V- I was reading an article today about the "Thieves' Quarrel" that happened to contain an account of an unexplicable change made by CT, which, when I checked in AR I couldn't find.
Here's an excerpt:
http://www.xenite.org/tolkien/do-balrog ... wings.htmlThen we turn to the question of whether Balrogs really CAN fly. The short answer is that they were Maiar and that Maiar can whatever they please. The long answer is that Tolkien DOES provide one example of flying Balrogs, and that is when they flew over Hithlum to rescue Morgoth from Ungoliant.
Here many people raise objections by dissecting a single sentence and taking specific phrases out of context. "winged speed", they say, can be used as a metaphor. Yes, it can, but there is no indication in the text that Tolkien used it so. "Arose", they say, can refer to the act of flying up into the sky or simply climbing out of an underground abode, and the Balrogs were indeed underground when they heard Morgoth scream. Yes, that is so. But there is no indication in the text that this is what Tolkien meant to imply without also implying flight.
"Passed over" doesn't necessarily mean flight, either, they say. Fingolfin's horse passed over the plain of Anfauglith after the Dagor Bragollach, and the horse obviously was not flying. True, but "passed over" must be given a context to have any meaning.
What J.R.R. Tolkien actually wrote was "swiftly they arose, and they passed with winged speed over Hithlum, they came to Lammoth as a tempest of fire." Unfortunately, only part of this text was used by Christopher Tolkien in THE SILMARILLION. What he wrote "and now swiftly they arose, and passing over Hithlum they came to Lammoth as a tempest of fire."
Why did Christopher change the text? He doesn't say. It may only have been an error of omission. But it's not simply a matter of omission, he changed the verbal phrasing completely from "they passed with winged speed over Hithlum" to "passing over Hithlum".
The key phrase in both versions of the sentence, however, is the metaphor "tempest of fire". A tempest is a storm. Some people have argued that a tempest can simply refer to a disturbance, but Tolkien doesn't use "tempest" that way. He uses it to refer to things coming out of the sky. When Morgoth unleashed the winged dragons on the Host of the Valar at the end of the War of Wrath, they erupted like a "tempest of fire". Clearly the winged dragons were flying and spewing flames.
Tolkien's "tempest of fire" in Lammoth dates from the 1950s, AFTER Tolkien had reached the conclusion that Balrogs were winged fallen Maiar. Furthermore, it works with "swiftly they arose, and they passed with winged speed over Hithlum" to denote a passage through the sky. There were Elves in Hithlum at the time (Sindar) who noted this passage (that is how Tolkien justifies his histories -- either someone witnesses it or infers it). Hithlum itself was not burned, nor suffered any kind of damage from flame and smoke. Tolkien doesn't say the flaming Balrogs ran through Hithlum, and they in their fiery state could not have ridden through it as in the older stories.