) come from?But the Balrog has a clear predecessor in Norse literature in the form of fire-giant Surtr, which means “the black one” or “the swarthy one”. The giant is the master of fire and guardian of Muspelheim, a burning realm of fire, closely linked to the volcanic underworld. In 1963, a new island formed off Iceland following a volcanic eruption. It was named Surtsey meaning Surtr’s island. In Völuspá, we are told that Surtr is an evil creature. He comes from the south and is connected to fire. In VafϷrúðnismál (saga), it says that Surtr has to fight the gods and that Surtr uses fire as a weapon. At Ragnarok, Surtr will be surrounded by burning fire, and his sword will shine brighter than the sun.
The Balrog is quite simply the fire giant Surtr. Both are creatures of the underworld and the dark, and at the same time fire monsters. They both carry fiery weapons – a fiery whip and a flaming sword respectively. Both will fight powerful people – Surtr, the gods and the Balrog, Gandalf the Grey.
I think the Balrogs are good representatives of this hybrid mythology.The legendarium reflects Tolkien’s effort to assimilate his own Judeo-Christian monotheism with the multi-deity pagan mythologies of Northern Europe and elsewhere that so fascinated him. This resulted in a hybrid mythology that contains both a pantheon of gods (the Valar) and one true God, Eru Ilúvatar
Just like Woses, Balrogs owe a part of their existence, at least, to an editorial problem. There is an Old English poem called Exodus, like several Old English poems a paraphrase of a part of the Bible. Tolkien’s edition of it did not appear during his lifetime, but it came out posthumously, appropriately enough ‘reconstructed’ from his lecture notes. Since it is both a paraphrase and a fragment, the poem has never managed to gain a central position in literary courses, but Tolkien was interested in it: for one thing, he thought on linguistic grounds that it was older than Beowulf, and he thought that like the Beowulf-poet, the Exodus-poet had known a good deal about the native pre-Christian mythology, which could with care be retrieved from his copyists’ ignorant errors. In particular, the poet at several points mentions the Sigelwara land, the ‘land of the Sigelware’. In modern dictionaries and editions, these ‘Sigelware’ are invariably translated as ‘Ethiopians’. Tolkien thought, as often, that that was a mistake. He thought that the name was another compound, exactly like *wudu-wása and *hol-bytla, and that it should have been written *sigel-hearwa. Furthermore, he suggested (in two long articles written early on in his career, and now ignored by scholarship) that a *sigel-hearwa was a kind of fire-giant.
