Dagorlad

Dagorlad is a Sindarin name, and its two parts are both recorded in the list of name-elements that accompanies The Silmarillion. The first, dagor, is the ordinary Grey-elven word for a battle. The second, lad, denotes a plain or a level stretch of land, and the same element can be recognised in Imladris, where it appears in the compound imlad, a deep valley. Read together, the name means simply the plain of battle, a description rather than a proper name in any ornate sense. The Silmarillion itself pairs the Elvish form with its English rendering when it first brings the armies of the Last Alliance to that ground, so the translation is given by the text and need not be inferred.1

In The Lord of the Rings the region appears under both names. The narrative of the journey to the Black Gate tends to use the English form, the Battle Plain, as the hobbits and Gollum approach the northern approaches of Mordor, while the chronologies of the Appendices keep the Sindarin Dagorlad as the label under which the battle of the Last Alliance, and later engagements on the same ground, are entered. This division fits the book's general practice of giving Elvish names in the annals and English equivalents where the story is told from a hobbit's point of view. Nothing in the published text records a separate name for the plain in the Black Speech or in any language of Men.2

The name belongs to a small family of Sindarin battle-names built on the same word, among them Dagor Aglareb, the Glorious Battle, and Dagor Bragollach, the Battle of Sudden Flame, both from the wars of Beleriand. Those names designate events, whereas Dagorlad designates a place, and in this respect it stands apart from its relatives. The texts do not say who first called the plain by this name, or whether it bore another before the host of Gil-galad and Elendil met Sauron's forces there; the name as recorded presupposes a battle already remembered, and the sources leave its coining at that.3

Dagorlad is an open, treeless plain lying directly north of Mordor, in front of the pass through which the Black Land was entered from that side. To the south it is closed off by the mountains that fence Mordor, where the northern range and the western range draw together toward the gate called the Morannon. The Silmarillion places the plain before that gate, so that any army moving on Mordor from the north had to cross it. When the host of Gil-galad and Elendil came down from the north along the course of the Great River, this was the ground on which it first met the enemy. In the older account the region is therefore defined chiefly by its position: it is the approach to Mordor's northern entrance and the last level land before the mountains close in.1

The Lord of the Rings shows how the plain sits among its neighbours from the west. Between the hills of the Emyn Muil and the northern approaches of Mordor lie the Dead Marshes, a wide region of fen and standing water, and the eastern edge of the marshes merges with the old battlefield. As Gollum leads Frodo and Sam through the fens, he explains that the marshes have spread over time and have covered the graves of those who fell in the ancient battle, and the travellers see pale faces of the dead beneath the surface of the pools. The boundary between marsh and plain is thus not fixed: in the course of the Third Age the wetland advanced over part of the field it once bordered, and its westernmost reach is now under water.2

Beyond the marshes the land becomes dry and barren, and by the time of the War of the Ring the approaches to the gate are a waste of ash, broken stone and poisoned ground where almost nothing grows. The hobbits reach this desolation at the end of their passage through the fens and find it more oppressive than the marsh itself. Farther on, the plain narrows into the haunted pass between the converging mountains, which the Morannon closes. In the last campaign of the war the Captains of the West drew up their small army on two great mounds of rubble and earth, heaped up by orcs over many years, that stood in this waste before the gate. The ground that had once served the Last Alliance as an open field of battle thus appears in the later narrative as a spoiled and partly drowned landscape, marked by the long occupation of Mordor at its southern edge.3

The recorded history of Dagorlad begins at the close of the Second Age. Neither The Silmarillion nor the Appendices say anything of the plain before the war of the Last Alliance, and nothing suggests it was settled or held by any people. It enters the annals as a field of war and keeps that character in every later entry. Its importance came from its position and not from any use made of it in peace, for whoever held Mordor's northern door looked out over this ground, and whoever sought to reach that door had to cross it.1

The Tale of Years places the great battle in the year 3434 of the Second Age. That year the allied host crossed the Misty Mountains, defeated Sauron on the plain, and began the siege of the Dark Tower, which ended with Sauron's overthrow in 3441. The Silmarillion's account stresses how divided the peoples of Middle-earth were in this struggle. Men and other creatures served on both sides, and among the Elves there was no such division. The Dwarves stood mostly apart, with the Longbeards of Moria as the notable exception. The battle on Dagorlad was therefore not a contest of one race against another, and much of its later memory rests on that point.2

Unfinished Tales records the heavy cost of the battle to the Silvan Elves who marched under their own lords. Oropher, king of the woodland realm in Greenwood, charged forward in the first assault before Gil-galad gave the signal, and he was killed along with many of his people. Amdír of Lórien and most of his following became separated from the main army and were forced back into the marshes beside the field. Their heirs, Thranduil and Amroth, returned home with only a remnant of the forces that had set out. This loss is one of the few details of the fighting that the texts preserve, and it helps explain why the dead of that day were later said to lie beneath the fens to the west of the plain.3

In the Third Age the plain became a frontier of Gondor against invaders from the east. The Wainriders, a confederacy of Easterlings, had killed King Narmacil II in battle beyond the Anduin. In 1899 his son Calimehtar met them on Dagorlad and won a great victory, which the Tale of Years records under that name. The respite did not last. In 1944 the Wainriders, now acting together with the Haradrim, attacked Gondor from north and south at the same time, and King Ondoher and both his sons fell in battle north of the Morannon. Gondor was saved by Eärnil's victories in Ithilien, not on the plain itself. Afterward the watch on Mordor lapsed, and the approaches to the gate slowly passed out of Gondor's control.4

By the end of the Third Age the old battlefield lay within Sauron's reach. It was crossed by those who came and went from Mordor, and its western edge had been swallowed by the spreading marsh described above. In late February and early March of 3019, Gollum led Frodo and Sam through the fens and across the waste to the Morannon, where they saw that the gate was barred to them and turned south toward Ithilien. A few weeks later the host of the West came north by the same road. On 25 March it stood on the mounds before the Black Gate and fought the battle that ended with the destruction of the Ring and the collapse of Sauron's realm. After that the texts record no further fighting on the plain, and the narrative gives no account of its fate in the Fourth Age.5

No people is recorded as ever having made its home on Dagorlad, and the sources name no lord of the plain itself. It was a borderland, and in practice its master was whoever held the pass at its southern end. After the victory of the Last Alliance, the Men of Gondor took up that position. At the mouth of the pass they raised the two Towers of the Teeth, which faced inward and kept watch on the emptied land of Mordor so that its lord could not return unobserved. The plain in front of them thus fell within Gondor's reach as the outer field of its eastern guard. Nothing suggests that it was settled, farmed or given a government of its own.1

This arrangement did not outlast the decline of the southern kingdom. Appendix A records that after the Great Plague, which the Tale of Years places in 1636, the fortresses that guarded the passes into Mordor were left without garrisons, and Gondor never again kept the watch in its former strength. The towers stood empty for a long time. When Sauron returned to his old land, his servants repaired them and filled them with arms, so that defences built against him came to serve him. Sauron declared himself openly in 2951. From then on the plain was no longer a march of Gondor but the forecourt of Mordor, and the forces gathering to the Dark Tower passed across it.2

The contrast with the older battle makes the book's point: the decision no longer depends on the strength of armies.

The plain's dealings with its neighbours followed from this position between kingdoms rather than within one. Mordor lay to the south and Gondor's lands beyond the river to the west, while the open country to the north and east gave peoples out of the East a route toward Gondor's borders. For that reason Gondor's quarrels with Easterling invaders repeatedly came to this ground. The texts record no treaty, tribute or agreed boundary concerning Dagorlad, and they name no people, of Men or of any other kind, that claimed it as its own. Its history is one of armies that passed through or fought there, never of a population that stayed.3

In The Lord of the Rings the plain first appears as a memory, before any character sets foot on it. At the Council in Rivendell, Elrond explains the history of the Ring and says he served as Gil-galad's herald and fought in the battle before the Black Gate, where the Elven king's spear and Elendil's sword could not be withstood. This places a living witness between the reader and the Second Age. The victory on Dagorlad is presented as real but incomplete: it opened the way to Sauron's overthrow, yet the Ring survived, and Elrond's account moves quickly from triumph to Isildur's failure. The plain therefore enters the story as the scene of a success that the present generation must finish.1

In Book IV the same past becomes something the hobbits can see. In the marshes Gollum tells what he heard of the battle when he was young, and he insists that the dead in the water cannot be reached or touched. He also warns Frodo and Sam not to follow the lights that flicker over the pools. The ancient field thus changes from a chronicle entry into a hazard on the path, and its dead become a sign of how much the long war has already cost. Frodo, who carries the object that battle failed to destroy, crosses the ground as a lone traveller where an army once marched.2

The last march north gives the plain a deliberate echo. The Captains of the West bring a small host of Men, with a few Elves, a Dwarf and a hobbit among them, onto the ground where the Alliance once defeated Sauron. This time they do not expect to win in the field. Their aim is to hold the Enemy's attention while the Ring-bearer moves unseen. Crossing the desolation, some of the younger soldiers are overcome by dread, and Aragorn sends them away to recapture Cair Andros instead of shaming them. The contrast with the older battle makes the book's point: the decision no longer depends on the strength of armies.3

The plain is never named in Peter Jackson's film trilogy, and the war of the Last Alliance is reduced to the prologue of the first film. There the struggle against Sauron is compressed into a single engagement. The prologue gives no sense of a first victory on open ground before the Black Gate followed by a siege of the Dark Tower. Instead it moves the decisive fighting to the slopes of Orodruin, where Sauron appears in person, kills Elendil and Gil-galad, and loses the Ring to Isildur in the same encounter. The seven years of siege recorded in the book are left out entirely. Elrond, played by Hugo Weaving, is present in this sequence, which matches his own account of having served in that war, while Elendil is played by Peter McKenzie, Gil-galad by Mark Ferguson and Isildur by Harry Sinclair.1

The later films keep the region's geography in outline without giving it its name. In the second film, Gollum, performed by Andy Serkis, leads Frodo and Sam through the Dead Marshes, and the film preserves the book's link between the fens and the dead of the ancient battle. In the third film, the Host of the West marches north to the Black Gate under Aragorn, played by Viggo Mortensen, and fights its last battle in the waste in front of the gate. The film version of that march is shorter than the book's. It leaves out the episode in which Aragorn releases the soldiers overcome by fear and sends them to retake Cair Andros, so the plain loses one of the details through which the book marks the difference between the two wars fought on it.2