2. notes and reference
My husband (he’s an engineer) is the one who fired me up, telling me that in The Book Of Lost Tales II, some of the dragons at the siege of Gondolin are described as mechanical constructs — a host of orcs rode inside like the Trojan horse and poured out into the city.
I could not stop wondering what would make a living being get inside a dragon with a Balrog rider. I could not get the taste of hot metal out of my mouth. And I kept thinking about orcs being made from/in mockery of the elves and wondering what elven smugness would look like if it manifested on the dark side… and the terrible fierce thought of orc beauty.
The Book of Lost Tales II p. 177:
But now Gothmog lord of Balrogs, captain of the hosts of Melko, took counsel and gathered all his things of iron that could coil themselves around and above all obstacles before them. These he bade pile themselves before the northern gate; and behold, their great spires reached even to its threshold and thrust at the towers and bastions about it, and by reason of the exceeding heaviness of their bodies those gates fell, and great was the noise thereof: yet the most of the walls around them still stood firm. Then the engines and the catapults of the king poured darts and boulders and molten metals on those ruthless beasts, and their hollow bellies clanged beneath the buffeting, yet it availed not for they might not be broken, and the fires rolled off them. Then were the topmost opened about their middles, and an innumerable host of the Orcs, the goblins of hatred, poured therefrom into the breach; and who shall tell of the gleam of their scimitars or the flash of the broad-bladed spears with which they stabbed?
I could not stop wondering what would make a living being get inside a dragon with a Balrog rider. I could not get the taste of hot metal out of my mouth. And I kept thinking about orcs being made from/in mockery of the elves and wondering what elven smugness would look like if it manifested on the dark side… and the terrible fierce thought of orc beauty.
The Book of Lost Tales II p. 177:
But now Gothmog lord of Balrogs, captain of the hosts of Melko, took counsel and gathered all his things of iron that could coil themselves around and above all obstacles before them. These he bade pile themselves before the northern gate; and behold, their great spires reached even to its threshold and thrust at the towers and bastions about it, and by reason of the exceeding heaviness of their bodies those gates fell, and great was the noise thereof: yet the most of the walls around them still stood firm. Then the engines and the catapults of the king poured darts and boulders and molten metals on those ruthless beasts, and their hollow bellies clanged beneath the buffeting, yet it availed not for they might not be broken, and the fires rolled off them. Then were the topmost opened about their middles, and an innumerable host of the Orcs, the goblins of hatred, poured therefrom into the breach; and who shall tell of the gleam of their scimitars or the flash of the broad-bladed spears with which they stabbed?
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