Quoth Sean <no.spam DeleteThis @no.spam> in article <414FFDA6.97BCC4E1 DeleteThis @no.spam>:
> Evan-Josh Roose wrote:
> > Who is stronger ?
> >
> > A balrog or a dragon ?
> A balrog. These were higher-order beings (Maiar, ie. demigods)
> who had been corrupted by Melkor the Arch-enemy in the First Age.
Hmm. There are those who believe that dragons could have been Maiar
as well, I think. We really don't have any clear idea of what they
were or where they came from: dragons can clearly think and speak, and
they can breed, both of which should be clues of some sort. I think
that the breeding more or less rules out all dragons being Maiar, but
the first ones might conceivably have been.
> In Tolkien's cosmology there is a hierarchy of beings that goes
> roughly like this:
>
> Eru (the One) -- Valar (gods) -- Maiar (demigods) --
> Elves (the Firstborn) -- Men -- ...whatever
>
> The basic rule is that beings at one level can not by themselves
> defeat a being at a higher level.
I think you're reading rather a lot more into this hierarchy than is
wise. (And perhaps being a little free with the term "defeat": what
would it mean to "defeat" God (Eru)? Or even Orome?) The Valar and
Maiar were essentially the same type of being: Silm. says that some of
the Maiar were "well nigh as great as" the Valar. I wouldn't be at
all surprised if some particularly battle-minded Maiar could have
"defeated" a more peaceful Vala like, say, Nessa (the Dancer), for
some definitions of "defeated". The distinction between Valar and
Maiar seems almost to have been more a matter of loyalty than of
some sort of strict "power" comparison.
To be more concrete, at least two Balrogs were slain by Elves in the
Fall of Gondolin, and Tuor might have slain one as well (he certainly
did in the old Lost Tales version). Huan the dog beat Sauron (yes,
it's possible that Huan was an incarnate Maia, but that's far from
certain). Elendil and Gil-galad defeated Sauron. Wormtongue killed
Saruman. Any number of Elves were killed by Men over the years (and
that's not even getting into the precise origins of Orcs). In short,
exceptions to that "basic rule" are so common that I really don't
think it's worth calling it a "rule" at all.
> One exception to this rule seems to be Sam's wounding of Shelob,
> who, as the child of the corrupted Maia Ungoliant was presumably of
> Maia stature herself.
By the time he revised Silm. after LotR was written, Tolkien seems to
have decided pretty firmly that the Valar and Maiar couldn't mate with
each other to produce more Valar and Maiar (or at least, they never,
ever did so that he mentioned). There is at least the one example of
Luthien as a child of a Maia, but she was very firmly counted as an
Elf despite her "mixed heritage" (see my other recent post on this
topic for a teensy bit more detail on that). Yes, she had "higher
stature" than every other Elf or Man in Middle-earth, whatever that
means, but she was still fundamentally an Elf.
Finally, for the record, it isn't totally certain that Ungoliant was a
Maia, either.
And we know absolutely nothing about the nature or
origin of her first mates, in any case: unless they were _also_ Maiar,
there would be no reason to expect Ungoliant's children to be "of Maia
stature" any more than Luthien was.
Steuard Jensen<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->
>> Stay informed about: Balrog versus dragon ? 
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