Smaug vs. Balrog - Who would win?

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

5 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Well first of all, Gandalf kind of is an expert on ringlore. It's a major part of his whole purpose in Middle Earth. And even if Balrog fire is different than dragonfire, it's never even implied that Balrogs could destroy rings of power. Gandalf says that even Ancalagon wouldn't have been able to destroy the One Ring because of how much of his own power Sauron poured into it. I would be very surprised if Durin's Bane could bring more heat than Ancalagon.

The Sun is not something that anyone in Middle Earth would ever have had access to, so idk what the point of bringing that up is.

You know, it depends.  I think the point about the Aniur who becomes the sun as being an unfallen fire Maia matters.  A Balrog probably does have the power to destroy the ring.  Unless you are going to argue that it is something about Sammath Naur that would allow for the unmaking of the One Ring.  

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

1 hour ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Only if there was textual evidence that the sun could destroy the One Ring, which there isn't. Lord Varys is just assuming that it could based on the idea that a star would produce more heat than a volcano. But if Maiar could destroy the One Ring, why wouldn't Gandalf have just done it himself? He was more powerful than Durin's Bane, especially as Gandalf the White, and is capable of producing fire magic of his own.

I'll also take a moment to point out that, unless I'm mistaken, Arien does not provide the heat energy for the sun in Middle-Earth. Arien was the Maia chosen to guide the sun, which itself a vessel containing a portion of the power of Laurelin. So even if the sun does provide more heat than Mount Doom (which in and of itself is dubious, given that it clearly does not function like a star), that energy is not coming from Arien.

From the discussion about the The Istari in Unfinished Tales I believe the Istari were limited by the bodies they were placed in and as such didn't hve the full power of their Maia forms.

[Lord Varys]

1 hour ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Only if there was textual evidence that the sun could destroy the One Ring, which there isn't. Lord Varys is just assuming that it could based on the idea that a star would produce more heat than a volcano. But if Maiar could destroy the One Ring, why wouldn't Gandalf have just done it himself? He was more powerful than Durin's Bane, especially as Gandalf the White, and is capable of producing fire magic of his own.

Gandalf is just an incarnated Maia who has nothing to do with fire. He is not the kind of guy to do this kind of thing. In fact, as an incarnated being he is actually subject to the power of the Ring (which is why he doesn't want to take it). The Valar most likely would be able to destroy it, and perhaps even Maiar with certain destructive powers who are more powerful than Sauron. Osse, perhaps? But Olórin isn't a Maia stronger than Sauron. He is weaker than Sauron. He even feared Sauron when Manwe chose him to go to Middle-earth.

I'm not saying every Maia could destroy the One Ring. But since heat is melting it a powerful fire spirit like a Balrog is a strong candidate to destroy it.

1 hour ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

I'll also take a moment to point out that, unless I'm mistaken, Arien does not provide the heat energy for the sun in Middle-Earth. Arien was the Maia chosen to guide the sun, which itself a vessel containing a portion of the power of Laurelin. So even if the sun does provide more heat than Mount Doom (which in and of itself is dubious, given that it clearly does not function like a star), that energy is not coming from Arien.

Well, that depends on the version of Arien we are talking about here. The later version was raped by Melkor and burned him in turn. If she could burn Melkor she certainly could also melt the One Ring.

And, yeah, I most certainly assume that the sun is much hotter than some lava. Regardless whether it is some huge golden fruit from a tree or, you know, an actual star. It seems that the heat is the crucial factor in destroying the One. That is why the Seven could be destroyed by dragonfire, and why Gandalf thinks even Ancalagon's fire wouldn't be hot enough for the One. But another volcano certainly could have done the trick. The fires of the earth should burn hot everywhere, not just in the Sammath Naur.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Were Ecthelion and Glorfindel "more powerful" than the Balrogs they managed to kill?  

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

2 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Different situations. Gandalf and DB were both Maia that had a prolonged fight. If Gandalf killed the Balrog by knocking it off the ledge or into a magical fountain, that would be a different story.

Given Gandalf's limited power in is mortal guise I think the situations are more similar than you think.

[Happy Ent]

On 23/05/2017 at 2:29 PM, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

Along those lines - any ideas on what would have happened if the Balrog knocked Gandalf off the bridge, killed the Fellowship, and found itself in possession of the One Ring?

I’ve spent many a happy night in entire role-playing and tabletop wargame campaigns based on that premise. Durin’s bane and his ragtag low-leadership Orcs and Trolls attack Lothlorien, possible flank by Dain Ironfoot. Beautiful. Small skirmishes from hastily assembled Elven armies from Mirkwood or Rivendell. Encounters with Gondorian/Rohan, and with Saruman’s elite. You can give Durin’s Bane the chance to turn/recruit any of Galadriel, Saruman, or others as various sub-objectives. (Alternatively, if Galadriel gets the Ring, she takes over.)

Final battle is with Sauron and the might of Mordor.   

[Lord Varys]

9 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

Burning Melkor =/= destroying or being more powerful than Melkor (or Sauron for that matter).

Is it? Melkor is much more powerful than Sauron, and his body should have been much more stable and impervious back in the good old does when he did not yet become earthbound. A spirit would have to have a lot of power to permanently disfigure Melkor back in those days. Power Sauron clearly never possessed. And the One Ring was created by Sauron. It is not more powerful than he himself is.

9 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

In either case, unless you're trying to argue that Balrog fire burns as hot as the sun (it most certainly doesn't), then that particular line of speculation has no bearing on the current discussion.

It doesn't have to burn as hot as the sun to destroy some ring. It has just burn hotter than the fires of the earth.

9 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

I'll go back to what I said earlier. Show me one piece of textual evidence that even hints that a Balrog (or any other fire spirit) could destroy the One Ring, and I'll back off. But it just doesn't seem to be there.

I don't care whether you back off or not. This is a ridiculous speculation about fictional characters who don't exist. You are free to believe whatever you want to believe. All I'm trying to do is to point out that things might be more complex.

The real point I was making was that I found it very unlikely that the Balrog would care about the One Ring. It sure as hell doesn't care about political power, nor did it thrive on dominating Orcs. Azog was the ruler of the Orcs in Moria, not the Balrog. And what little we know about the end of Balin's expedition indicates that those dwarves were also killed by Orcs, not the Balrog. The Balrog may actually have been woken again by Pippin's stone, or he was drawn to the fellowship because of Gandalf's presence.

9 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

As you yourself just wrote, if heat alone were enough then they could use any volcano, they wouldn't have to hoof the Ring right into Sauron's backyard.

Show me another volcano on the map of Middle-earth. There are version of the Akallabêth which claim that the Meneltarma eventually turned into a volcano in the end, but that's it. There were no volcanoes in the regions of Middle-earth we intimately knew. If there were any in the south or the east they were literally outside of the story Tolkien told.

9 hours ago, Let's Get Kraken said:

And yet, limited though he was, Gandalf was still more powerful Durin's Bane. All the more so following their battle.

It seems that Gandalf actually used powers he was not supposed to use as an incarnated Istar. You can see the beginnings of that when he breaks his staff. The staffs of the Istari are symbols of their office and mission as emissaries from the West. When Saruman's staff is broken by Gandalf the White (acting there apparently as emissary coming from Ilúvatar himself, not just as emissary coming from the Elder King) Saruman loses a lot of his power. How this works is difficult to say but one can speculate that their powers were shut inside their bodies and the staffs were instruments that helped them to summon or activate them to a certain degree. The Istari were not just looking like old mortal men, they actually were old mortal men in a very real sense (not completely, of course, but to a very large degree).

Anyway, it seems that the fight between the Balrog and Gandalf at the mountain top was a fight much closer resembling the War of the Powers of old, a fight were Ainur fought Ainur both in spiritual and half-physical shapes. Gandalf talks of fire, lightning, and thunder up at the mountain, and quite a lot of things were destroyed up there. One assumes that Gandalf draw on his entire power as an Ainu to defeat the Balrog and burned his body out in the process. His body should have died in the fall or should died of thirst, starvation, or exhaustion on the way up. But he didn't. And it doesn't seem the Balrog mortally wounded him.

Gandalf didn't get more powerful because he defeated the Balrog. He became more powerful because Eru Ilúvatar made him Gandalf the White, extending both his power by changing the restrictions imposed on his new body, and by giving him more authority.

From a storytelling point of view Tolkien dropped the ball there, by the way. It would have been much better if the Balrog had actually killed Gandalf the Grey and then Eru (or the Valar or whoever) would have rewarded Gandalf for his sacrifice, granted him more power, and then sent him back to Middle-earth to kill the Balrog, help his friends, and defeat Sauron.

8 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Were Ecthelion and Glorfindel "more powerful" than the Balrogs they managed to kill?  

It is not impossible that they were, depending on the nature of the Balrogs we speak of. However, even with the 3-7 Super-Balrogs we have to keep in mind that Tolkien made it clear that Feanor was the most powerful child Eru ever created. He certainly wasn't as powerful as the Elder King or any of the Aratar but it is not that unlikely that he was more powerful (in certain fields) than many of the Maiar. And Feanor was attacked by more than one Balrog (Gothmog among them) and withstood them for quite some time. Something Ungoliant could not pull off. The Eldar can be pretty powerful.

[Kyll.Ing.]

Going off on a tangent here... didn't Gandalf at one point says there were "worse" things than Balrogs buried beneath Khazad-dûm? If Durin's Bane was only the first terror to be unearthed, it's almost a good thing the dwarves didn't defeat it so they could resume their mining operation...

Then again, Gandalf might have been talking about pockets of entrapped carbon monoxide. That stuff is perhaps more dangerous than a Balrog, since at least you will notice a huge noisy shadow-and-flame beast coming your way. With CO, you'll just feel like napping for a while.

[KingintheNorth4]

Batman with prep time would win.

[Jo498]

I never understood the "watcher in the water" as a shape? of the Balrog. In my impression this one could have been something "worse" (or at least less easily understood and sorted into the categories) than the Balrog, a Lovecraftian "nameless horror". Anyway, when one reads the LotR without any background in ME lore, both the Watcher and the Balrog are quite mysterious as there is no explanation for the former and "Balrog of Morgoth", "Flame of Udun" etc. is nothing but fancy names for the reader.

(I think that this a good thing. It has often been commented that the LotR feels so "deep" because not everything is explained in the way fitting for an RPG character sheet. That's another reason why questions like "Smaug vs. Balrog" are moot. There are no RPG stats for either.)

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

4 hours ago, Jo498 said:

I never understood the "watcher in the water" as a shape? of the Balrog. In my impression this one could have been something "worse" (or at least less easily understood and sorted into the categories) than the Balrog, a Lovecraftian "nameless horror". Anyway, when one reads the LotR without any background in ME lore, both the Watcher and the Balrog are quite mysterious as there is no explanation for the former and "Balrog of Morgoth", "Flame of Udun" etc. is nothing but fancy names for the reader.

(I think that this a good thing. It has often been commented that the LotR feels so "deep" because not everything is explained in the way fitting for an RPG character sheet. That's another reason why questions like "Smaug vs. Balrog" are moot. There are no RPG stats for either.)

I think it was just a giant squid or an octopus.  

Tolkien was careful to show that evil or malicious spirits existed in the world outside of Morgoth and Sauron.  I was a small change and one that I understand but in the books it was the spirit of the Mountain Caradhras that sends the storm that turned the Fellowship back from the Redhorn Gate and forced them into Moria, not Saruman.  That was what Tolkien ment when he mentioned "older evils".