12 April 2023

I’d just watched Tolkien again, about his life, and it struck me that for as iconic a creature as the balrog was in Lord of the Rings, it never really shows up anywhere else. Probably because it has too much in common with the aesthetic of the traditional demons in Christian lore? regardless of the reason, I kind of wanted to do something with it.

That said, I’m pretty dissatisfied with this attempt. It doesn’t feel true to what they were, and is all sorts of weird. It was worth exploring, but I won’t be doing anything with these ideas directly, at least.

It is said that the first balrog formed the moment man first tamed fire. For before that the flames held no malevolence; they were but a force of nature, destructive as they were. But no, under man’s control, it was only a matter of time before someone used them with ill intent.

In our world, they remained largely unseen, but that doesn’t mean they weren’t there. There beside the first man who committed arson; every “witch” burned at the stake. The many, often literal, flames of war, up to and including the nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

But here, in the world of [Lordran], they were not content to keep to the shadows, to whisper into the ears of men. No, here, they stalked the realm in physical form., giant horned beings of ash and flame. Few knew they’d ever had a master, and none but them knew if they served another after his death, or if they worked towards their own inscrutable ends.

There was no killing one, either; at least, not permanently. The great heroes had struck even the mightiest of them down at various points throughout history, earning a century or two’s reprieve from the beasts’ tyranny, but they lacked the divine power required to slay them for good.