Durin's Bane

A survivor of the Elder Days

The Balrog later called Durin's Bane was one of the Balrogs, the Maiar of fire whom Melkor corrupted before the making of the Sun. Most of its kind were destroyed in the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age, but the histories record that a few fled the ruin of Angband and hid in the deep places beneath the mountains of Middle-earth. This one buried itself at the roots of the Misty Mountains beneath Caradhras, and there it lay, unknown to Elves, Men or Dwarves, for more than six thousand years while the Second Age passed and much of the Third.

The ruin of Khazad-dûm

Above its hiding place stood Khazad-dûm, the greatest of all Dwarf-mansions, wealthy beyond any other in mithril. In T.A. 1980 the Dwarves, driving their mithril-workings ever deeper beneath Caradhras, broke into the Balrog's refuge and woke it. It rose through the mines and slew King Durin VI, and from that death it took the name by which it is remembered. In the following year it killed his son Náin I, and the Dwarves, unable to withstand it, abandoned their ancient home. Thráin I led the survivors away to found the kingdom under Erebor. Khazad-dûm became Moria, the Black Pit, and the Elves of Lothlórien across the river dwindled in the shadow of the fear that had come out of the mountains; Amroth and Nimrodel fled south in that time.

The dark years

The Balrog did not rule Moria as a king rules; it brooded in the depths, and in time the Orcs of the mountains crept in above it, until Moria was full of them. When the Dwarves came back to fight the War of the Dwarves and Orcs, and Dáin Ironfoot slew Azog at the East-gate in T.A. 2799, Dáin looked into the shadow of the gate and refused to enter, saying that a power greater than Orcs still waited within and that no Dwarf would reclaim Moria until the world changed. He did not name it, but he knew. Balin did not listen. In T.A. 2989 he led a colony from Erebor into Moria and held it for five years before he was shot at the Mirrormere and his people were destroyed by Orcs and by the Watcher in the Water. The book of Mazarbul, which the Fellowship found beside his tomb, records nothing of the Balrog directly, but the dread that filled the last pages belongs to it.

The Bridge of Khazad-dûm

On January 13 of T.A. 3019 the Fellowship of the Ring entered Moria by the West-gate. Two days later, in the Chamber of Mazarbul, Gandalf tried to hold a door against something that came up the passage, and felt a will of terrible strength contest his spell; the door burst and he was nearly broken by the effort. At the Bridge of Khazad-dûm the thing itself came out of the fire: a great shadow in the shape of a man, streaming flame, with a sword of fire and a whip of many thongs, its darkness spreading like wings from wall to wall. Legolas knew it for a Balrog and Gimli for Durin's Bane. Gandalf stood alone on the narrow bridge, forbade it passage, and when its sword shattered on his, broke the bridge beneath its feet with his staff. The Balrog fell, but its whip caught the wizard's knees and dragged him down with it.

Zirakzigil

The fight did not end there. Gandalf and the Balrog fell together into the deep water beneath the bridge, where the demon's fire was quenched, and struggled through tunnels older than Moria, through places gnawed by nameless things, until the Balrog fled up the Endless Stair to the peak of Zirakzigil above the mines. There, on the pinnacle where Durin's Tower once stood, they fought for two days in storm and lightning, and on January 25 Gandalf threw his enemy down from the height so that it broke the mountainside in its fall. The Balrog was destroyed, and Gandalf, spent, died on the peak before he was sent back.

Legacy

The destruction of Durin's Bane ended the last known Balrog and lifted the ancient shadow from Moria, though Orcs still held it at the end of the Third Age. The Dwarves believed that Durin would return in the Fourth Age and reclaim Khazad-dûm, and by the account in the Appendices that prophecy was fulfilled under Durin VII. Through this Balrog also runs the story of Gandalf's death and return, which changed the course of the War of the Ring.

Cast down by Gandalf from the peak of Zirakzigil on January 25, T.A. 3019, and destroyed.