What does Gandalf mean by "Secret Fire", "Flame of Anor" and "Flame of Udûn"?

Question

In Moria, when Gandalf confronts the Balrog on the bridge of Khazad-dûm, Gandalf says the following:

I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. You cannot pass! The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the Shadow! You cannot pass!

I cannot find any reference to "flame of Anor" or "flame of Udûn" anywhere else in The Lord of the Rings, not in the appendices. As Gandalf possesses Narya (the ring of fire) at this point in time, I am wondering if he is referring to this in some way? Is this correct? If not, what is he referring to?

Answer 1

Gandalf is making three very specific references as both warning and challenge to the Balrog.

By identifying himself as a servant of the Secret Fire (or Flame Imperishable), Gandalf is identifying himself as a Maia, an embodied angelic servant of the Valar protecting the light of Creation that Eru Ilúvatar (or God) has set to burn at the centre of Arda (Earth).

Wielder of the flame of Anor is a reference to his ability to draw on the power of the sun possibly through the Ring of Fire, Narya, but maybe also through his own divine origins.

Finally as he refers to the Balrog as the Flame of Udûn, he informs the Balrog that he knows it to be a corrupted Maia in the service of Morgoth from the earliest time when he resided as Melkor in his dark fortress of Utumno broken by the Valar at the awakening of the Elves. He orders it to retreat ("go back to the shadows") or face the consequences of divine conflict and final judgement before the Vala Mandos, the fate of all slain creatures.

Answer 2

Secret Fire

In The Silmarillion, the creation of the world is described. The Gods sing a vision of the World. Then the One God, Ilúvatar, makes their song reality:

Therefore Ilúvatar gave to their vision Being, and set it amid the Void, and the Secret Fire was sent to burn at the heart of the World; and it was called Eä.

Flame of Anor

"Anor" is the Sindarin name for the Sun. Also seen in the name Minas Anor, the Tower of the Sun, which was later renamed to Minas Tirith, the Tower of Guard.

Flame of Udûn

Udûn (Sindarin: "hell") was the first fortress of Melkor in the far north of Middle-earth. This marks the Balrog as an ancient foe. As Tolkien's world is in a perpetual state of decline, being ancient makes the Balrog a very powerful foe. And indeed the Balrog turned out to be an equal of Gandalf, a Maia, or a lesser god.

Answer 3

Above answers including explanations for "Secret Fire" and "Flame of Udûn" are satisfactory and correct as far as I know, but the treatment of "Flame of Anor" is massively speculative with no acceptable evidence, and thus woefully lacking. I will attempt to answer what Gandalf quite obviously meant by "Flame of Anor," using a style of exaggerated introduction to an enemy that Tolkien uses when Bilbo met Smaug that everyone seems to have missed.

The Flame of Anor is simply the Sun, and nothing else. More specifically, it is the Dawn. Gandalf meant quite literally that he wields the Sun, and we know this from his history to be true, from The Hobbit:

'Dawn take you all, and be stone to you!' said a voice that sounded like William's. But it wasn't. For just at that moment the light came over the hill, and there was a mighty twitter in the branches. William never spoke for he stood turned to stone as he stooped; and Bert and Tom were stuck like rocks as they looked at him. And there they stand to this day, all alone, unless the birds perch on them; for trolls... must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of, and never move again....

'Excellent!' said Gandalf, as he stepped from behind a tree, and helped Bilbo to climb down out of a thorn-bush. Then Bilbo understood. It was the wizard's voice that had kept the trolls bickering and quarrelling, until the light came and made an end of them.

Gandalf wields the Sun often subsequent to his battle with the Balrog. When reunited with Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli in Fangorn, he chooses to do so while bathed in the sun, from The Two Towers:

They all gazed at him. His hair was white as snow in the sunshine, and gleaming white was his robe; the eyes under his deep brows were bright, piercing as the rays of the sun; power was in his hand.

Arriving at Helm's Deep with reinforcements, we read the enemy is driven mad by Gandalf's approach from the East at sunrise, from The Two Towers:

There suddenly upon a ridge appeared a rider, clad in white, shining in the rising sun. [...] The White Rider was upon them, and the terror of his coming filled the enemy with madness.

Gandalf's use of sunrise is hardly isolated, and there are quite a few passages with him arriving at his destination at first light, from The Return of the King:

So Gandalf and Peregrin rode to the Great Gate of the Men of Gondor at the rising of the sun, and its iron doors rolled back before them.

In fact, Gandalf never reveals Narya until the very end of the story after Aragorn has been crowned, keeping it secret from the Enemy as instructed by Círdan, so its highly unlikely he would tell the Balrog anything of Narya. What Tolkien didn't reveal to us he never intended, such as Gandalf referring to Narya as "The Sun," which he would never do. Narya has no connection to the Sun other than the coincidence that Gandalf wields the sun, as he says, which is always a white light, and he also happens to secretly posses Narya, the red ring, giving him some influence over fire and the ability to kindle hearts. The Sun and the powers of Narya are not related. Narya is not a weapon nor does Gandalf use it as one, like he uses the Sun.

Answer 4

Tolkien has said that the "secret fire" (when used elsewhere), referred to the Holy Spirit.

Professor Clyde S Kilby spent a summer in 1966 with Tolkien during which he read and provided feedback on the then unpublished Silmarillion. A decade later, he published the book Tolkien and the Silmarillion, with a memoir of his visit, and a few critical essays of his on Tolkien, (e.g. exploring Tolkien as a Christian writer, or as a member of the Inklings).

One of the anecdotes he shares was about the usage of the word "Secret Fire" in the beginning of the Silmarillion.

Professor Tolkien talked to me at some length about the use of the word "holy" in The Silmarillion. Very specifically he told me that the "Secret Fire sent to burn at the heart of the World" in the beginning was the Holy Spirit.
_{Tolkien and the Silmarillion - "Tolkien as Christian Writer"}

The passage being referred to is one from The Silmarillion, not from The Lord of the Rings:

Therefore Ilúvatar gave to their vision Being, and set it amid the Void, and the Secret Fire was sent to burn at the heart of the World; and it was called Eä.
_{The Silmarillion - "Valaquenta"}

However Kilby cites Gandalf's line to the Balrog in a footnote, implying that he had interpreted Tolkien's words as also applying to when Gandalf said it.

Answer 5

Anor or Anar. Eru gave a special light to Varda (Elbereth) (whom the Noldor especially revered) when she entered Eä at the beginning of time. This light she shared with Arien (the Maia of the Sun) and it was to possess this light that Morgoth 'ravished' Arien; thereby burning and diminishing himself irrevocably. I believe that Gandalf is referring to this very special and holy light, given by Eru as something deadly to Morgoth and his servants. Udûn is Sindarin for Utumno, Morgoth's great first underground realm - the underworld.

Answer 6

Secret Fire and Flame of Anor are two different names for the same thing... the Light of Creation... the power of Eru (God) to bring things into actual existence, to Create. Tolkien wrote in his letters several times about this concept of Creation and Sub-creation (refashioning something new out of what Eru has already Created). Only Eru could truly create, all others could only sub-create. (The Valar accept their limited powers as stewardship; Melkor/Morgoth envies and lusts after Eru's true creative power... but to no avail.) It is very, very closely associated with Life and bringing things "to life." The medieval word for life was "quick"... which was the same as the part of a candle which hosts the flame... now we say the "wick", but quick and wick were once the same word. Back then, the idea of soul or having life was deeply associated with light and flame. Tolkien knew this, and based his mythos on it.

The Flame of Udûn... the "dark fire" is Morgoth's attempt to "Create" his own version of the "light of creation"...an envious perversion of what has already been created.

Anor being in the Sun and yet also at the center of the world explains a lot about Tolkien's fascination with vulcanism. Smaug is essentially a volcano personified, and the One Ring could only be created or destroyed in the heart of a volcano... by tapping into Anor.

Answer 7

I think what he is basically saying is: "I wield the fire of the sun through Narya. You wield the dark fire of hell. My fire is stronger than yours."

I'm pretty sure that he isn't speaking of wielding the power of the Valar, as there are no other instances in all of LotR legendarium that I am aware of where a character wields the power of another. None of the other Maiar are shown to have extraordinary powers (Except Melion, to a degree). Conversely, we see similar power over the elements by Elrond who, wielding the sapphire ring, controls the water of Bruinen to drown the Nazgûl. Besides, if Gandalf had been granted amazing powers by Manwë, Círdan would have had no reason to give him Narya in the first place.

Answer 8

In The War of the Jewels, Christopher Tolkien has a brief section, page 397 through 407, on "The language of the Valar". There are several lists of Valarin words. These are not Elvish, though the Elves copied many of them. In those word lists, Anar and uruš appear on page 401. The first means "the sun" or "appointed heat" and the second means "fire". Given the linguistic similarity between r and d, I think it not unlikely that Gandalf used very ancient vocabulary indeed — words that preceded the awakening of the Elves to refer to his fire and that of the Balrog. The only connection in LotR or The Silmarillion between "Udûn" and "Utumno" comes on the very last page of The Silmarillion where "Udûn" is given as the Sindarin version of "Utumno". The word Udûn, as far as I can tell, does not appear in the 13 volume set of The History of Middle-earth and the closest that I can find is uruš. So take it as speculation that Gandalf was deliberately using some very ancient vocabulary and not Elvish words.

It also occurred to me that this speech was not for the Balrog's benefit. Assuming that the Balrog spoke the language of Morgoth which predated Elvish and then the Balrog had been buried underground for ages and then had only interacted with Orcs or a few tortured Dwarves, he likely wouldn't have spoken common or Sindarin, so the communication between Gandalf and the Balrog was likely telepathic like all the Valar and Maiar were capable of. The speech was primarily for the benefit of the hearers or to help Gandalf formulate his thought-communication.

Answer 9

What about the possibility of a typo? Perhaps it was wrong in the text when printed, and what was meant was not "Anor" but "Arnor", in which case the flame of Arnor would definitely be the red ring, first carried by Cirdan and later Gandalf and it was at first in the land of Arnor, the northern kingdom.