In the Lord of the Rings fandom there’s a persistent debate whether balrogs, or Durin’s Bane specifically, have wings. The text in Fellowship is ambiguous whether what it is describing are literal wings or something else wing-like.
In the Lord of the Rings fandom there’s a persistent debate whether balrogs, or Durin’s Bane specifically, have wings. The text in Fellowship is ambiguous whether what it is describing are literal wings or something else wing-like.
not in the passage you quoted, no. i know he was meticulous about translation notes, is there anything in those?
Did you read it? Explicitly says they have wings.
are you still talking about the quote? because tolkien does that all throughout the books. he establishes that a thing is “like” something else, then refers to it by that other thing as shorthand for the sake of tone. or are you suggesting that “from wall to wall” is literal as well?
In that same passage we also get “Gandalf flew down the stairs”. Explicit, unambiguous evidence that Gandalfs have wings.