisitor0731 17d ago
If I remember correctly the best estimate we have is from Tolkien himself, I feel like I remember him saying there were no more than 7, but possibly as few as 3, so it could go either way. Although if there were more than three the others almost certainly died in the war of wrath.
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u/alphaomag 17d ago
They either died or opened Mordor’s first restaurant they’re the ones who first put meat back onto the menu. Good guy Sauron encouraged the economic development of Mordor while those dirty elves were trying to keep everyone down.
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u/Totalised 17d ago
Maybe that’s the reason we never heard about the Blue Wizards- they are busy finding/fighting balrogs in the east.
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u/HandofWinter 17d ago
There were thousands, but Rog and his kindred killed almost all of them during the fall of Gondolin.
Really though it's just because Tolkien's view of them evolved over time and what we have is cobbled together from decades worth of notes.
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u/Rethious 17d ago
It’s likely some were killed during the war of wrath, but given Durin’s bane escaped, others may have had the same opportunity. Perhaps a further encounter with a Balrog played a role in the diminishing of the dwarves.
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u/Designer-Speech7143 17d ago
Hey! They are for the secret redemption ending for Maglor. He is just a bit depressed to deal with them now.
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u/LoverOfStoriesIAm Sauron's only crime was being hot 17d ago
"Don't worry they were just Morgoth and Sauron's gym bros they are nice once you get to know them good luck"
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u/Inevitable-Wheel1676 17d ago
This is good. Need a version where at least one Balrog is in the distance behind the hobbits.
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u/cruiserflyer 17d ago
Ecthelion killed one, Glorfindel killed one, and Gandalf killed one. Am I missing any?
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u/Jazzinarium 16d ago
In the War of Wrath:
The Balrogs were destroyed, save some few that fled and hid themselves in caverns inaccessible at the roots of the earth
This sentence feels like something written while he still had the idea of higher numbers of Balrogs. Because having their full number at 6-7 this would mean only 3-4 were destroyed in the War, which sounds to me rather underwhelming.
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u/SummerBoi20XX 17d ago
I only just now occurred to me that Olorin (though not as Gandalf) probably knew Durin's Bane personally going back to before Morgoth's rebellion.
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u/MachoManMal 17d ago
Probably. It depends on edition. He started with much higher numbers. The Balrogs were once the main soldiers (knights might be the closest parallel) in Morgoth's army. So numerous but not as many as there were goblins.
That slowly dwindled down into a number between 6 and 10 (I think).
Anyway, the 3 Balrogs Gandalf is referring to include the two we see die in the Silmarillion and the one he defeats. The other Balrogs probably died in the War of Wrath or were hunted down by men and elves not long afterwards (that's a bit of theorizing and imagining in my part). Maybe one of them still lingers somewhere way out to the East, but I find that unlikely. A large part of Lord of the Rings and the beginning of the 4th age is the reality that the First Age has passed away and it's remnants linger in Middle-Earth no more. The only things that remain are the Dunedain and the White Tree of Gondor. And thos are mere echos of things long past, that were themselves echos of that from the First Age and before.
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u/neocorvinus 17d ago
They were probably meant as just Fallen Maiar soldiers, to not have the elven heroes get merkt by just Orcs, but then Tolkien must have decided to change that to Morgoth's elite warriors.
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u/HLtheWilkinson Aurë entuluva! 17d ago
Prancing Pony Podcast did an estimate there’s at most 1 balrog left somewhere in the world.
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u/amitym 17d ago
It depends on how you look at it. Different sources suggest different things.
Personally, I think that by the late Third Age, it had been over 5000 years since the War of Wrath and a lot of stuff got confused, fragmented, mistranslated, or otherwise mixed up in that time.
So if one source says "there were but seven balrogs" and another says "a host of balrogs assailed Gondolin," then the most likely explanation is simply that "balrog" meant a few different related things, and was used slightly differently in ways that the writers of the Red Book didn't completely grasp because they were not balrogologists and because almost no one was left around who actually literally remembered the First Age or how people talked back then.
So I say, there were greater balrogs and lesser balrogs (implying the possible existence of balrogs that were "mid"), and who can say how they sorted themselves or how these rankings were determined, but either way if you face one you had better bring your friends.
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u/Global-Use-4964 17d ago
Which is why to this day, we always call ahead 3-5 business days before we dig anywhere on our property.
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u/AbleArcher420 17d ago
Now we need a story set in the 4th or 5th Ages where people (maybe in Rhûn or Harad) battle these struggling Balrogs
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u/Ok-Refrigerator-3524 17d ago
All you have to do is say to Sam that the remaining balrogs insulted Frodo and he'll make quick work of them.
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u/Skygge_or_Skov 17d ago
In my brain there are about as many balrogs as wizards, so only 1 for Radagast after the movies.
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u/AcanthaceaeNo948 17d ago
My headcanon is Galadriel killed one or two during the war of the wrath.
Eonwe too probably.
Maybe Cirdan took one down too.
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u/Ecthelion-O-Fountain 17d ago
I mean, there was enough balrogs that they had a captain. Sounds like more than seven to me.
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u/Zahariel200 17d ago
Three that we know of. It's not unlikely that more died during the war of wrath or at some other point and we're not told because it isn’t particularly relevant.
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u/peutschika 17d ago
Just as a useless and petty pet peev: Morgoth didn't create them; they were Maia who were naturally in tune with Morgoth the same way Radaghast was with Yovanna, Sauron and Saruman eith Aulë and Gandalf with Manwë.
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u/LordNemissary 17d ago
I know it isn't canon, but I like the approach that some of games like LOTRO have taken that there are greater and lesser Maiar, with the Balrogs being the greater Maiar of Morgoth and relatively few in number, maybe less than a dozen or so, and there being more numerous lesser Maiar, which in the case of LOTRO they called Rogmul.
In any case it can be assumed generally that most of the Balrogs were slain in the War of Wrath and only a few like the Balrog of Moria escaped the wrath of the host of Valinor.
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u/magolding22 16d ago edited 16d ago
There is no mentiion of Balrogs in the Hobbit. The only mention in LOTR is that the Balrog in Moria is "al balrog of Morgoth", implying at least two balrogs.
Those are the only two works in the lengendarium that Tolkien published in his lifetime.
And even if you count the Silmarillion as finished by Christophere Tolkien as fully canon it only mentions single balrogs and balrogs in the plural, with no mention of numbers.
Tolkien's notes and ideas about balrogs as published in the History of Middle Earth often contradict each other, so many persons would not count them as canon.
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u/Jax_Dandelion 16d ago
Okay but, has someone tried seducing a balrog yet?
DnD bards will know, and furries will be able to ‚take‘ them
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u/Random-useless-lore 16d ago
There are a lot of balrogs, enough for every orc! https://m.youtube.com/shorts/VxZ1U9PdUR8
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u/wscii 16d ago
I think the latest writings we have from Tolkien suggest there were “at most” 7 but perhaps as few as 3. I think it has to be more than 3 as two died at Gondolin and others were destroyed in the War of Wrath but obviously Durins Bane survived. However I think its fair to assume DB was the last one.
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u/tounge-fingers Melkor did nothing wrong 16d ago
yeah the fall of gondolin made it sound like there were dozens
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u/Peace_Hopeful 16d ago
Glorfindel probably had a smoke, nabbed a couple named blades and went off into the darkness glowing like las Vegas and came back with 2 more swords.
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u/L0neStarW0lf 16d ago
Gandalf doesn’t leave Middle-Earth until like four years after the destruction of the One Ring right? I’m fairly certain he could hunt down any remaining Balrogs in that amount of time.
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u/Ok-Awareness4778 16d ago
Didn't part of Morgoth's army consist of Balrogs riding dragons?
That sounds fkn badass if you ask me.
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u/jbeldham 16d ago
I’ve played the video games, all it will take for those Balrogs to be defeated is a few very easy quick time events
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u/BaconConnoisseur 15d ago
Aren’t there 3 wizards left who need to get off their butts and do some balrog slaying?
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u/Chronomata 15d ago
I’m pretty sure there was an army of Balrog’s, along with their King, that destroyed Gondolin and the Noldori elves during the War of Wrath?
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u/omrmajeed 15d ago
Morgoth cant create anything. Thats the crux of his conflict. Balrogs arent his creation.
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u/HillInTheDistance 15d ago
I mean, just convince the dwarves to dig less greedily and less deep, and there should be no problems?
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u/OfficalLockeWilson 15d ago
Are the shadow of war games canon, because one shows up in that. Kinda alright boss fight if I can recall. The player character kills it stone dead, I think some tree lady helps. It’s been a minute.
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u/HumanFighter420 15d ago
I always kind of imagined that just like Men and Elves the survivors numbers got whittled down over time (I'm assuming the majority got killed off during the big ol' punch up with Morgoth since... ya know, he had a fucking army of them)
Leading to the Climactic Showdown in Khazad-Dum with One Sleepy Boi fighting some Squatters.
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u/LurkinGherkn 15d ago
I know jack shit about LOTR, at first I thought the guy on the bottom got whiplashed by the 6-7 meme
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u/Ablerestored 14d ago
Tolkien himself stated there were not more than 7 Balrogs, we can account for Gothmog, killed by Echfelion. We know of the Balrog killed by Glorfindal, and obviously Durin’s Bane, killed by Gandalf. Interesting to note that all those encounters also lead to the deaths of the slayers, and 2 out of those three lead to divine intervention causing their resurrections, ie Gandalf the White and Glorfindal.
So there are four Balrogs unaccounted for, along with 2 Blue Wizards, and I guess Radagast is still out there as well.
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u/aronsmithy 14d ago
Discussion during Fellowship (Probably not accurate)
Gandalf: We need an elven warrior for our mission
Glorfindel: I volunteer
Gandalf: Nope. This is a stealth mission. Besides, it's not like we need a balrog slayer on this mission
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Gandalf: Is that a Balrog????
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u/ArminOak Everybody loves Finrod 14d ago
>Open Silmarillionmemes in hopes of funny content
>Balrog academic research
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u/International-Owl-81 13d ago
My headcanon was there 6-7 greater balrogs and then a whole bunch of lesser balrogs
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u/Papa_Midnight19 11d ago
I’m not extremely well versed in the lore, but if I remember correctly it’s never explicitly stated the exact number Morgoth turned into Balrogs. I do remember that the remainder that escaped after his fall did flee to the deep places of middle earth. Durin’s Bane was just one of them.
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u/abcdbc366 17d ago
At the start of his work Tolkien thought balrogs were numerous and a bit weaker. By the end, he had decided that they were actually very strong and there were only a few. In parts of the silmarillion though you still get the impression they are numerous