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I have taken you through this essay in the manner of physicists, and accordingly, I have reached a physicist’s conclusion. That mindset includes the phrase made famous by William of Occam: "Non sunt multiplicanda entia praeter necessitatem." This is commonly called Occam’s razor. A way it is often paraphrased is that the simplest answer is also the best.

This guy is probably the worst kind of sci-fi geek. I'm all for internal consistency, but geez... if you're willing suspend disbelief and read a story with elves and dragons, perhaps you could avoid trying to justify everything scientifically.

The author of a previous article about Dwarves, made the point that Tolkien didn't care for simple answers. He'd rather invent a complicated history for why the Dwarves in The Hobbit have mannish names.

Boy, this guy goes overboard. He makes a number of questionable assumptions, and then draws even more questionable conclusions from them.

For instance, yes, a chasm must be much longer than it is wide, but, he does not notice the assumption he is making: he assumes that the room must be as wide as the chasm is long. The chasm could be thousands of feet wide, but the room only ten feet wide. The width of the room and the length of the chasm are not the same thing.

Also, he goes on and on about how Tolkien does not say that the wings were limited to gliding; but then, Tolkien doesn't say that the wings were capable of flying or hovering, either. The reality is that the size of wings increases exponentially to the size of the flying animal, which is why the very largest of birds have giant wings and cannot do anything much more than glide, taking advantage of updrafts - they certainly can't hover like small birds.

In fact, anything as big as a balrog (let alone a dragon) is too big (even if "only" 14ft tall) to glide, let alone fly, without ridiculously gigantic wings. In the real world, this is impossible; flying balrogs, flying dragons, and giant eagles must therefore be magical.

So it's really ridiculous trying to use "reason" to figure out whether the balrogs have wings or not, since being magical we must assume they could have done anything Tolkien said they could do. And Tolkien doesn't make a definitive statement one way or another.

Of course, the writer doesn't mention some points which were closer to the flying balrog assumption: the balrogs are hidden all over middle earth when Morgoth returns and summons them to come to his aid against Ungoliant, and yet they arrive almost instantly, in time to save him. How did they do that if they could not fly? Are we to believe they ran hundreds of miles in a few minutes? Would not flying be more likely?

If a balrog's wings are limited to a gliding kind of flying (which is highly likely for such a large creature), then of course a balrog is going to be jumping around on the mountaintop, not hovering, when fighting Glorfindel.

Also, Tolkien emphasizes that the longer the Maia remain in middle earth, the more they become tied to it, and limited in their powers. It is entirely possible that the balrogs of the First Age could fly, but by the Third Age, the remaining balrog is too diminished and tied to his physical existence in middle earth to be able to fly anymore - his wings are there, but they have atrophied, as it were.

Anyway, who knows. The balrog in FOTR was cool: the idea of its skin as a kind of crust of lava was good, as was interpreting the "shadow" around the balrog as a kind of smoke. It worked pretty well.