Maybe they require a large horizontal distance to take off, like a plane
Basically the balrog stalled out
If I pushed an albatross down a well and attached a crab to it to harrass it on the way down it would also fall, despite being a fantastic winged flier.
Imagine them with wings ill suited to vertical flight and hovering, but very fast in the sky while soaring, and with the endurance to keep going for hours.
It’s my headcannon, but I give Gandalf points for forcing the fighter jet into a helicopter arena.
Is Gandolf the Camo bringing the fighter jets to helms deep on the third morning not cannon?
He unlearned the ability from thousands of years underground.
“A complete consistency (either within the compass of the Silmarillion itself or between The Silmarillion and other published writings of my father’s) is not to be looked for, and could only be achieved, if at all, at heavy and needless cost.”
- Christopher Tolkien
The Silmarillian Forward, 1977
Needless cost?
That is just so what a nerd (Tolkien) would say about other needs nerding out.
Just let us nerd, ok?!
I think he means in terms of time. In order to make it fully consistent, you’d have to have some kind of index and go through line by line making sure everything is saying the same thing.
Oh, wait…
It’s similar to searching for consistencies amongst any mythology, which is what Tolkien was attempting to create. Tales will always change over time, and they’ll always shift focus to what the teller determines is important. As focuses of a society shift, so do the focuses of its related mythology. In this way, I think Tolkien did an excellent job creating a united mythos for England in all the different versions of his legendarium. As the tales evolved, consistencies emerged elements which were formerly key, were discarded, and internal references became more commonplace than external references (see Tolkien’s influences from William Morris and Icelandic, Celtic, Germanic, and Anglo Saxon epics)
That was the challenge Christopher noted in the forward to the Silmarillion. J.R.R. had started working it in 1917, and kept making changes right up until his death in 1973.
So he had 56 years worth of papers, and notes, lots of it hand written, to try to kind of reconcile into a single work.
It’s been a few years since I’ve read the foreword to the Silmarillion, but I’m glad I’m consistent with Christopher’s analysis 😁
- Christopher Tolkien
These are divine beings. Their speed doesn’t necessarily imply how they got from point A to point B so quickly.
I think you mean fictitious beings.
Apparently it’s real for a lot of people judging by the number of down votes I got. They’re upvoting this though, which I don’t get. Perhaps they don’t know that this meme is making fun of nerds who treat fiction like it’s reality.
I think it’s the spirit of your comment.
It’s almost in the same vein as someone going to a magic show and loudly proclaiming that magic isn’t real and it’s all stagecraft.
I’d say your comment wasn’t exactly required, we all know it’s just stories. But it’s also an open forum and you’re free to comment all you like. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t downvote you.
I think nitpicking the inconsistencies in a work of fiction is like going to a magic show and pointing out that it’s not real. No one cares that the balrog had wings, or was divine or whatever contrivance people need to chew on until the story is tasteless. Suspend some disbelief, and just let the thing fall.
…and yet, as evidenced by the many back-and-forth discussions in this very thread, plenty of people do care enough to reread older texts and workshop theories to explain the discrepancy. YOU think that no one cares because YOU don’t care, but you are clearly wrong.
Obvuously, they took the eagles!
They had “wings of shadow,” not physical wings.
