Minas Tirith

The city's name belongs to Sindarin, the Elven tongue that the Númenórean exiles kept as the speech of lore and public record in Gondor, and which supplied nearly all the great names of the realm. Its first element, minas, denotes a tower or the fortress gathered about one, and it recurs across the paired strongholds that the sons of Elendil raised on either side of the Anduin. The city on the western bank was Minas Anor, the tower of the sun, set to face the westering light; its eastward counterpart in the mountains of shadow was Minas Ithil, the tower of the moon. Between the two lay Osgiliath, the older chief seat of the kingdom, so that the three formed a single scheme of naming rather than three separate inventions. Anárion, who held the southern and western lands, is named as the builder of the sun-tower, and the correspondence between his own name and Anor is not accidental.

The second name arose from a change in the city's relation to its twin. When Minas Ithil was taken by the servants of Sauron, the moon-tower became a place of dread and was thereafter called Minas Morgul, the tower of sorcery, and the western city — by then the seat of the kings and the chief place of the realm — was renamed Minas Tirith. The element tirith carries the sense of watch or guard, and the name is a statement of purpose rather than of situation: the city that keeps unsleeping vigil against the evil across the river. English usage renders it Tower of Guard, and the older form Minas Anor did not vanish entirely but survived in records and in the speech of those fond of ancient usage.

Beside these formal names stand descriptive ones. The white stone of its walls and of the tower on its highest circle gave rise to the White City, while its long function as the royal seat produced the City of the Kings; both are epithets of common speech rather than official titles. The Rohirrim, whose tongue is represented in the narrative by Old English, knew it by a name of their own, Mundburg, the guardian fortress, which preserves the same idea of watchful protection in a wholly different language and is the form used in their songs. Within the city, the White Tower itself came to be called the Tower of Ecthelion after the Steward who rebuilt it, an instance of the Gondorian habit of fixing a ruler's name to the work he raised.

The city stands on the western side of the Anduin, at the point where the great river bends south below the ruins of Osgiliath, and it is set against the last and easternmost outlier of the White Mountains, the mountain called Mindolluin. From the body of that mountain a knee or spur of rock runs eastward into the plain, and it is upon this spur that the city is built, so that it stands with its back against the heights and its face turned toward the river and the lands beyond. Directly opposite, across the water and the wide vale, rise the mountains of shadow that fence Mordor on the west, and in a valley of that range lies the fallen sister-city, so that the two look at one another across the gulf. Northward along the river lies the island fortress that guards the crossings above; westward, behind the mountain wall, the road runs toward the fords and the plains of the horsemen; and below the city on the riverbank are the quays of the Harlond, where ships from the southern fiefs come up.

Its form is unusual among the cities of Middle-earth. Seven concentric walls climb the spur, each enclosing a level higher than the last and each with its own gate, so that the whole rises in tiers to the topmost circle where the Citadel stands with its court and fountain and the White Tower above them. The outer and greatest wall is of a dark, close-grained stone that resisted both tool and fire, and the Great Gate that pierces it opens eastward toward the river. The ascent is complicated by a huge shoulder of rock that divides the upper levels from east to west, its eastern edge running out to a sharp point above the Gate; the climbing road cannot pass it and must instead go through a tunnel driven in the stone, emerging on the opposite side at each stage, so that the gates of the successive circles do not stand in a single line. From the point of that rock spur one may look straight down upon the outermost gate, hundreds of feet below.

Before the city lies the Pelennor, a broad half-circle of farmland, homesteads and orchards that supplied it, watered by streams from the mountains and crossed by the paved road running east to the river crossings. This townland was not open: an outer rampart, raised long afterward as a defence for the fields, ran in a great arc from the mountain flank round to the water again, with a gate where the causeway went out and towers along its length. Behind the sixth circle, on the mountain side and reached through a single guarded door, a narrow way leads to the burial precinct where the tombs of the rulers of the realm were made, a silent quarter set apart from the living city. Because the mountain rises sheer behind, the place cannot readily be assailed from the rear, and every approach must come across the level ground in front — a fact that shaped both its long usefulness as a watch-post and the manner in which it was at last besieged.

The city belongs, in its origin, to the last years of the Second Age. When Elendil and his sons escaped the drowning of Númenor and established their realms in Middle-earth in the year 3320, the southern kingdom was ordered about three seats on and near the Anduin, and the sun-tower on the western bank was one of them, held by Anárion while his brother kept the eastern tower. Its first recorded trial came in 3429, when Sauron came out of Mordor and seized the eastern city; Isildur escaped by river and sea to seek his father in the north, and Anárion held the western bank and the crossings against the assault until help came. The war that followed, waged by the alliance of Elves and Men, ended with Sauron's overthrow in 3441, but Anárion himself was slain before Barad-dûr in the last year of the siege. In the second year of the Third Age Isildur planted in the city a seedling of the White Tree in his brother's memory, and thereafter the Tree in the high court was bound to the fortunes of the line that ruled there.

For the first thousand years of the Third Age the city was a secondary seat, since the kings held their court in the older river-town below. Ostoher, the seventh king, rebuilt and enlarged it about the year 420, and from his time onward the kings preferred to dwell there in summer rather than beside the water. The long civil war known as the Kin-strife altered that balance: in 1437 the river-city was burned in the fighting between Eldacar and the usurper Castamir, its great dome fell, and the seeing-stone kept there was lost in the water; from that ruin the old capital never fully recovered. The decisive change came two centuries later with the Great Plague of 1636, which killed King Telemnar and his children and left the river-city half-empty. His successor Tarondor replanted the withered Tree and, in 1640, removed the king's house permanently to the western tower, which from that year was the sole capital of the realm.

In 2002 the eastern tower fell at last, after a long siege, to the servants of the Nazgûl, and its seeing-stone passed into the enemy's hands; it was then that the western city took the name it kept ever after. Two generations later the Lord of the Morgul-city challenged the childless king Eärnur, who rode out to answer him in 2050 and was never seen again. No proof of his death could be had and no undoubted heir came forward, so the rule passed to the Steward Mardil and to his descendants after him, who governed in the King's name for nearly a thousand years without claiming the crown; in the throne-hall the high seat stood empty and the Steward sat on a plain chair on the step below it. The frontier meanwhile crept closer: in 2475 the ruined river-city was overrun and its bridge finally broken, so that the walls stood as the chief bulwark of the realm. Within the city, the Steward Ecthelion I rebuilt the White Tower in 2698, and in the later centuries of Steward rule the White Tree died and no seedling could be found, so the dead trunk was left standing in the court and a guard set upon it.

Under the last Ruling Steward, Denethor II, the city prepared for the assault it had long expected. The outer rampart of the townland was repaired at his order, the chain of hill-beacons westward toward the horse-lords was kept manned, and in the summer of 3018 the enemy forced the river crossings and drove the garrison from the eastern shore. The siege proper began in March of 3019, when a great host out of the Morgul-vale invested the townland, burned its farms and drew its lines about the walls, and the Nazgûl overhead broke the courage of the defenders. On the fifteenth of March the Great Gate was shattered by a battering-ram brought up under sorcery — the only breach the outer wall ever suffered — but at that hour the horsemen of the north came into the fields at dawn, and later in the morning ships taken at the southern havens brought Aragorn and the men of the coastlands up the river against the enemy's rear. The besieging army was destroyed on the level ground before the walls, though at heavy cost: King Théoden fell in the battle, and Denethor, despairing, burned himself in the tomb-precinct behind the sixth circle while the fighting still went on.

The city was not destroyed, and its recovery was swift. Ten days after the battle the Ring was unmade and the Dark Tower fell, and on the first of May Aragorn was crowned within the walls, restoring the kingship that had lapsed with Eärnur; the Steward's office continued under Faramir, who was made Prince of Ithilien. In the following June a sapling of the White Tree was found growing on a high shoulder of the mountain behind the city and was set in the court in place of the withered trunk, and at Midsummer Arwen came south for the wedding. Under the restored line the walls and houses were rebuilt more fairly than before, the ruined river-town below was resettled in time, and the capital ceased to be a frontier watch-post, since the land it had watched was empty. Elessar reigned for a hundred and twenty years into the Fourth Age and was succeeded by his son Eldarion; long after, in the year 172 of that age, a copy of the hobbits' chronicle of the war was made in the city by the King's writer, an unremarkable act of scribal work that is nonetheless the last thing the records report of it.

The city's people were Men of Gondor, who traced their descent from the Númenórean exiles, though by the late Third Age that inheritance was much diluted and the households of unmixed lineage had grown few. Everyday speech was the Common Tongue, but among those of purer descent Sindarin was still used as a language of the house and not merely of ceremony, and it was from such families that the servants of the Citadel were chiefly drawn. The city was also a place of ordinary trades, with streets named for the crafts practised in them and inns kept for travellers from the country districts. By the time of the War of the Ring its houses stood emptier than they had been in earlier days, and before the siege the women and children were sent away south, leaving a garrison town.

Authority lay with the Lord of the City, a title borne first by the kings of Anárion's line and afterwards by the Stewards who held their place. The stewardship had begun as an appointed office, but it was made hereditary in the House of Húrin, whose founder had served King Minardil and was reckoned of high Númenórean race; its holders bore a white rod as the sign of their charge and administered oaths of service in the King's name. Under the Lord stood the garrison of the Citadel, organised in companies whose men wore black livery with the device of the White Tree and a silver crown, and who alone in the city were permitted that emblem. The Houses of Healing on the sixth circle, kept by a Warden and his people, formed a further branch of the city's establishment.

Beyond its walls the city drew on the southern and coastal fiefs, whose lords brought companies to its muster in time of need, among them the men of Lossarnach, Lebennin, Lamedon and the vales of the mountains; the Prince of Dol Amroth, who came with mounted knights, was besides brother to the wife of the last Ruling Steward and so kin to his sons. The principal alliance was with the horsemen of the north, granted the empty province of Calenardhon by the Steward Cirion in return for the sworn friendship of Eorl, an oath renewed by their successors and answered by the sending of a token when aid was required. Eastward there was no relation but enmity, the watch on the Morgul-vale being maintained by rangers under the Steward's son; and the sundered northern kingdom of Elendil's other heirs remained only a memory until the crowning of Elessar joined both realms again.

The city enters the narrative late and is shown almost entirely through unaccustomed eyes. Pippin, brought south on Shadowfax after the disaster at Isengard, sees it first in the grey of morning, and the reader's impression of its levels, its guards and its silence is his impression, that of a small stranger among tall and grave men. His offer of service to the Lord of the City, made partly in payment of a debt to Boromir and partly out of pride stung by the manner of his reception, gives him the black livery and a place inside the Citadel, and so an ordinary hobbit becomes the vantage point for the highest councils of Gondor. Through the guardsman Beregond, assigned to instruct him, and through Beregond's son Bergil, who takes him to watch the companies of the fiefs come in, the city is presented as an inhabited place with its own customs, meal-times and gossip before it is presented as a fortress under attack.

Thematically the city serves as the narrative's chief image of an inheritance carefully kept but no longer renewed. The high seat stands vacant above a Steward's plain chair, a dead tree is guarded in the court, and its ruler is a man of great capacity who has come to measure everything by loss. Denethor's decline — his secret use of the seeing-stone, his conviction that resistance is futile, his final rage against his surviving son — is played out in these rooms, and the reader learns the cause only afterwards, from Gandalf. Meanwhile the chapters set here alternate with those following Frodo and Sam eastward, so that the loud war of banners and cavalry is continually set beside two figures crawling unseen through the enemy's land, and the story insists that the visible defence is not what decides the outcome.

After the battle the city becomes the place where the surviving threads are drawn together. In the Houses of Healing, Faramir, Éowyn and Merry lie under a shadow that ordinary craft cannot touch, and Aragorn's power to draw them out of it is recognised by an old saying of the city's lore rather than by any claim of his own; he enters at night, unheralded, and withdraws again rather than assert the crown while Denethor's household still stands. It is on the walls of that house that Éowyn and Faramir meet and turn from war to what follows it. From here the small remaining host marches out to the Black Gate, and here the scattered Company is reunited afterwards, before the story disperses homeward and the city passes out of it.

The name Minas Tirith was in use in Tolkien's writing long before the city of Gondor was conceived. In the Beleriand legends it belonged to the tower that Finrod raised on the island in Sirion to watch the northern passes, a stronghold afterwards taken by Sauron and given another name; the sense of a tower of watch is the same, but the place is a wholly separate and much older invention, and the reuse of the name in the later story is one of many such transfers between strata of the legendarium. The southern kingdom of Men itself entered the drafts late and under other names: it appears first as Ond, and for a considerable stretch of the writing as Ondor, before the published form was reached. Because the realm was unsettled, so was its chief city, and the scheme of paired sun-tower and moon-tower flanking an older river-seat took shape only as the Númenórean background behind the story was worked out.

The chapters describing the city were composed with unusual attention to its ground plan. Among the drafts Christopher Tolkien prints his father's diagrams and calculations for the place — the compass of the circles, the heights of the walls and the great dividing rock — which show that the geometry was settled as a working problem before the siege came to be narrated, rather than sketched loosely for effect. Outlines belonging to the same period set out the course of the assault and the fate of the Steward's house in forms that differ from the finished account in order and emphasis. Later still, in the material drafted for the Appendices, the dynastic annals of Gondor stand in fuller shape than the published summary allows, with notes on the reigns and on the removal of the royal seat; a number of dates and details were revised between those drafts and the printed text.

The city has fared unevenly on screen. Ralph Bakshi's animated film never reaches it: the picture breaks off after the fighting at Helm's Deep and the intended second part was never produced, so Gondor's capital lies entirely outside its compass. The Rankin/Bass television film of 1980 takes up the closing part of the story instead, with John Huston voicing Gandalf and William Conrad voicing Denethor, but its running time of roughly ninety minutes obliges it to compress the siege severely and to summarise events it had not itself dramatised, since it does not continue Bakshi's film. Peter Jackson's trilogy gives the city by far the fullest treatment, making it the principal setting of the third film, with John Noble as Denethor; the earlier two films glimpse it only in passing. As in the older animated films, the city is realised through design and effects work rather than through any single performer associated with it, so the adaptations are compared chiefly by what they keep of the book's material.

Jackson's departures in the city are the ones most often noted. The lighting of the mountain beacons is turned into a clandestine act performed by Pippin at Gandalf's prompting, against the Steward's will, where in the book the beacons are kindled on Denethor's own order; Faramir is sent out on a hopeless charge to recover the river-city, an episode without a counterpart in the novel; and Denethor dies by falling in flames from the great rock spur above the Gate rather than on the pyre in the tomb-precinct. The films also drop the guardsman Beregond and his son entirely, so Pippin's introduction to the ordinary life of the place goes with them, and they supply no equivalent of the later explanation that the Steward's despair had been fed by a seeing-stone. Material set in the Houses of Healing, including the meeting of Faramir and Éowyn, survives only in abbreviated form in the extended version. The BBC Radio dramatisation of 1981, running to twenty-six half-hour parts, is the most faithful of the older versions in this respect: its length allows the councils, the Steward's household and the aftermath of the battle to be played out at something near the book's proportions, with Peter Vaughan as Denethor and Michael Hordern as Gandalf.