Blogs used to be everywhere. There are still pockets of them around, of course, but in the late 90s there were thousands. Have you ever wondered where they came from? Who was writing them, and why? And what’s the word “blog” even mean?
Despite the ubiquity of information in our modern age, it’s virtually impossible to uncover the genesis of the blog online. I hope to remedy that today.
First, they weren’t originally called “blogs”. The term “blog” is actually a bastardization of the word “brog”, which itself is an abbreviation of the word Balrog.
The above image is a very famous painting by the Brothers Hildebrandt, which accompanied the first known instance of slash fiction, Gandalf and the Balrog Go Mining. There were only 500 copies of this book printed by Grove Press in 1972. The author is uncredited and remains unknown to this day.
The story depicts a torrid, violent relationship between the Balrog and Gandalf the Grey in the Mines of Moria. The explosion depicted above is not a result of magic or fire, but, well, let’s just say the Balrog is having a great time.
As the Internet became a more active place, fans of the original slashfic began writing their own serialized stories online — as a community, they organically began calling them “Balrogs”, or “brogs” for short.
No detailed statistics are available regarding these “brogs”, but it’s widely agreed that these were the more common storylines:
- Frodo and Sam
- Aragorn and Legolas
- Gandalf and the Balrog (of course)
- Merry and Sam
- Gimli and Frodo
- Gimli and Aragorn
- Gimli and Sam
- Gimli and Legolas
- Gimli and Gollum
- Sam and Gollum
- Tom Bombadil and a tree
- Tom Bombadil and a tree that turns out to be an Ent
- All the Nazgûl
- Pippin and Beorn
- Gollum and Smeagol (time-travel)
- King Théoden and Wormtongue
- Gandalf and Saruman
- Gandalf and Saruman and Wormtongue
- Gandalf and Saruman and Wormtongue and King Théoden
- Boromir
There are many less-common slashfic stories, but they are mostly from The Silmarillion and are not considered essential.
There are some who strongly argue that Star Trek slashfic pre-dates Gandalf and the Balrog Go Mining, and point to the contemporaneous popularity of Star Trek slashfic online as a more culturally significant phenomena.
However, there is no known published slashfic of Star Trek that pre-dates Gandalf and the Balrog Go Mining. Admittedly, It is a fact that there was much Star Trek slashfic in the mid- to late-90s, but these stories were limited to LiveJournal and did not have the cultural reach of the brog.
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So, the next time you see a post you like on one of the few blogs remaining on the Internet, thank Gandalf, thank the Balrog, and thank the dark, hot Mines of Moria.
Excelsior!
