The Lord of the Rings Expert Answers More Tolkien Questions From Twitter

I've heard some people attempt to argue

that Balrogs could have vestigial wings.

This I find a very comical [Corey chuckles]

suggestion in the end,

as why would an immortal being

who had manifest themself in a body

have a vestigial anything, right?

Seriously, would Balrogs be like,

What I really need for my form

is decorative non-functional wings?

That just doesn't really make any sense to me.

Hi, this is Corey Olsen, the Tolkien professor,

and this is part two of Tolkien Support.

[percussive music]

La Wren asks, Do Orcs just think

all Elven weapons glow blue?

Only the really scary ones.

It's not just an automatic property of Elvish weapons,

but one of the things that we see in Tolkien is that

great craftsmen, great and powerful craftsmen,

are able to invest the things that we make

with something of their own spirit,

something of their own desires,

to infuse of their own spirit or will into what they do.

Now, obviously,

the biggest example of this is Sauron and the ring,

but I don't even mean on that kind of level.

The elves and their passionate, cold hatred of the Orcs

and their opposition against everything the Orcs stand for,

is what is infused into those old swords from Gondolin.

The old smiths from Gondolin filled their weapons

with their own anger against the goblins,

and that's why those swords glow blue.

It's an expression of that spirit,

so it's not an automatic thing.

So the orcs won't think that all elf weapons glow blue,

but they know what it means.

They're very aware.

They can feel the anger of the ancient elves,

the potent anger of the ancient elves,

when they see those blue weapons.

That's why they freak them out so much.

Dan Roberts asks the classic question,

If Gandalf can summon eagles,

why didn't Frodo just hop a ride to Mount Doom

and drop the ring into the fire?

Answer, because that would be an incredibly boring story.

I would add, Gandalf can't summon eagles.

He doesn't have an eagle-summoning ring,

or an eagle-summoning moth.

Eagles are free agents.

And indeed, there are some implications in the text,

that they are free agents

who operate under the command of the Lords of the West,

of the Valar themselves.

So, no, they don't intervene in the world at all times

and under...

They are not a ferry service.

They are not a taxi service.

It's almost just like saying,

why doesn't God just reach down

and smite all the bad guys right away?

Well, sure, he could do that,

but there are reasons that he doesn't.

And those same reasons apply

to why the eagles don't take them into Mordor.

I would add, as a final note,

it probably wouldn't work.

Sauron has an air force too.

Sauron could see the eagles coming,

and he could personally get to Mount Doom

before the eagles that he sees coming in

from a distance could,

and that would probably not go well

when they got there in that case,

as there's no open caldera at the top,

to drop the ring in from the top.

So it wouldn't work.

But most importantly, it would be a pretty bad story.

Alexander asks,

Why does the ring not turn Sauron invisible?

Is that explained somewhere?

The reason it doesn't turn Sauron invisible

is that he doesn't have a body in the normal way.

When Bilbo finds the ring in The Hobbit

and finds that it turns him invisible,

that's kind of the way that he understands it, right?

He has this ring, and so he's like,

Oh, it's a magic invisibility ring.

That's cool.

And of course, when Tolkien wrote the story,

that's kind of what it was, right?

When he decides that the ring is a ring of power,

and in fact, it has more and different powers

than merely the turning invisible,

he kind of retcons the invisibility thing,

and he decides that the invisibility is actually gonna be

kind of a side of effect essentially,

of the larger power of the ring.

The Ringwraiths exist.

So there's this like...

There's the physical world, and there's the spiritual world.

A spirit, in Tolkien's world,

can go around the world invisibly, right?

They don't necessarily interact with the physical world.

Some spirits can take on a body.

Sauron is one of these.

He can give himself a body and interact

with the physical world.

The Ringwraiths are men,

who were drawn into the Wraith-world, basically.

Remember Bilbo says that he feels like butter

scraped over too much bread, right?

The Ringwraiths have been scraped over so much bread

that there's nothing at all left of them.

They're almost completely immaterial.

Not completely immaterial,

in the sense that they can hold objects, right?

They can interact with the physical world,

but they no longer really have physical bodies anymore.

They dwell at once in the Wraith-world

and the physical world,

and more and more, as they are dominated,

they get drawn into the Wraith-world.

So when you put on the ring, you're not just magically made-

It's not like you're affecting people's vision,

or the way light reflects off you, or something like that.

You are actually going with your whole self

into the Wraith-world.

It doesn't affect Sauron this way,

'cause he doesn't have a body.

He's not a mortal.

The invisibility thing is a consequence

of when mortals have it,

because mortals are being drawn into Sauron's world.

But he lives there, right?

And he's chosen from that world in which he lives,

to manifest a body,

so that manifested body doesn't become invisible,

'cause he doesn't want it to be.

That's the way that Tolkien kind of constructed the whole...

or reconstructed the invisibility thing,

after he decided that the ring was ring of power.

Jenna J asks, Is the ring like

a 'Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants' situation?

Does it fit everyone?

What do you do if it doesn't fit you?

If not, are Sauron's hands the same size

as Gollum and Frodo?

Please, help me.

Okay, the answer is yes.

The ring of power is almost exactly

like the Traveling Pants.

There are some differences, I admit,

but Tolkien does explicitly say

that the ring does change size.

It changes sizes to adjust to its owner,

and this is important.

This represents...

The ring has a kind of bond.

You have to claim the ring.

You have to know what you're doing.

You have to take the ring and intend to keep it.

You don't have to know that it's a ring of power

before you start.

But if you claim ownership of the ring,

then it forms a kind of bond with you.

It can magically change its size,

so that it can fit any hand that takes it up.

It is willing to take any master who claims it,

but it won't necessarily stay with them.

It can reject its master,

as it seems to have done with Gollum,

and as it seems to have done with Isildur.

Okay, Kari Fry asks,

Lord of the Rings question I'm too lazy to research,

could Sam have carried the ring?

Yes, in fact, Sam did carry the ring,

both directly and indirectly.

When he though Frodo was dead, he took it from Frodo's body,

thinking that he was going to have carry it

into Mordor himself.

He only bore it for a short time before, of course,

he found Frodo again and returned it to Frodo.

So he does carry it,

and therefore clearly could have carried it.

He also carries it, indirectly, in that,

in the last stages of the journey, of course,

he carries Frodo who's carrying the ring, on his back.

So Sam does, of course, himself convey the ring,

still around Frodo's neck, to Mount Doom.

Could Sam have been the ring bearer?

Could he have been the One?

Well, I mean, no, he couldn't

without taking it away from Frodo,

and that would have destroyed Frodo.

Frodo would clearly have assaulted him.

So Sam does what he has to do.

Sam can't carry the ring

but he can carry Frodo and the ring with it.

Okay, Julie DiCaro asks,

Why is the entrance to Moria in Elvish?

Isn't the Elvish word for 'friend' Mithrandir?

No, it might seem a synonym.

The Elvish word for friend is, in fact, mellon.

The entrance to Moria is in Elvish

because this was the door that faced

the kingdom of the elves.

So in the old days, before Moria fell,

back in the Second Age of the world,

Moria was the greatest of the kingdoms of the dwarves.

Their next door neighbors, in Eregion, right there,

is Celebrimbor, and the elves of Eregion

were friends with the dwarves of Moria,

and they worked together a lot.

They traded with each other a lot.

So that gate was built there basically,

in order to be the liaison

between the dwarves of Moria and elves of Eregion.

So that's why the inscription is in Elvish,

and that's why the command word was in Elvish,

because it was designed to be the elves private entrance,

basically, into the kingdom of the dwarves.

A Kind of Computer Jawa has asked,

'No living man may hinder the Witch-King,'

but does Beorn in bear form count?

Surely not, as he is a bear, not a man,

and thus free to maul the boss ringwraith.

That is an interesting exploit, A Kind of Computer Jawa.

I think it wouldn't work because...

There's a question, of course,

there's an open question in the Hobbit about what Beorn is.

Is he a man who can turn into a bear,

or is he a bear who can turn into a man, right?

Ultimately, what is he?

In the text, it's not really clear.

Gandalf gives his opinion, that Beorn is a man

who has the power to turn into a bear,

and Tolkien seems to, basically, think

that Gandalf is probably right about that.

So I don't think that the shape that he takes,

ultimately, changes his identity.

He is a man in bear form.

He may be a bear, but he's really a man in bear's shape.

It's a change of shape, not a change of essence.

So I think he would not be able to get off

on that technicality, and they couldn't just call him,

of course, apart from the fact

that Beorn is dead at that point,

but I don't think they could have sent Beorn

to hunt down the Witch King,

but it's an excellent suggestion.

Hayley Parr asks, If the ring is constantly

being sought out by Sauron and the Eye of Mordor,

how did it end up in a lake for 2000 years?

Well, river technically, not lake, but great question.

A lot of people assume that Sauron

has a kind of ring detector

or at least like ring proximity detector.

I think there is plenty evidence in the text

that Sauron cannot detect the presence of the ring

from a distance.

If you look at the maps of Middle Earth,

the spot where the ring was in the river

for thousands of years, more than 2000 years,

is actually pretty close to the place

where Sauron set up his headquarters,

Dol Guldur in southern Mirkwood.

He was quite close to where the ring was

for quite some period of time.

If Sauron had a ring proximity detector,

it would certainly have been going off at some point,

and even, of course, the evidence

of the Lord of the Rings itself,

he can't tell when it's there in Mordor.

It just miles away from him, at that point,

far closer than it's been for a really, really long time.

I think it's pretty clear from the text

that Sauron cannot sense the ring's presence

and the ring approaching.

Tony McDonough asks, If it hadn't rained at Helm's Deep,

would the battle have gone differently?

That's a fascinating question.

I think it's probably to the advantage of the defenders

that it was raining,

especially since they would be on firmer ground.

We know that there's a river that's emerging through there,

and so the whole area would probably have become muddy

and a great deal of running water through there.

That's actually an element

that Peter Jackson didn't really include.

I'm not saying it would've washed them away

like the flood of Isengard

or the deluge at the Fort of Bruinen,

but it certainly would have made

the movement of armies a little bit inconvenient.

So I think if it inconvenienced anyone,

it certainly would have inconvenienced the Orcs

more than it inconvenienced the defenders.

So if anything, probably,

the rain was definitely a net gain there.

If it would have gone differently,

I think that it would have been harder for the defenders.

But it is possible to see the inclemate weather there

as being a kind of mercy on the part of the defenders.

Okay, Matt Daniels asks, In the 1937 version of The Hobbit,

how did Bilbo come into possession of his ring?

Answer: actually, in exactly the same way.

That's not one of the things that Tolkien changed,

so Bilbo putting his hand accidentally

on the ring in the dark while he's crawling around

is how he finds it in the original as well as later.

The changes that Tolkien made to the 1937 version

are primarily to the terms of the riddle game

and the end of the riddle game.

And actually, one of the other interesting trends

that you can notice,

he makes Gollum creepier and a little bit scarier

by adding more sounds, like the hissing semblant sounds

that Gollum makes are much more pronounced

in the later version.

Like he's going out of his way

to make Gollum a little creepier

in the second version than he was in the first.

But the actual, the original story of the finding

of the ring is the same in the '37 version.

Jeremy Simmons asks one of the all-time classic questions,

What is Tom Bombadil?

He says its his first question for Tolkien in the afterlife.

Hopefully, by then, he'll have an answer.

Of course, Jeremy referring to the fact that Tolkien was,

not shy on this point, but doesn't answer it straight out.

One thing we know for certain is Tom Bombadil is not an elf.

He's not a man.

He's not a mortal creature.

That's perfectly clear.

We know this because in his speech

that he gives to the Hobbits,

when he talks about how long he's been here,

he says he saw the little people arriving.

He saw the men come.

He saw the elves come through.

He's been there since before the elves awoke in Cuivienen.

He predates elves, the existence of elves, right?

So he's not one of the Valar.

They're in Valinor.

They have other jobs.

Tom has established himself in his little domain,

and this is where he lives with his wife, Goldberry.

Goldberry is also a spirit.

She is a spirit of the river, actually.

So Tom Bombadil is that kind of thing.

He is a spiritual being.

He's a kind of nature spirit, but he's different.

He's not quite like Goldberry.

He clearly did descend into Arda from outside.

He says he was there from the beginning,

before Melkor arrived in Middle Earth.

I know that there are some people

who really like this sort of semi-conspiracy theory

that Tom Bombadil is actually God himself,

is actually Iluvatar in physical form.

That's a charming idea,

and there's a lot of things that I love about that reading,

but it's clearly not true.

The proponents of this theory point to Goldberry's response

when Frodo asks her, Who is Tom Bombadil?

And she answers, He is.

And a lot of people are like, Hey,

It's like the name of God in Exodus, right?

I am that I am.

Tolkien actually explicitly addressed this,

like he knew of this theory,

and he responded to it very clearly.

And he said, First of all, there's a big different between

'He is' and 'I am that I am'.

And points to the context, right.

Goldberry says, He is,

and then, she pauses, and then says,

He is as you have seen him.

What she's talking about is labels, names,

what does it mean, right?

Tom addresses exactly the same thing himself later

when Frodo asks him the question, Who are you, Master?

And Tom Bombadil says, Aye, what?

Don't you know my name yet?

And he says to Frodo, Who are you?

Alone, yourself, and nameless?

You are your name; your name is a label.

Like do you capture who you are

and what it means to be you.

So what are you asking of me exactly?

And Tom goes on, that's when he gives that speech

I was just talking about, about how long he's been there

and how much he's seen.

He gives even a kind of answer to that question.

I'm not a hobbit; I'm not a human; I'm not an elf.

I have been here since essentially

the creation of the world.

So draw your own conclusions therefore, Frodo,

about what and who you think I am.

But he's definitely not identifying himself as God.

That's pretty clear.

Greg Maletic asks, How much time passes

between the start of 'Fellowship'

and the end of 'The Return of the King'?

Answer's a little more than a year.

The start of the fellowship, of course, is Bilbo's party,

and that's seventeen years earlier.

So you have Bilbo's party, and then he goes away,

and then seventeen years pass until Gandalf shows up

to Frodo for chapter two, right,

and has the conversation about the ring of power.

So there's a seventeen year gap there in the very beginning.

But after that seventeen year gap,

it's in the late spring when Gandalf shows up to Frodo,

and he delays for some time.

He doesn't leave until Bilbo's birthday, right.

It's when he moves out of Bag End,

and September when he leaves the Shire.

But remember, when they're coming home,

in the Return of the King,

after the whole adventure has happened,

and they're on the homeward road.

He's in sight of Weathertop when the one-year anniversary

of his being stabbed at Weathertop comes in.

So the whole story takes a little bit less

than a year, essentially.

I should say a little bit more than a year, actually,

until they get back,

and then some more time passes, when they get back home.

So the last chapter has a few years passing

before Frodo and Bilbo then depart on the ship.

But the primary action from the Shadow of the Past

when Gandalf comes and has the conversation with Frodo

until the Scouring of the Shire is maybe 16-17 months

or something like that.

And Mog asks, Dare we do the balrog wings thing?

So do balrog's have wings?

This is probably the most classic

internet Tolkien question of all time,

and the answer is, no, balrogs definitely,

clearly, authoritatively, do not have wings.

There are no wings on balrogs.

This is extremely clear in the text.

The balrogs are like the great bad guys.

They are the primary lieutenants of Melkor.

They're basically on a par with Sauron, essentially.

Sauron is the brains of the operation.

The balrogs are kind of thugs.

But still, they are the heavy infantry,

the really heavy infantry.

Infantry, I stress, not air force,

of Melkor in the First Age.

They are always described as running,

and they are on the ground.

In fact, Tolkien makes a big deal about the fact

that Melkor does not have an air force.

He does not have any winged support at all

until the winged dragons are revealed at the very end.

In every battle that the balrogs

are described as participating,

they are running in front of the armies.

They are climbing walls.

They cannot possibly fly.

Also, the fact that more than one balrog meets it end

by plummeting off of a cliff is also highly suggestive

that the balrogs do not, in fact, have wings.

There are only two reasons why anybody thinks

that balrogs might or should have wings,

and the primary one is the description

that Tolkien gives of it at the Bridge of Khazad Dum.

He says that as the balrog steps out,

shadows spreads around it like two vast wings, right.

So he uses a simile, comparing.

It's just darkness.

The balrog is so powerful; it's so intimidating

that darkness itself spreads around it.

And so, in order to try to convey visually

what that looks like,

he compares the darkness to, like two wings.

There's one other line.

People who are really kind of grasping at straws

to try to prove that balrogs have wings

will point to a sentence in appendix A

which says that the balrogs flew

from Thangorodrim in the old days.

That means ran away very fast.

Like they fled from Thangorodrim.

And you'll notice, of course,

in the very Bridge of Khazad Dum scene,

Gandalf uses the word in exactly that...

He says, Fly, you fools,

and I don't think that he is under any illusion

that Frodo and Aragorn and Boromir have wings.

He's telling them to run away very fast.

And that's what the balrogs did from Thangorodrim

at the end of the First Age.

Visual artists universally find

that balrogs look much cooler with wings.

And you know what, they're totally right.

There's no question that a balrog with like huge demon wings

is totally scarier looking

than a balrog without huge demon wings.

Like, I get it.

They look super cool with wings,

but, in the text, no, balrogs do not have wings.

I'm Corey Olsen, the Tolkien professor,

and this has been Tolkien Support.

Thanks for your awesome questions.

I imagine sort of Tolkien's mind back in the '30s

when he was first getting the Hobbit published

and what he would have thought to imagine us,

having these types of discussions by Twitter and YouTube

as we're still thinking about and engaging with

his world all these years later.

Thanks for you time and interest and energy,

and I hope you learned something about Tolkien today.