Time to return to my ongoing series of LOTR/Biker crossover galleries, so I bid you welcome to its tenth gallery (please click here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here & here to view the previous nine), where we shall now confront one of Middle-Earth's most terrifying entities - a balrog referred to only as Durin's Bane.
Balrogs are demonic entities that were initially benevolent primordial spirits known as Maiar, but certain Maiar became corrupted by the Dark Lord Morgoth, transforming into what were thereafter termed balrogs. After several battles against the armies of Light & Good, most balrogs were killed, but one survived in deep subterranean slumber until woken by dwarves mining for the precious metal mithril, and in raging fury it killed Durin VI, the dwarf king, which is why it became known thereafter as Durin's Bane, and drove all of the other dwarves from their underground kingdom, Khazad-dum. Moreover, when inadvertently reawoken by the Fellowship of the Ring while they were seeking to pass through the now orc-infested dwarves' kingdom, renamed Moria, en route to Mount Doom in order to cast the One Ring into its flames, Durrin's Bane was bravely held back by the Fellowship's wizard, Gandalf the Grey, and, as a result, both of them perished - or did they? As you'll know if you've read Tolkien's LOTR trilogy, Gandalf actually survived this titanic struggle after all, but that did not become known for a long time.
How, I wondered, would some battling bikers fare against a balrog, especially given that Durin's Bane was armed with a very lengthy whip that could wrap itself around an adversary and drag him down to his death - which is what ostensibly happened to Gandalf. There was only one way to find out. So here, via the assistance of the AI image/video-generation programs Dream Lab, Adobe Firefly & Grok Imagine, is what in my view would have transpired, as depicted above by a sequence of segued video clips, and below via a selection of still images. Some of the balrog portrayals are distinctly strange & decidedly unTolkiensesque, but that's what makes creating images via such programs endlessly fascinating. For no matter how precisely you word your verbal prompts to them, they still manage to add all manner of visual touches & flairs that are entirely original interpretations & totally unexpected, as you will now see!
More of my AI-created biker images next time, including some new LOTR/biker crossover galleries coming soon!
Plus: please click here to access a chronological listing of fully clickable links to all galleries uploaded by me on this blog. NB - all of the images included in this page's gallery were created by me, RebelBikerDude, using the AI image-generation programs Dream Lab & Adobe Firefly, plus Grok Imagine with the video clips, for non-commercial, entertainment purposes only, so they are not real images and they do not feature any real-life persons or copyrighted characters.
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