At some point in time, people will treat any essay concerning Balrogs with the utter disdain and dismay the topic thoroughly earns.
Alas!
It appears yet another misguided attempt to prove me wrong (about something I never said) is on the verge of publication. Other Minds issue 10 leads off with a horribly long (and on many points wrong) essay about Michael Martinez and Balrogs.
It’s one thing for people to want to argue with me, but when their arguments address points I don’t make, I find myself wondering why I’m being dragged into the melee again.
The essay by Thomas Gießl, titled “Balrogs do not have wings – but they do fly!” launches into faux scholarship by claiming that my essay “Do Balrogs Have Wings? Do Balrogs Fly?” takes the position that Balrogs have physical corporeal wings. There is no such claim in my essay.
It might be that people continue to misunderstand this the oldest of my essays on Balrogs because of the final paragraph:
In the final analysis one must accept that the Balrog of Moria had wings because J.R.R. Tolkien said it had wings and that the Balrogs flew to Lammoth because the sentence cannot mean anything else. If one chooses not to accept these facts then one is at variance with J.R.R. Tolkien and there is nothing which can be said or done to counter an argument that refuses to accept the plain and simple facts.
The wings were there in the text even if they were only wings of “shadow stuff” — that is the shadow was reaching outward from the Balrog in the apparent form of two vast wings.
The English language is a very flexible language. It allows words to take on multiple meanings many of which are often born out of metaphor. Tolkien’s use of the word “wings” in the much-disputed passage refers only to the darkness surrounding the Balrog but “wings” is not a metaphor for the darkness it is a literal description of the extensions of the darkness that reach out to either side of the Balrog.
For some unfathomable reason some people just seem offended by the idea that these wings are wings because in their minds wings must (apparently) only refer to things of flesh and blood or physical dimensions and shapes. So how do airplanes fly? How do armies maneuver on the battlefield? (I always wondered why people who said Tolkien couldn’t be using “wings” to refer to non-physical wings except in a metaphorical way didn’t have a problem with his use of “wings” in referring to the deployment of armies.)
The word “wings” just doesn’t mean one thing. The truth about Balrogs is that the truth about Balrogs has been buried beneath layers and layers of lies lousy scholarship and misuse of citations. That much could be said of the truth about wings too.
I suppose I could amend the paragraph to include some extensive qualifying language such as (or like — does anyone grasp the irony of my use of simile-structure in non-simileic fashion?) “In the final analysis one must accept that the Balrog of Moria had (non-corporeal) wings (of darkness or ‘shadow-stuff’) because J.R.R. Tolkien said it had (non-corporeal) wings (of darkness or ‘shadow-stuff’)”.
Or I could use the language Wayne Hammond and Christina Scull used in their book THE LORD OF THE RINGS: A Reader’s Companion and say that the wings are “figurative” — however that strikes me as a weak argument for metaphor/simile which doesn’t work because the narrative doesn’t (figuratively) turn to the reader and (figuratively) say “The Balrog had a great darkness which was awesome and intimidating like as if it had two great huge black wings that stretched out from either side to the walls”.
But would that really prevent people from falsely asserting that I say the Balrog had physical corporeal wings? Someone posted a comment here (which I deleted because I see no reason to publish other people’s false statements for them) alleging that I have changed my position on Balrog wings through the years (i.e. that I went from “the Balrog had physical wings” to “the Balrog had a darkness that reached out like wings”). Mr. Gießl’s OM article also seems to make that allegation. Oddly enough when searching the Internet I’m unable to find any statement I have ever made alleging that Balrogs had physical wings.
The only shift in my arguments concerning Balrogs so far as I am able to document through searches of Google Groups (the search functionality of which is nowhere near as good as the old DejaNews search tool was) concerned the Hithlum passage. Although I originally pointed to “swiftly they arose” “winged speed” and “passed over Hithlum” in arguing that the Balrogs flew to Morgoth’s aid in his struggle with Ungoliant discussion moved on to the “arrived as a tempest of fire” part of the passage. But when people decided that actually meant something like “a great noise (of fire)” (transmuted through the substitution of “tumult” for “tempest”) I finally challenged everyone to take the four points of the passage and substitute non-flying/atmospheric references in such a way that the passage would still make sense.
I have yet to encounter a successful attempt but I digress. In fact the whole Balrog Wings debate is a complete digression from life. Why do people insist on dragging me back into it with nonsense claims? I really don’t want any part of this silly discussion. I’m only writing this because Other Minds is going to put the Balrog back square on my nose again.
All of this pointless rewriting of Tolkien (and Martinez) may release some anxious energy from people every once in a while but it’s not advancing the readers’ appreciation of or understanding of the story. And frankly I’d rather not be remembered as the guy who insisted that Balrogs had physical wings.