Book II, Chapter 4: A Journey in the Dark and Book II, Chapter 5: The Bridge of Khazad-dum
My journey has finally led me into (and out of) Moria -- I’m glad I read both chapters, since it’s nice to treat the sequence as a whole, but there’s also a lot of directions for my mind to go. I think I’ll start by talking a little bit about Gandalf and what it means to be a wizard.
We have a lot of cultural associations with the word “wizard”, but it’s a little funny to me that Gandalf is often just taken for granted as being an example -- if not THE example -- of the archetype since he does not resemble “wizards” much at all. The popular notion of a wizard seems to me to owe much to Merlin from Arthurian myth, along with less fictional alchemists like Nicholas Flamel and John Dee -- at least somewhat-regular people (possessing some innate interest in things arcane) who through study and practice have developed incredible magical powers. Certainly the archetypal wizard in the fantasy genre is usually someone of that kind -- maybe they’re learned in a particular school or type of magic, maybe magic is some broader energy source they just tap into generally, but there’s generally this element of seeking and developing these abilities (even if to some extent they are innate and latent), it seems to me. There are of course counter-examples: fantasy contains multitudes. But you take my point, I think, if you know the genre.
Gandalf is a strange fit for that identity because almost none of it describes him. In large part that’s because Tolkien’s work here predates the concept of fantasy as a defined “genre” really (even though there are of course earlier examples than LOTR), and therefore the word “wizard” isn’t too rigidly defined for him to borrow it for these purposes. Still, whatever Gandalf is to us, he’s not a regular person -- and he’s not even a secretly cool person who has discovered and cultivated magical powers within. Instead, Gandalf is a powerful angelic spirit -- a Maia, like Sauron -- who was sent to Middle-earth from Valinor for a specific purpose, to oppose that Sauron guy. This was Saruman’s job also, but Saruman seems to have decided it’s better to try the whole “evil dark lord” thing, see how that goes. There have only ever been five wizards in the history of Middle-earth (which makes it all the stranger, back in Book I, that Gildor has a saying about not meddling in the affairs of wizards), two of whom seem to have gone AWOL almost immediately, and as far as I know it is not possible for any creature to learn how to be a sixth wizard. Anyway, Gandalf’s magical powers are not objects of study for him at all -- he studies lore, for instance, to find out about Isildur and his Ring, but we never hear of him studying magic. What’s he capable of? Well, he set fires in the last chapter and in this one -- once for warmth and once to set a hilltop ablaze and drive off an attacking pack of wargs. Handy, in a pinch. We know he can summon light in Moria, and control it to some extent, and that he knows some “spells” to open doors or close them -- he notes that he “once knew every spell” for opening a door, though that “once” implies the loss of some memories, I guess? This is where Tolkien’s nodding a little, since I’m not really clear on what Gandalf knows and doesn’t know -- can do or not do. Anyway, I’m mulling all this over just because Gandalf is so crucially important here: his knowledge/power is indispensable for getting into Moria, without which the quest would have basically ended before it started, and it’s essentially indispensable for getting through Moria (the eight of them would never have even made it to the Chamber of Mazarbul without him, it seems to me), and it sure is indispensable for saving the rest of them from-- well, that’s the end of the chapter. I’ll deal with it at the end.
I like how creative Tolkien gets with our foes in this section -- after basically playing every change he can on the threats posed by the Nazgul, suddenly we get a pack of wargs (another delightful cameo from some old friends from The Hobbit), followed by the Watcher in the Water (so creepy that even Gandalf doesn’t know what the heck it is, giving the company afterwards only the not-at-all comforting observation “there are older and fouler things than Orcs in the deep places of the world”), then some creepy pair of eyes and footsteps that it feels like only Frodo detects, then, not to be outdone, those aforementioned Orcs, and finally-- well, we’ll get to it at the end. We get some real battles here, even if they are brief, and it becomes clear how handy folks like Legolas and Gimli are going to be in a fight -- so much so that honestly Merry and Pippin look like a really bad move on Elrond’s part. We’re never really told what would have happened if Pippin hadn’t been a “fool of a Took” and dropped the stone down the well -- I think very little would have changed, since surely stones fall in abandoned Moria now and then all the time without a hobbit dropping them, and some orc patrol or other would have detected them sooner or later. The arrival of the orcs does bring us back to the question of race -- I can’t read these sequences without thinking of Jemisin’s critique, and she has a real point. I read orcs somewhat differently than she does, but there’s no denying that the language used to describe them often feels like allusions to racialized language from our human experience, and that it would have been trivially easy for Tolkien to find ways of steering away from that had he both been conscious of it and cared enough to make the change. My sense is that the problem here is mostly him being unconscious of it rather than him knowing there’s a racist twinge to some of the language and not caring about it, but at this point I’m just offering my impression, and not the truth. The sequence of foes here is certainly designed to send a message -- Sauron’s arm has grown long, as Gandalf said last chapter (I think?), and there won’t be a corner of Middle-earth now that fully escapes his disruptive reach. In this case, he’s clearly cluttered up as many Rivendell-adjacent spaces as he can with monsters, out of a desire to thwart whatever the heck it is those elves are up to. The Fellowship clearly left in the nick of time.
I’ve always wondered what it would have been like if Moria had proven to still hold some living Dwarves -- even if not a lavish kingdom, at least some embattled outpost ready to give aid and comfort. There’s an emotional resonance, of course, to that scene in Mazarbul -- Gimli finding the tomb of his cousin (Balin was his father Gloin’s first cousin, so this is close family), Gandalf straining to read anything in the smudged book other than some hasty Elvish script penned by Ori (another The Hobbit callback), etc. -- but I think a lot could have been done with a scene or two involving them finding the last Dwarven outpost in Moria, maybe even being present at its fall. I’m sorry we don’t get to see Balin as the restored Lord of Moria -- he was always my favorite of The Hobbit’s dwarves, and I would have been glad to see him again (similar sentiments to Celeborn about Gandalf next chapter, but of course I’m ahead of myself). I like that the Moria trip at least brings Gimli forward -- if anything, I wish he could have been a little more critically important to their navigation underground, but I suppose it’s important for thematic reasons to have Gandalf so crucial to the Fellowship’s successes in Moria, since it’ll make the loss of him weigh that much more heavily.
Okay, let’s talk about Durin’s Bane. Balrogs have been mentioned in an earlier post of mine, making war on Gondolin in Morgoth’s service -- after the First Age and the fall of Morgoth, Balrogs basically disappeared from Middle Earth. Practically speaking, the few who escaped the wrath of the Valar managed to hide themselves deep in shadowy places beneath the Earth. And they might not have been heard from again except that the Dwarves delved a little too deeply in Moria and woke one up, who killed Durin VI, their King, and earned himself the name Durin’s Bane. Balrogs are nasty pieces of work -- Legolas is young enough that he has literally never seen one before, but the moment Durin’s Bane comes into view, he freaks out. These things are enemies of basically anything that moves and isn’t directly in the service of evil -- honestly, given how terrified all the other enemies in Moria are at its arrival, they’re probably enemies of their own side at least sometimes (I imagine Balrogs snacking on orcs just out of boredom, if nothing else) -- and they are terrifying enough that they make Gandalf himself falter. Balrogs are also Maiar in physical form, and wield terrible spirit powers that are a match for even someone as powerful as Gandalf himself.
Do Balrogs have wings? No, they do not. This is fairly easy to resolve by just asking how Gandalf gets rid of one -- he knocks a stone out from underneath it, and it falls. And yet the conviction that Balrogs have wings continues to afflict millions of Tolkien readers, including smart people who I think should know better, like John Howe, whose illustrations of Balrogs always include these huge leathery bat-wings. Essays on the wingedness of Balrogs have filled the Internet ever since there was an Internet to fill. I think the text of the third email ever sent, after “QWERTYUIOP” and “Hi Mom”, was “Re: Wings, Why Balrogs Have Them, RAY”. Anyway, I don’t know how to kill a bat (nor do I want to know), but I’ll say this -- I’m pretty sure if I knocked a stone out from underneath a bat, it would be just fine. I will make allowances for the folks who believe that Balrogs have useless wings, although it’s not clear to me why we have to start positing vestigial wings on creatures that didn’t evolve in the first place. Okay, I’m being snarky -- here’s what it comes down to, for me. The reason many folks (maybe including you, dear reader) think Balrogs have wings is that the text apparently informs you that they do -- as Durin’s Bane approaches Gandalf, “it drew itself up to a great height, and its wings were spread from wall to wall”. Now, that would be pretty open and shut, I grant you, if we had no other information to work with. I do not possess wings, myself, and therefore even if I drew myself up to a great height, nobody would start talking about where my wings stretched. But all we really have to do is reach back two paragraphs to clear this one up, where we are told that the Balrog faces Gandalf, “and the shadow about it reached out like two wings”. 1) I’d suggest that if it already had wings, Tolkien would here almost certainly have used a phrase like “two additional wings”, 2) it seems pretty straight-forward to me that the wings made of shadow in this paragraph are the wings referenced two paragraphs later, rather than there being another set of previously unmentioned wings that suddenly appear, and 3) even if we didn’t find that convincing, the creature is knocked through the bridge and it falls rather than flies. Balrogs don’t have wings. But! If you have more fun imagining them with wings (and it seems that almost every artist and movie maker to touch the creatures DOES), you really should have fun with it and I promise to leave you in peace. All I really need to know is that MY Balrogs don’t have wings -- my Balrogs, truthfully, don’t look like any artist’s conception I have seen, and are far more elemental and spectral than these big bellowing fire golems that seem to be in vogue -- and I already know that, so it's all good.
The confrontation between Gandalf and Durin’s Bane is so legendary that there’s little I can add to it. Jackson’s film plays it totally straight -- I don’t think they changed a word of Gandalf’s dialogue -- since Tolkien gets this cinematic quality perfectly into the novel’s depiction of it. I do just want to note that Gandalf uses a couple of distinctive phrases here that are pretty cryptic in the text of the novel, and I think unpacking them here is pretty significant to understanding who Gandalf is and what it means for him to be a wizard, which I alluded to earlier. Gandalf, standing alone on that narrow span, tells the Balrog that he is a “servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor”. The Secret Fire is a reference to that energy with which Eru Iluvatar animated the universe at the beginning of creation. The “flame of Anor” is a little less precise, but Anor is the Elvish name for the Sun, which is the sole surviving fruit of Laurelin, one of the oft-referenced Two Trees of Valinor -- the flame must be that light, which was sung into Laurelin by Yavanna, who herself as a Vala does so only in imitation of Eru’s first creation of light. Gandalf is not standing on this bridge as many other fantasy wizards would, invoking the name of some arcane school of magic or a powerful charm in his possession. He places his body between the Balrog and his friends, and tells him that he, Gandalf, is a servant of that life which lives in all good things -- the life that the Balrog, ages ago, heard erupting from the song of Eru Iluvatar -- and that light that sustains the living world. That he invokes not some petty spell, but the sinews that bind together the created order. And then, realizing that his friends are about to leap forward and imperil their own lives to aid him, Gandalf breaks his staff, the white fire leaps up around him, and into the abyss plunges the Balrog with Gandalf dragged behind. He could not have known then what fate awaited him -- I don’t think so, at any rate. And I think it is true of the Gandalf I know that he faced death gladly for the sake of his friends -- that, if we could have asked him in that moment “is this what you were sent across the Sea for, and lived the lifetimes of many men here in Middle-earth to do?” he would have said, “Yes.” He would have added, I think, that to do less would be to forsake the Secret Fire, and to break faith with the light of Anor -- that the power which he came to wield could not survive in him if he valued himself over those he came to protect. A lesson Saruman never learns. That’s what it means to be a wizard -- to be the kind of wizard that Gandalf (and perhaps only Gandalf, in all of Middle-earth) truly succeeds in being.
I can’t say much beyond that -- even knowing the story as well as I do, the death of Gandalf makes me feel quiet, and I think it is good to stop here. I will leave you with the closest artistic depiction of Gandalf’s stand on the bridge to what is in my head -- a wingless Balrog, at least. http://tolkiengateway.net/w/images/5/50/Stephen_Hickman_-_Gandalf_and_the_Balrog.jpg And tomorrow I will see you as we journey into Lothlorien: Book II, Chapter 6.