Do Balrogs have wings?
This is the archetypal example of the within-Middle-earth obsessive debate, and I shall use that an an excuse to take it as an example. I was relieved a couple of years ago to see that the compilers of the New Tolkien Newsgroups FAQ (enquiries to Steuard Jensen, contact for the New Tolkien Newsgroups FAQ, at sbjensen@midway.uchicago.edu) had arrived, after much debate and the application of many minds to the subject, at a conclusion not completely different from the one I arrived at after a long and eyeball spinning study of the sources. I quote their conclusions here: ” * The Balrog in Moria had “wings” of some sort, which the company saw stretch from wall to wall. * Those “wings” were probably not made of flesh and blood, but rather of some sort of “shadow-stuff”. (Thus, when the Balrog is in front of the pit of fire, the fire seems dimmed, not just plain blocked.)” Although this answer is drawn from careful comparative study of Tolkien’s writings over a long time, it was not given t
