Balrogs of Middle-earth — Valaraukar, Durin's Bane and Gothmog

Quick Answer: Balrogs are Maiar, spirits of the same order as Gandalf, who were seduced by Morgoth before the world was finished and took bodies of shadow and fire. They served as his captains in the First Age. The most famous is Durin's Bane, the Balrog of Moria that Gandalf fights on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm. Their Sindarin name, Balrog, ends in raug, "demon, powerful hostile and terrible creature," and in Quenya they are the Valaraukar.

Few creatures in fantasy are remembered from a single scene as vividly as the Balrog. A drum in the deep, a wall of fire, a wizard on a narrow bridge, and four words shouted into the dark. Yet the Balrog of Moria is the last of a long line. Behind that one scene in The Lord of the Rings stands a whole history in The Silmarillion, where Balrogs lead armies, kill kings of the Elves, and fall in duels that the Elves remembered for thousands of years.

This guide covers what Tolkien actually wrote about them: where they came from, how many there were, the great Balrogs who have names and stories, the question of wings, how the films changed them, and the Elvish words hidden inside their name. It is one of the spokes of our complete guide to the races of Middle-earth.

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What Is a Balrog?

A Balrog is not a beast, and it is not a kind of Orc. It is a fallen spirit. In Tolkien's mythology, the world was sung into being by the Ainur, the holy spirits created by Eru Ilúvatar before time began. The greatest of the Ainur who came down into the world are the Valar, the Powers. Lesser spirits of the same kind came with them; these are the Maiar.

Melkor, later called Morgoth, was the mightiest of the Ainur, and he rebelled. The Silmarillion tells that many Maiar were drawn to him in the days of his splendour and stayed with him into his darkness. The most terrible of these became the Balrogs, which the book calls demons of terror whose bodies were wrapped in fire and darkness, with whips of flame in their hands.

That origin explains almost everything about them. A Balrog is the same order of being as Gandalf and Saruman, who were also Maiar, and as Sauron, who was the greatest of Morgoth's Maiar servants. That is why the fight in Moria is more than a wizard against a monster. It is two spirits of the same kind, one faithful and one fallen, meeting on a bridge. For the wizards' side of that story, see our guide to the Istari, the wizards of Middle-earth.

Fire, shadow and the whip

Tolkien describes Balrogs mostly through effect rather than anatomy. They come wrapped in shadow, they carry flame, and they wield whips of many thongs along with swords. They cause fear before they are seen. In the Moria chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, the Orcs and trolls fall silent and draw aside when it arrives, and even Legolas, who has seen much, cries out in dismay when he recognises it.

The shapes they take are bodies they chose, not their true nature. A Maia can clothe itself in a form. A Balrog's form is fire and shadow because that is what it has become in spirit.

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The Balrogs in the First Age

Most of what Tolkien wrote about Balrogs belongs to the First Age, the age of The Silmarillion, when Morgoth ruled from his fortress of Angband in the north and the exiled Noldor made war on him.

Rescuing Morgoth from Ungoliant

Their first great appearance is a rescue. After Morgoth and the spider Ungoliant destroyed the Two Trees of Valinor and stole the Silmarils, the two quarrelled over the plunder. Ungoliant had grown vast and wrapped Morgoth in her webs. His great cry echoed through the north, and the Balrogs who still lurked in the deep places of Angband came out like a storm of fire and drove her away. It is a revealing scene: even the Dark Lord needed his servants. Read more about Ungoliant in our guide to the giant spiders of Middle-earth.

Gothmog and the death of Fëanor

Gothmog is the greatest Balrog with a name. The Silmarillion calls him Lord of Balrogs and the high-captain of Angband. When Fëanor, maker of the Silmarils, rushed ahead of his army after the first battle in Middle-earth, he found himself surrounded by Balrogs near the borders of Morgoth's land. He fought on, wounded many times, until Gothmog struck him down. His sons rescued him, but he died of his wounds, and his spirit departed so fiercely that his body fell to ash.

Gothmog appears again and again in the later battles. In the Battle of Unnumbered Tears it is Gothmog who kills Fingon, High King of the Noldor, and it is Gothmog who captures Húrin after the last stand of the Men of Dor-lómin. The name Gothmog is also used for a lieutenant of Minas Morgul in The Return of the King, a different character who simply shares the name.

The fall of Gondolin

The most famous Balrog battles are at the fall of Gondolin, the hidden city of King Turgon. When Morgoth finally found it, he sent dragons, Orcs and Balrogs against it. Two duels from that night became legend among the Elves.

Ecthelion of the Fountain met Gothmog in the king's square. Wounded, his sword-arm useless, Ecthelion threw himself against the Balrog, and the two of them fell together into the deep fountain of the king. Both drowned. Gothmog, the slayer of Fëanor and Fingon, died there.

Glorfindel fought another Balrog during the escape. The survivors fled over a perilous mountain pass, Cirith Thoronath, the Eagles' Cleft, where a Balrog ambushed them. Glorfindel held the path, and he and the Balrog fell together from the cliff into the abyss. The Eagles brought up his body and the survivors raised a cairn over him. Thorondor, King of the Eagles, appears in that scene; see our guide to the Great Eagles of Middle-earth.

The War of Wrath

At the end of the First Age, the Valar came out of the West in the War of Wrath and overthrew Morgoth. The Silmarillion says that the Balrogs were destroyed, all save some few who fled and hid themselves in caverns at the roots of the earth. That one sentence sets up everything that follows in the Third Age.

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Durin's Bane: The Balrog of Moria

For thousands of years one of those fugitives slept beneath the Misty Mountains, under the great Dwarf-kingdom of Khazad-dûm. The Elves called that kingdom Moria, a name the dictionary glosses as "Black Chasm, Black Pit." It became a black pit because of what the Dwarves woke there.

How the Dwarves woke it

The wealth of Khazad-dûm was mithril, the true-silver found nowhere else. The appendices of The Lord of the Rings tell how the Dwarves delved ever deeper under Caradhras for it, until in the year 1980 of the Third Age they disturbed the thing hidden at the roots of the mountain. It killed their king, Durin VI, and so the Dwarves named it Durin's Bane. The next year it killed his son Náin I, and the Dwarves fled the halls their ancestors had held since the beginning of the world.

The Balrog's waking had consequences far beyond Moria. With the Dwarves gone, Orcs filled the empty halls. The Elves of nearby Lothlórien grew more wary and withdrawn. And later attempts to retake the kingdom failed, most famously when Balin led a colony back into Moria and was destroyed. The book the Fellowship finds in the Chamber of Mazarbul is the record of that colony's end. For the Dwarvish side of this history, read our Khuzdul dwarven language guide and the spoke on the dwarves of Middle-earth.

The Bridge of Khazad-dûm

When the Fellowship crossed Moria in January of the year 3019, the Orcs attacked them in the Chamber of Mazarbul and the Balrog came with the Orcs. Gandalf tried to hold a door against it with a spell of shutting and was nearly broken by the counter-spell. On the narrow bridge over the chasm he turned to face it alone.

The confrontation is short, and its words matter. Gandalf names himself a servant of the Secret Fire and wielder of the flame of Anor, and he names the Balrog the flame of Udûn. The Secret Fire is the creative power of Ilúvatar; Anor is the Sun; Udûn is a name for Morgoth's ancient hell in the north. In a few phrases Tolkien tells us exactly what is happening: a faithful Maia and a fallen one, each drawing on a different fire.

Gandalf breaks the bridge, but the Balrog's whip catches his knees and drags him into the abyss. His last words to the Fellowship, "Fly, you fools!", are among the best-known lines in the book. The Elvish he used at the West-gate an hour earlier, Pedo mellon a minno, is covered in our guide to Lord of the Rings Elvish phrases.

The Battle of the Peak

The rest of the fight is told later, in The Two Towers, when Gandalf returns. He and the Balrog fell into deep water at the bottom of the world, which quenched its fire, and he followed it through tunnels gnawed by nameless things until it fled up the Endless Stair to the peak of Zirakzigil. There, in fire and lightning, Gandalf threw it down, and the mountainside was broken where it fell. Then Gandalf himself died, and was sent back, as Gandalf the White, with his task not yet done.

Durin's Bane is the last Balrog in Tolkien's story. Its death removed one of the oldest powers left in Middle-earth from the board just as the War of the Ring began. To understand why Gandalf, and not Aragorn or Legolas, had to be the one on the bridge, read our explainer on Gandalf's Elvish name, Mithrandir.

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Do Balrogs Have Wings?

This is the most argued question in Tolkien fandom, and the honest answer is that the text does not settle it.

In the Moria chapter, the shadow about the Balrog reaches out and is compared to two vast wings. A few lines later its wings are spread from wall to wall. One camp reads the first sentence as a simile and the second as a continuation of the same image: the Balrog is wrapped in shadow that looks like wings. The other camp points out that Tolkien then speaks plainly of its wings, with no comparison, and argues that a narrator does not keep using a simile as a noun.

Other evidence cuts both ways. The Balrogs in The Silmarillion never fly. Durin's Bane falls into the abyss rather than flying out of it, and it climbs the Endless Stair rather than flying to the peak. Glorfindel's Balrog falls off a cliff. Defenders of wings answer that wings made of shadow need not be wings that bear weight.

Tolkien was asked about many details in his letters, but no surviving answer from him resolves this one. Both readings are defensible, and you can enjoy the scene either way.

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How Many Balrogs Were There?

Tolkien changed his mind. In the earliest versions of his mythology, written in the 1910s and 1920s and published in The Book of Lost Tales, Balrogs come by the hundreds and even the thousands, and they can be killed in some numbers by heroes. The fall of Gondolin in that early version is full of them.

Later in life he grew dissatisfied with this. In notes published in Morgoth's Ring, the tenth volume of The History of Middle-earth, he wrote that there should be only a few of them, perhaps three, at most seven. The published Silmarillion, assembled by Christopher Tolkien, does not give a number, so either picture can be read into it. The later view fits the Balrogs better: if each is a Maia, a spirit of the same order as Sauron, then a handful is already a great force.

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Balrogs in the Films and Series

Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) gave the Balrog its most famous screen form: a horned giant of smoke and magma, with great leathery wings, a flaming sword and a whip. The design is film-only in its specifics. Jackson chose real wings, the horns and the bull-like head come from the film's concept artists rather than from the text, and the Balrog is far larger than the books imply. The bridge scene itself follows the book closely, with Gandalf's famous refusal reworded slightly from the book.

Amazon's series The Rings of Power shows a Balrog awakening beneath Khazad-dûm in the Second Age. That is a television invention: in Tolkien's chronology, the Balrog was disturbed in the Third Age, more than three thousand years after the events of the series. Treat everything about Balrogs in the series as adaptation, not canon.

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Glorfindel: The Balrog-slayer Who Came Back

Glorfindel deserves his own section, because he links the First Age to The Lord of the Rings. In The Fellowship of the Ring, an Elf-lord named Glorfindel rides out from Rivendell to find Frodo, puts him on his horse Asfaloth, and drives the Nazgûl into the flood of the Bruinen. In the book it is Glorfindel, not Arwen, who greets Aragorn with Mae govannen; the films gave his role to Arwen. The Black Riders he faces have their own guide: the Nazgûl, Ringwraiths explained.

Was he the same Glorfindel who died fighting a Balrog at Gondolin? Tolkien considered the question late in life, in essays published in The Peoples of Middle-earth, the twelfth volume of The History of Middle-earth. He concluded that he was. After his death his spirit went to the Halls of Mandos in Valinor, he was re-embodied, and he later returned to Middle-earth. That is why Gandalf says, in Rivendell, that Glorfindel is one of the mighty of the Firstborn, and why the Ringwraiths fear him.

His name is Sindarin. The dictionary entry for fîn gives "hair, lock of hair" and names Glorfindel, "golden-haired," as its secure example. A golden-haired Elf who once threw himself off a mountain with a Balrog is about as good a story as any name in Tolkien carries.

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Balrogs in Elvish

The words for these creatures come from the Elves, who fought them for a whole age. Here are the attested words connected with them, with the glosses from our Elvish vocabulary database, which is built on Eldamo, the scholarly lexicon of Tolkien's languages.

A few notes on these:

• Raug is the element that makes a Balrog a demon. Our database gives the meaning but not a separate gloss for the first syllable of Balrog, so we do not offer one here. The same goes for the Quenya Valarauko: we can tell you it is the Quenya name, but not break it down from attested entries.
• Maia and Vala place the Balrogs in the order of creation. A Balrog is a Maia that fell, which is why it can match a wizard.
• Moria shows how the Elves saw Khazad-dûm after the Balrog woke. The Dwarves never used that name; it is an Elvish description of a place that had become a black pit.

The spelling of Elvish names follows rules of its own, and Sindarin and Quenya sound different in ways that matter. Our guide to Quenya vs Sindarin explains why Balrog is Sindarin and Valaraukar is Quenya, and what language the Elves speak in Lord of the Rings covers which of the two you hear in the book and films.

If you want to go further than a word list, you can learn Elvish free on Tengwar, starting from pronunciation and greetings. To see how an English phrase would come out in Quenya or Sindarin, try the English to Elvish translator. For more attested vocabulary of the same kind, our Elvish dictionary of common words is a good next step.

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Balrogs, Orcs and Dragons: Morgoth's Other Servants

Balrogs were not Morgoth's only weapons. His armies were mostly Orcs, and in the First Age he bred dragons, the greatest of which, Glaurung and Ancalagon, were as dangerous as any Balrog. The difference is in their nature. Orcs and dragons are creatures bred or corrupted within the world. Balrogs are spirits from outside it, older than the Sun and Moon.

At Gondolin the three kinds fought together: Balrogs, Orcs and the newly made fire-drakes, some of which carried Balrogs in Tolkien's earliest telling in The Book of Lost Tales. If you are following the whole bestiary of the Enemy, read our guides to the orcs and goblins of Middle-earth and the dragons of Middle-earth. The language Sauron later devised for his servants is covered in our Black Speech vocabulary guide.

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Why the Balrog Works So Well on the Page

Tolkien gives the Balrog of Moria very few lines of description, and that restraint is the point. We get a shadow, a shape of man-form maybe but greater, fire running before it, a whip and a sword. The rest is reaction: the fear of the Orcs, Legolas's cry, Gimli's despair at recognising Durin's Bane, Gandalf's weariness. The reader builds the monster out of everyone else's terror.

The scene also carries the weight of the whole mythology. The Balrog is a survivor of the War of Wrath, a creature that fought in battles the Elves still sang about. When Gandalf faces it, the oldest conflict in Tolkien's world, between the faithful and the fallen among the Ainur, reaches into the Third Age for one last time. A reader who has read The Silmarillion knows that Ecthelion and Glorfindel each died killing one. Gandalf dies too.

That depth is also why the Elvish names matter. The Elves named the Balrogs because they faced them across centuries. To read those names, from raug to Angband, is to read a record of that war in the language of the people who fought it. If you want to write a name of your own in the same script the Elves used, try the Tengwar name generator, or practise the letters by hand in the Tengwar Scribe. Our Tengwar alphabet guide explains how the letters work.

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People Also Ask

What is a Balrog in Lord of the Rings?

A Balrog is a Maia, one of the lesser spirits who came into the world with the Valar, who was corrupted by Morgoth and took a form of shadow and fire. The Balrog in The Lord of the Rings is Durin's Bane, the creature that drove the Dwarves out of Moria.

What does the word Balrog mean?

Balrog is Sindarin. Its second element is raug, "demon, powerful hostile and terrible creature." The Quenya name for these beings is Valarauko, plural Valaraukar.

Is the Balrog stronger than Gandalf?

They are spirits of the same order, which is why their fight is so evenly matched. Gandalf wins, but he dies doing it and is sent back. Tolkien gives no ranking beyond the story itself.

Who killed Balrogs in Tolkien?

Ecthelion killed Gothmog at Gondolin, Glorfindel killed a Balrog in the Eagles' Cleft, and Gandalf killed Durin's Bane on the peak of Zirakzigil. All three died in the process.

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Related Reading

• Races of Middle-earth: The Complete Guide
• Wizards of Middle-earth: The Istari
• Dwarves of Middle-earth
• Elves of Middle-earth
• Gandalf's Elvish Name: Mithrandir
• Khuzdul: The Dwarven Language Complete Guide
• Black Speech Words and Orkish Vocabulary
• Tolkien's Elvish Languages: The Complete Guide

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