This is threadshitting. If you’re not interested in the topic, please don’t post in the thread.
Movie Gandalf tells Frodo in the mines of Moria: “There are some powers against which I have not yet been tested”, apparently in reference to the Balrog. Meaning that the Balrog was extremely powerful and Gandalf wasn’t sure he could beat it.
But in the book, Gandalf tells Frodo this before they even left the shire (a lot of the conversations in the movie take place at different times and locations than the books). So it’s not as clear exactly what he meant by this. He probably wasn’t referring to the Balrog, as I don’t think he knew of it’s existence at this point, or that their road would lead them to it. But I think it’s still pretty clear (book or movie) that Gandalf would have preferred not to fight the Balrog if he didn’t have to. He didn’t “kick it’s ass”, he died fighting it, and was sent back to middle earth because his role wasn’t finished.
I thought the Elves at the council of Elrond made it pretty clear that the ring was a middle-earth problem (in the books, at least). It wasn’t so much that they couldn’t deal with it, but they weren’t meant to. Same deal as “why didn’t they just fly ring to Mordor on the back of a giant eagle?” The ring and the sacrifice/effort to destroy it meant something, taking an avian taxi and dropping it off would have negated the whole effort. Could the Valinor elves have dealt with it? Unlikely. Even if they had managed to cart it over without succumbing to it’s temptation, and it’s very presence didn’t corrupt the elvish version of heaven/paradise, it’s unlikely that they had the ability to destroy it. It wasn’t just an “evil magic ring”, it was a huge part of a being several orders of magnitude more powerful than any of them. Sauron died when the ring did because he had put so much of himself into it.
I think the implication with the witch-king prophecy was supposed to be: No man can kill the Witch-king, and people took it to mean that he was invincible. But that wasn’t what the prophecy meant, it was about how the witch-king would die (a woman would kill him). It was misinterpreted. Which may have been what launched the now-common fantasy trope of confusing and utimately useless prohpecies whose meaning only becomes apparent once it is fufilled.
This is probably just to make the story more dramatic, but it always bugs me that the good guys, in this case Gandalf, are sent to do some work without their full power while the Balrog can probably fly around zapping people with fireballs at will.
And if the response is “well look what happened if they got more power, they could have turned out like Saruman” then I would say THAT is a dramatic license by the writer too! 
Its like, why can’t we have a story where the good guys aren’t artificially hobbled from the beginning and simply fight from a disadvantage not of some deux ex plot device? Its like when I’m playing a racing game, and I’m winning by a lot, but at the last lap the computer, without using any speed boosts or anything, seems to dramatically catch up so that the finish is close.
It took a woman AND a hobbit to kill the witch-king. But no man.
If the Balrog had taken the Ring and mastered it, Sauron would have diminished to a mere ghost, just as if the Ring had been destroyed (Tolkien addressed this in one of his many letters). It seems unlikely that Sauron could have taken Moria by siege, and even if he had, the Balrog could have retreated into the depths.
Doubtful I’m afraid. In the history of Lorien, the Silvan and Sindarin elves of Lorien were fleeing the mere rumour of the Balrog, not knowing what it even was, until Galadriel and Celeborn came. Legolas was undone by the mere sight of it. Galadriel has one of the three, but it is not a weapon of war. Perhaps she could have lured it into a trap somehow, at the cost of her own life.
It’s not a confrontation Tolkien would ever have written. Galadriel was inspired by Tolkien’s conception of the Virgin Mary (although, interestingly, a Mary human enough to be tempted by pride and a lust for power). Her purpose in the narrative is to act as a councillor.
Again, it’s the richness of Tolkien’s imagined world that makes it possible to make some sort of answer to these kinds of hypotheticals.
This pre-dates Tolkien by a long way, see my post concerning Macbeth above.
But the Balrog is hobbled as well. As a maia he should have an intellect equal to Gandalf’s, but he behaves as little more than a raging beast. The maia are too expansive to be fully contained within any mortal vessel. In order to be incarnated, some part of their essence must become inaccessible to them. Gandalf knows himself as himself, but is magically weaker. The balrog has forgotten himself, but is magically stronger.
Beautiful synopsis; To further summarize, the “greater powers” -cannot- really exist within Middle Earth. Every single one of them is handicapped in some way or another, including Sauron.
To further address question #1: Elves bearing The Ring would likely never have even made it to Valinor - in the first age, Earendil sails around for what may have been YEARS trying to get Valinor just to say “Some help here, guys?” and he never finds the way until he tries again with the Silmaril lighting the way. Getting to Valinor is more than “Just hold a steady course westward for 20 days.” If the Valar don’t give you more or less express permission, you’re not getting there. Because Valinor is essentially “heaven”. So no, you can’t just “send the ring there” regardless of any other issues like it corrupting the bearer, the boat would just come back.
For #2: Staves are definitely symbolic, but it’s never really explained what they do.
I don’t buy this explanation. I will grant the explanation about the Valar, but the eagles are in Middle Earth and of Middle Earth. Either Tolkein had some rationale in mind that didn’t get mentioned in the text, or else he didn’t think of it and we are left to retcon explanations. I don’t except “you must slog or it won’t mean anything”. I will accept "eagles would be [del]sitting ducks[/del] easy targets for the Witch King and the Ring Wraiths. Frodo was counting on stealth to keep him hidden from the baddies. The Eagles might cut the travel time, but at the cost of high visibility.
It was old when Shakespeare did it in MacBeth. It’s pretty much a trope of prophesy that it is vague and only makes sense in retrospect. Look at Oedipus Rex - King Laius hears a prophesy that his son, Oedipus, will kill him and marry his wife, so he plans his son’s execution. But a well-meaning servant smuggles the son away and tells Laius that Oedipus was killed. So Oedipus grows up in a foreign land not knowing who his father is, and then when he meets his father, doesn’t know it’s his father, and they fight. The prophesy came true because Lauis took actions based upon hearing the prophesy. Would Oedipus have tried to kill Lauis if he had grown up as the prince, knowing who his father was? Or was Oedipus fated to kill Laius, and since Laius tried to thwart the prophesy, Fate found a way?
A nitpick, but Valinor is closer to Tolkien’s conception of purgatory. A far kinder purgatory than is commonly thought of, but a place for reflection.
You missed a critical aspect of that letter. Mastering the Ring requires defeating Sauron. You can’t just claim it while hiding away in an old dwarf-hole. It’s not enough to have it - you have to more or less rip it away from Sauron’s mental grasp, probably in person, and risking complete enslavement as a consequence. And creatures far wiser and with greater knowledge than the Balrog would likely have failed.
They undoubtedly would not have wanted to face it and would have lost a great deal facing it. But considering that Elves of immense power still strode the earth and that a great many of the lived there, well, the Balrog wouldn’t have won. They were big, magical, and incredibly powerful, but they do seem to have been killable by more-or-less mortal weaponry if you hit them hard enough or long enough, and the Elves had a lot of it.
I’m not saying he wouldn’t have effectively erased Lorien in the process, and left it overrun with orcs and orc corpses.
This isn’t DnD. Even the Balrog, when it comes down to it, was basically a really big dude. He could only alter reality in relatively small ways.
And this is what they do and why they can’t use their full power. They don’t “cast spells”. Humans and elves and dwarves and orcs and Nazgul use magic in that sense. Sure, it’s often subtle and used very sparingly, but that’s what mortals and such do. Maiar and to a much greater degree Valar re-write reality.
This is why they can’t/won’t use it. Gandalf and the Wizards deliberately accepted limitations to protect humanity (Elfity. Dwarfity… Hobbitity?), and keep from coming to dominate the world simply by existing. The Balrog and his kind mostly had theirs limited by losing their priveleges and also being dominated by Morgoth, although they certainly used it in a much more flagrant manner. And for the wizards, the important task isn’t overthrowing the bad guys, but making it possible for people to do so. Note that Gandalf came closest to directly facing down the villains, and he was the most forward-facing of all of them. One, Radagast, spends most of his time helping animals and beasts escape the power of Sauron, and otherwise healing the natural world. Saruman, even before his Face Heel Turn, was a Thinker and Planner who msotly helped by giving advice and making alliances. Two others aren’t even noted, and the closest which might be said about them is that they probably went behind enemy lines to weaken Sauron in the unknown eastern nations.
Sorry, haven’t read the thread in detail. Anyone figure out what the Balrog’s wingspan was yet?
Hmm, reading the letter again, it’s seems we are both wrong. It’s not necessary to defeat Sauron to make full use of its powers. But neither is Sauron reduced to impotence merely by mastering the Ring, his physical defeat is required. So, the Balrog would likely have been unable to defeat Sauron as you say, difficult to see where it could have raised the required armies from to assault Mordor.
The Silvan and Sindarin elves of Lorien do not have that power, they did not travel to Valinor.
I’ve always thought that there are a few hints that Varda (the power of her name, and the light, via Galadriel), and maybe Manwe, (the Eagles and the final wind blowing Sauron and Saruman away) are trying to help out Frodo and Aragorn in discreet fashion. Certainly one of them returned Gandalf to Middle Earth after the Balrog unpleasantness.
On a wider point though, the victory against Sauron had to be done by mortals. The Elves had already fought and lost a series of wars against Sauron’s boss - a situation that was only resolved by the Valar. It also wrecked a continent-sized chunk of land, a lesson that humans didn’t really learn.
At the time of the Lord of the Rings, there are only relatively few Elves left in Middle Earth - some powerful ones to be sure - but their concerns are elsewhere. They are immortal, bound to the Earth for as long as it lasts, and it’s not hard to see why they would eventually tire of the relentless humdrum of decay. Mortals bypass the halls of Mandos and only, maybe, Manwe knows where they go*. The Elves envy them.
*obviously Eru knows
This is entirely believable - just because they’ve sworn “never again” to a War of Wrath doesn’t mean they’re not trying to nudge things along in the direction of Eru’s designs. I mean, they sent the Istari, for heavens’ sake.
And yeah. There actually WEREN’T that many high and mighty elves in Lorien. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that, really, the only elf of any level of grand power there was Galadriel herself. Celeborn as has been said elsewhere “married up” - he might be a big deal for a Sindarin elf, but that’s small potatoes next to Galadriel, who is without question one of the oldest (and therefore most powerful) beings alive in Middle Earth at the time of LotR. Rivendell, in spite of a (to be supposed) much smaller actual population, contained many more High Elves and folk of that sort of Power.
I wouldn’t want to bet on the outcome of a Galadriel vs The Balrog confrontation, and in any event, the rest of the elves in Lorien with their pointy sticks probably aren’t contributing a lot to that engagement.
I don’t remember this from the books (but then I never read the Simarillion), how does that work?
I have to admit I was a bit, just a tiny bit, disappointed that we didn’t get as much overt magicking in the movies. Considering that the books basically laid the foundation for D&D, maybe a fireball or two would have been nice. I do remember, and I think my memory’s good about this one, that in the book, during the escape from the Balrog out of Balin’s Tomb, Gandalf froze some walls with ice to slow him down. Wish we could have seen that
About Gandalf’s powers, would it be fair to say then that he could probably do some more impressive displays of power, but it would have been merely impressive to the eye and not done as much damage? All flash and no substance, so to speak?
What privileges are you talking about? Their minds? From what I gathered, which admittedly isn’t much, from reading a lot about the Simarillion from other sources, many of the Maiar like the Balrogs went with Morgoth willingly. Why wouldn’t they retain all their power? Its not like they couldn’t be willful and evil at the same time, Morgoth sure was
Does this seem to anyone else as a plot-driven, artificial weaking of the good guys? Saruman went against his orders, raised an army, joined Sauron, and tried to destroy Gondor and Rohan. Had he succeeded, would the Valars who sent him snatch him back to Valinor to face punishment?
Meanwhile, Gandalf’s supposed to help the good guys, but he simply led them on a journey and gave counsel for the most part (nevermind that it worked out in the end). Shouldn’t he have been gifted with a bit more power, maybe started off as Gandalf the White’s power level so that he could go around zapping any who got in the Fellowship’s way? I’m sure he wouldn’t have totally lost his mind if he had even some lower level spells that could protect them from a few orcs
To each their own, of course, but I like the way Tolkien wrote his story without the overt ‘magicking’. Made it more meaningful, to me. I think, considering the number of such fantasy books that have been written, that a lot of folks agree with you in this regard YogSosoth.
He lays a locking cantrip on the door to try to keep it closed but the balrog casts a spell of opening and the door shatters from the tension.
Elves and Maiar are closer to the Stuff of the Universe than mortals. They can change it a little just by strength of will. They, never, EVER “cast spells”.
Uh, no, he did not. And “fireballs” would’ve had the actual LotR fans fleeing the theatre. That’s not what this book is about, and all the “magic missile” nonsense in D&D comes from somewhere else. (Probably the “common knowledge school of what ‘wizards’ are ‘supposed’ to be able to do”)
Not really?
It was “the deal”; As in “Hey, you five maiar can go to Middle Earth to help out, but we’re sending you over in the bodies of old men, and you won’t be able to much alter the fabric of reality while you’re there. We don’t want to sink any more continents.”
But you might’ve noticed that nowhere in all this did he use any really remarkable “magic”. When he goes off the rails, all he STILL HAS is his ability to command, impress, and his devious mind. He didn’t suddenly go “Screw you guys, I’m throwing fireballs” because he can’t.
He DID a “couple of low level spells” during Fellowship (mostly pyrotechnical type stuff, you’ll note, amusingly, in spite of your complaints about “lack of fireballs”, the most notable being turing a campfire into a warg-immolating conflagration in Eregion) and it was only in life-or-death circumstances because it was, as he put it, the equivalent of writing “‘Gandalf is here’ in signs that all can read from Rivendell to the mouths of Anduin.” i.e. it’s like saying “Hey Sauron, I’ve got your ring of power right here! Want to come get it?” Not exactly the sort of thing you want to do when you can just stab some orcs, ya?
Honestly, it sounds like you are relying on a fairly sketchy memory of events in the books, colored by events in the movies, and they are leading your discussion rather far astray.
Gandalf does shoot stuff from his staff from time to time. There should be at least one scene of that in the film about to open.
I seem to recall that he was more powerful when he first arrived in Middle Earth. He lost some of his wisdom/power by spending too much time around mortals.