Dol Guldur

The name Dol Guldur belongs to the vocabulary of The Lord of the Rings and its appendices. The Hobbit never uses it: there the place is known only indirectly, through Gandalf's references to the Necromancer and the dungeons where he had once been. In the later narrative and in the Tale of Years the fortress appears under its Elvish name, and the older label becomes a way of referring to its unseen master. This reflects a shift in how the place was known. At first it was defined by the power that lived there, and only later by a name that marked the site as evil in its own right.1

The name is Sindarin and is usually rendered in English as the Hill of Sorcery; the fuller gloss, Hill of Dark Sorcery, spells out every element. Dol denotes a head, and by extension a hill or rounded height, and is found in several other Sindarin place-names. The middle element gul means sorcery or necromancy. According to the etymological notes published with The Silmarillion, it is related to an ancient stem meaning lore or wisdom, but it came to carry a sinister sense through use in words for black arts, such as the morgul of Minas Morgul. The ending comes from dûr, dark. The name therefore describes what was practised on the hill rather than what the hill looks like. In the same way, the Silmarillion account of the Third Age calls the master of the fortress the Sorcerer of Dol Guldur.2

Before the shadow settled there, the height had a plainer name. The Silvan Elves of the Greenwood called it Amon Lanc, the Naked Hill, because its summit stood bare of trees above the surrounding forest. Unfinished Tales places it in the south-western part of the wood and associates it with the early dwelling of Oropher and his people, before they moved farther north. Seen side by side, the two names record a change in the site's character. The older one describes its landscape, while the newer one describes the evil that came to occupy it.3

Dol Guldur stood in the southern reaches of Mirkwood, on a height that rose above the surrounding forest. It lay on the eastern side of the Anduin, not far in from the western eaves of the wood, and directly across the Great River from the Golden Wood of Lothlórien. The Elves of Lórien could see it from their own land. When the Company of the Ring climbed the green mound of Cerin Amroth, Haldir pointed out the dark stretch of forest beyond the river where the stronghold lay hidden. He described the southern woods as a place where the trees grew in strife and their branches withered, so that the fortress seemed to cast its blight on the country around it as well as rule it.1

In The Hobbit the same region is simply the dangerous south of the forest. It lay far from the realm of the Wood-elves in the north-east and away from the path that Bilbo and the dwarves took through Mirkwood. Gandalf left the company at the forest's edge on business in the south, which was the direction where the Necromancer's power was known to be. The fortress therefore marked the dark southern end of a wood whose northern parts held the kingdom of Thranduil. Between the two lay a great expanse of forest.2

The chronicles say little about the fortress itself. The notices of its fall mention walls and pits beneath them, which suggests a stronghold built above a warren of underground chambers. That fits the dungeons in which Gandalf had once found the captive Thráin. After Sauron's overthrow, Galadriel crossed the river, broke down those walls and exposed the pits, and the forest was cleansed. The land was then divided anew. Thranduil kept the north, the region of the Narrows in the middle became the land of the Beornings and Woodmen, and the southern forest, where Dol Guldur had stood, became East Lórien under Celeborn. In this way the site passed to the realm that had once looked across at it from the far bank of the Anduin.3

The history of Dol Guldur begins in the early second millennium of the Third Age, when a darkness first crept over the Greenwood. The Tale of Years places this change around the year 1050, when the shadow fell on the forest and Men began to call it Mirkwood. Some fifty years later, about 1100, the Wise (the Istari together with the chief among the Eldar) learned that an evil power had built a stronghold on the hill in the south of the wood. They could not yet tell what it was. The prevailing opinion held that it was one of the Nazgûl, and that mistaken judgement was to shape the Council's caution for many centuries.1

The first open challenge came in 2063, when Gandalf went to Dol Guldur to learn more of its master. The Necromancer did not face him. He withdrew and hid in the East, and his departure began the period the chronicles call the Watchful Peace, which lasted almost four hundred years. The respite ended in 2460, when Sauron came back to the fortress with greater strength than before. Three years later, in 2463, the White Council was formed, in part as an answer to this renewed threat in the south of the forest.2

In the twenty-ninth century the stronghold became tied to the fate of Durin's Folk. In 2845 Thráin, son of Thrór, was captured on his wanderings and brought to Dol Guldur, where the last of the Seven Rings of the Dwarves was taken from him. In 2850 Gandalf entered the fortress a second time. He confirmed that its master was Sauron himself, and he found Thráin close to death, receiving from him the map and key that later came to Thorin. At the Council's meeting in 2851 Gandalf urged an immediate attack on the stronghold, but Saruman spoke against it and his counsel carried the day.3

Ninety years later the Council finally took action. In 2941, the year of Bilbo's journey to Erebor, Saruman agreed to an assault on Dol Guldur. According to the Tale of Years he did so because he wanted to stop Sauron from searching the Anduin near the Gladden Fields, where he himself hoped the Ring might be found. The Council drove the Necromancer from the south of Mirkwood, and at the end of The Hobbit Gandalf mentions this as the business that had kept him away from the company. The victory was less than it seemed. Sauron had already made his plans and gave up the fortress willingly. Ten years later, in 2951, he declared himself openly in Mordor and sent some of the Nazgûl back to occupy the stronghold again.4

The posthumously published writings add to this picture. The account of the Rings of Power in The Silmarillion presents the withdrawal of 2941 as something Sauron had foreseen, a feint and not a defeat. It also records that the fortress's master was feared across the region long before his identity was proven. According to Unfinished Tales, in the years leading up to the War of the Ring the stronghold was held by Khamûl, the second of the Ringwraiths, known as the Shadow of the East. He lived there as Sauron's lieutenant. Dol Guldur thus served as Sauron's forward post in the north-west, placed between the Elves of Lórien and the realm of Thranduil.5

During the War of the Ring the fortress sent out its forces for the last time. In March 3019 Lothlórien was attacked from Dol Guldur three times, on the eleventh, the fifteenth and the twenty-second of the month, and each attack failed against the defences of the Golden Wood. On the fifteenth there was also fighting under the trees of northern Mirkwood, where Thranduil held off the forces from the south. After Sauron's fall the balance changed. On 28 March Celeborn led the host of Lórien across the Anduin and began the destruction of the stronghold, the task whose conclusion was described above. With this, Dol Guldur ceased to exist as a fortress, and its history ends in the year the steckbrief of the Third Age closes.6

Before the fortress was built, the hill belonged to a Silvan people with Sindarin lords. Oropher, a prince of Sindarin descent, ruled the Wood-elves of the Greenwood from the region of Amon Lanc. According to Unfinished Tales, his later moves northward had two causes. He wanted distance from the Dwarves of Khazad-dûm as their delvings spread, and he wished to stay out of the reach of Celeborn and Galadriel across the river. Oropher fell in the war of the Last Alliance, and his son Thranduil succeeded him. The lordship that had once been held on the hill therefore survived in the north, and the later realm of Thranduil descends from it.1

Under the shadow the site had rulers but no people of its own. Its lord hid behind an assumed character, and no records name a household, a subject folk or any settled population. Rule there came in two phases. The first was the master's own presence, which ended with his calculated withdrawal. The second was delegated command in his absence. Unfinished Tales names Khamûl as the lieutenant in the later period and says that another of the Nine served with him as his messenger. The Tale of Years describes the fortress's strength only as its forces, meaning the armed servants it could send out, and says nothing of how they were organised or who commanded them in the field.2

The effect is to give a children's adventure a horizon of larger events that the hobbit never sees directly.

The fortress had no peaceful dealings with its neighbours. It exacted no recorded tribute and made no alliances. Its relationship with the peoples around it was one of threat on its side and watchfulness on theirs. Lothlórien to the west and the Wood-elves to the north both regarded it as the principal danger on their borders, and when the chronicles mention it in connection with either realm, the context is always attack. The Woodmen and other dwellers in the forest were at most people living in its shadow and did not come under any government from it. The fortress was an armed outpost set down among free peoples and never became the centre of a realm.3

In The Hobbit the fortress stays offstage throughout. No character in the tale goes there, and the narrative uses it mainly to explain why Gandalf is away. His departure at the edge of Mirkwood leaves the dwarves and Bilbo to face the forest alone. Only in the closing chapter does Bilbo learn what the wizard had been doing. The quest itself also has roots in the same place, since the map that sets the company on its way was obtained in the Necromancer's dungeons. The effect is to give a children's adventure a horizon of larger events that the hobbit never sees directly.1

The Lord of the Rings turns this background detail into a hinge between the two books. At the Council of Elrond Gandalf tells of his earlier venture into the stronghold as part of his long account of the Ring. In the telling, the Necromancer of the earlier tale is recast after the fact as the Dark Lord whose servants now hunt the Ring. Even so, the fortress is never entered in the main narrative. For the Company it remains a distant menace seen from the Golden Wood, and the fighting it later sends against Lórien is recorded only in the appendices. Its role is to make the pressure of the Shadow felt on the Elven realms while the plot moves elsewhere.2

The posthumous account of the hunt for the Ring gives the fortress a more active part in the story. It becomes one of the points from which the search for the Shire is directed, and its lieutenant rides out with the other Ringwraiths. Unfinished Tales identifies him with the Rider who came closest to the hobbits during their flight through the Shire. The dread of the early chapters of The Lord of the Rings therefore has one of its sources in southern Mirkwood. Read together, the texts present the fortress less as a battlefield than as a hidden centre of watching and waiting. Much of the tale is shaped by what goes out from it, even though almost no one in the story goes in.3

Among the screen versions, Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy (2012–2014) is the one that gives the fortress a substantial part of its own. The novel keeps Dol Guldur offstage, but the films follow a subplot drawn from the appendices of The Lord of the Rings and take their characters inside it. In the first film Radagast, played by Sylvester McCoy, visits the ruin and brings word of what he found there to Gandalf. In the second, Gandalf, played by Ian McKellen, goes there himself. The master of the stronghold, credited as the Necromancer, is voiced and performance-captured by Benedict Cumberbatch, who also plays Smaug. In the extended edition of the second film Gandalf meets Thráin in the dungeons, with Antony Sher in the role. The third film shows the White Council's assault directly, with Cate Blanchett as Galadriel, Hugo Weaving as Elrond and Christopher Lee as Saruman.1

The main departures from the book concern chronology and the Council's role. In the Tale of Years, Gandalf's discovery of Thráin and his confirmation of the Necromancer's identity come nearly a century before Bilbo's journey. The films place both in the same year as the quest for Erebor. This means that Gandalf's second visit, the identification of Sauron and the Council's expulsion of him all happen within a few weeks, and the long debate in which Saruman held the Council back does not appear. The films also turn the fortress into a staging ground for the armies of Orcs that march on the Lonely Mountain, which links it to the Battle of Five Armies. Tolkien does not make that connection. The Council's attack, which the novel mentions only in passing after the fact, becomes a major episode on screen, and Gandalf is shown as a prisoner of the stronghold rather than as its investigator.2