Mordor

The name Mordor is Sindarin, formed from the element mor, "dark" or "black", and dôr, "land" — the same first element that stands in Morgoth, Moria and Morannon, and the same second element that appears in Gondor and Eriador. Rendered plainly, it means the black or dark land, and the epithets attached to it in the Common Speech are little more than translations of that compound. The form is worth noting for what it implies about who did the naming: an Elvish name for a country whose inhabitants spoke no Elvish tongue is a name given from outside, by those who watched the region from the west rather than by those who dwelt in it. No name of Sauron's own devising for his realm is recorded, and the Sindarin word is the one that passed into the histories of Men.

In Westron usage the country was called the Black Land and the Land of Shadow, and in Gondor it was frequently not named at all. The practice of avoidance ran deep among the Dúnedain of the south, who preferred circumlocution to speaking either of Sauron or of his country directly, so that a land plainly marked on maps could still be referred to obliquely in speech. Among the Shire-hobbits the same reticence took a vaguer form, since Mordor was for them scarcely more than a rumour of a Shadow somewhere east; the name reached the Shire late and carried no geography with it. The result is a set of designations that shade from the precise to the deliberately evasive, all describing one thing from varying distances.

The naming of Mordor's chief features follows the same pattern of Elvish description supplemented by Gondorian coinage. The encircling ranges bear the Sindarin names Ephel Dúath, the outer fence of shadow, and Ered Lithui, the Ash Mountains, both plainly descriptive of what could be seen from without. The fire-mountain was called Orodruin, but the Men of Gondor gave it a second name, Amon Amarth, Mount Doom, after it burst again into flame — a naming Elrond recalled at his council as a mark of the country's revival. One inner name looks further back still: the valley behind the Black Gate is Udûn, which is the Sindarin form of Utumno, Melkor's first northern fortress, so that a much older stronghold is echoed in the ground plan of the later one.

Mordor lies in the south-east of the western lands, east of the great river Anduin and beyond the eastern frontier of Gondor, with which its border ran for the whole length of the Ephel Dúath. Between the mountains and the river stretches Ithilien, the woodland province that Gondor held and lost, so that the two realms faced each other across a strip of contested ground rather than along a single line. To the north-west, before the country's only gate, spreads the barren plain of Dagorlad, and beyond that the Dead Marshes and the fen-country toward the river; northward and eastward the land opens toward Rhûn, and to the south-east lies Khand, whence men came to Sauron's service. The realm's defining feature is its shape: a rough rectangle fenced on three sides by mountains, the Ephel Dúath running along the west and turning east to close the south, the Ered Lithui running along the north, the two ranges meeting at a north-western angle and leaving the east comparatively open toward the lands from which Sauron drew his tributary peoples.

Within the fences the ground is not uniform. The northern and western interior is Gorgoroth, a high plateau of ash, slag and cinder-hills pitted with fissures, where nothing grows and the dust drifts under a sky darkened by the fumes of the fire-mountain that rises from it. At the eastern edge of that plain a long arm of the Ered Lithui is thrust out westward, and on it stood Barad-dûr, set high enough to overlook the whole plateau. Behind the north-western gate the ground sinks into a walled depression that serves as a mustering-place, closed at its far end by a narrow neck of a pass. Along the inner side of the western range runs a second, lower ridge, the Morgai, separated from the main wall by a long dry trench of a valley; between the two the only vegetation of that quarter clings on — thorn, bramble and stunted growth fed by trickles from the heights.

Southward the country changes entirely. Núrn is a lower and watered region drained by streams from the encircling heights into a bitter inland sea, and its fields were tilled by slaves to feed the armies quartered in the north — the one part of the realm that could be called fertile, and the reason a land of ash could sustain a population at all. Entry from the west was possible only by two ways: the fortified gap at the north-western angle, and the high pass in the Ephel Dúath above the valley of Minas Morgul, reached by a stair-road and watched by a tower at its eastern mouth. Both were guarded works rather than natural openings, which is the essential fact about Mordor as a place: a country whose defence was already built into the ground before anyone fortified it.

The realm dates from about the year 1000 of the Second Age, when Sauron, watching the sea-power of Númenor grow and reckoning that he would need a stronghold that could not be taken from the west, fixed upon the fenced country beyond Anduin and began the raising of Barad-dûr. The work took some six hundred years, and it was finished at the same season as the instrument it was built to house: in 1600 the One Ring was made in the fire of the mountain, and the tower was completed. From that base Sauron opened his long war upon the Elves of Eriador, which began in 1693 and carried his armies over the whole of that country by 1699, until a Númenórean fleet drove him back east in 1701. The country was by then not merely a refuge but the administrative centre of a dominion reaching far beyond its own mountains, and by 2251 the nine Ringwraiths had appeared as its servants.

Its first interruption came from Númenor. In 3261 Ar-Pharazôn landed at Umbar with a force so overwhelming that Sauron's own troops abandoned him, and he chose submission over battle, allowing himself to be carried away as a hostage — so that for more than half a century the land lay without the master who had made it. His body perished in the Downfall of 3319, but his spirit returned to Mordor, and thereafter he could no longer clothe himself in a shape that men would call fair. The survivors of the wreck founded their southern realm in 3320 and set one of their chief cities on the western skirts of the mountains expressly as a check upon what lay behind them, a posture of open threat rather than of watchfulness alone. Sauron answered it in 3429 by striking first: the city on the mountain-shoulder was taken and the White Tree of Minas Anor burned, and the long antagonism between Mordor and Gondor was fixed for the rest of its history.

The counter-stroke was the Last Alliance, leagued in 3430. In 3434 the joint host of Elves and Men came down out of the north and fought the great battle on the plain before the north-western gate, forcing the entry that no army had forced before, and then sat down before Barad-dûr for seven years. Anárion was killed by a stone cast from the walls in 3440, and in 3441 Gil-galad and Elendil overthrew Sauron at the cost of their own lives, whereupon Isildur cut the Ring from his hand and kept it rather than destroying it. With that the Second Age ended and the tower was pulled down, but the demolition was incomplete in a way that mattered: its foundations had been laid by the power of the Ring and could not be undone while the Ring survived. The land had been conquered, not cleansed, and the ruin on the mountain-spur remained a site awaiting reoccupation.

Gondor understood this and for sixteen centuries kept a garrison-watch upon the empty country, manning the passes and the works before the gate. What ended the watch was not an enemy but the Great Plague of 1636, which so emptied the southern kingdom that the frontier fortresses were left without men, and the guard was never properly restored. Evil things drifted back into the vacancy, and in 1980 the Lord of the Nazgûl came to Mordor and assembled the other eight there. In 2000 they issued from it and laid siege to Minas Ithil, which fell after two years with its palantír and became Minas Morgul, a hostile city on Gondor's own side of the mountains. The last direct consequence followed in 2050, when King Eärnur accepted a challenge, rode to its gate and was never heard of again, leaving Gondor to be governed by Stewards.

Sauron himself returned in secret in 2942, having been driven from his southern refuge in Mirkwood, and in 2951 he declared himself openly and began to rebuild Barad-dûr on its surviving foundations. Three years later the fire-mountain woke again and the last inhabitants of Ithilien crossed the river to escape the fumes, so that the whole province between the ranges and the Anduin was ceded in fact if not in name. Open war came in 3018, and in March of 3019 the country was entered from two directions at once: the Host of the West marched to the northern gate to fix Sauron's attention upon a hopeless assault, while Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee came in by the high southern pass, worked north through the trench between the inner ridge and the outer wall, and crossed the ash-plain toward the mountain. They reached the chambers within its side on the twenty-fifth of March.

The unmaking of the Ring destroyed the realm in the space of an hour. The mountain erupted, the Ringwraiths flying to intercept the hobbits were burned up in the blast, and Barad-dûr — whose foundations had outlasted the Second Age precisely because the Ring endured — collapsed; the rampart and the towers at the northern gate came down as well, and the armies before them scattered or surrendered. The land itself remained, and its settled population with it: among his first acts as king, Elessar freed the labourers of the southern farmlands and granted them the country around the inland sea as their own property, converting the estate that had fed Sauron's armies into a holding of free men. What ended in 3019 was therefore not the place but the polity — after two ages in which every use of the country had been dictated by one will, Mordor ceased to be a realm at the moment that will was destroyed.

Mordor had one ruler and no succession. From its founding to its fall it was held by Sauron alone, and no other name is recorded as lord of the country; there was no dynasty, no heir, no council, and no office that carried authority in its own right. What existed instead was delegation, revocable and personal. The Nazgûl were his chief servants, and their captain was seated at Minas Morgul once that city had been taken, holding the western approach as a commander rather than as a lord of any land of his own. At Barad-dûr the standing officer was a living Man, of Black Númenórean descent, who had taken service under the Dark Tower at its second raising and had by the end forgotten the name he was born with; he was known only by his function as the Mouth of Sauron, and it was he who came out to the northern gate to treat with the Host of the West. Below that level the realm was run by garrison captains, which is to say by military command and not by any form of landholding.

The population of the fenced country was chiefly Orcs, quartered in the fortresses and towers and moved along the roads in companies. They were not a single body: the soldiery of Barad-dûr went under the sign of the Red Eye, while the garrison of Minas Morgul carried a different device, and the two establishments distrusted one another. What Samwise overheard at the pass and in the tower above it is the closest thing to a record of Mordor's internal life — talk of plunder and grievance, complaints against orders from above, the memory of an older arrangement before the present one, and finally a quarrel over a captured mail-shirt that destroyed the tower's own garrison without any enemy present. Men lived in the country as well, in camps set along the plain and its roads, and in the watered south the fields were worked by thralls. One inhabitant belonged to no order at all: the spider that lodged in the tunnel of the high pass acknowledged no master, though her presence served as a guard upon that road and Sauron was content to leave her there.

Toward its neighbours the realm knew two relations only, tribute and war. Westward there was never anything but hostility, from the first stroke against Gondor to the last campaign. Eastward and southward the pattern was different: the Men of Rhûn and of Khand, and the peoples of the far south, were drawn in as subjects and levies rather than as enemies, a dominion Sauron had built over Men of the East and South across the Second Age, where he was feared and in places honoured as a god-king. Those lands supplied the numbers that a country of ash could not raise from its own soil, and their contingents appear in every muster the histories record. The arrangement had no reciprocity in it and produced no treaty, no marriage, no shared frontier held in common — only obedience owed in one direction, which is why the whole structure came apart in a single day when the will at its centre ended.

For most of The Lord of the Rings Mordor is a destination rather than a setting — a name spoken in council rooms and on roads far to the west, always in the direction the story is pointed. It is the answer to the question of where the Ring must go, given at Rivendell and never afterwards revised, and every stage of the journey is measured against it. The narrative treats the country as a fixed point around which everything else arranges itself: Boromir argues about it, Gandalf reasons from it, Aragorn's campaign is shaped by the need to draw its master's attention away from it. Yet for two of the three books it is never entered and scarcely seen, and the effect of that withholding is that the land accumulates weight without ever being described. When Frodo does at last look out over it from the high pass, the reader has been waiting for the view for a very long time.

Once inside, the story changes register entirely. The chapters in Mordor are the slowest and least eventful in the book: two hobbits crawling along a ditch, rationing water, hiding from marching companies, arguing about how much to carry. There are no councils, no songs, no encounters with strangers, and almost no dialogue except between the two of them and, earlier, with the creature who has led them there. What the country supplies instead is friction — thirst, ash, the weight of the Ring increasing with every mile, and the steady erosion of Frodo's ability to remember anything that is not the Ring. Sam becomes the point of view through which most of it is reported, which is itself a consequence of the place: the bearer is being consumed by what he carries, and someone else must do the seeing. The one accident of luck that carries them across the plain is an orc-company that mistakes them for its own stragglers, which is to say the realm's own machinery, briefly and indifferently, does the work.

What the land stands for in the book is best read from what happens at its centre. Frodo, standing in the chamber in the mountain's side, does not throw the Ring away; he claims it, and the quest is completed only because Gollum takes it from him by force and falls. Mordor is therefore the place where the story declines to reward endurance with victory, and where the argument that runs through the whole work — that power of this kind cannot be used or willingly surrendered, only destroyed by something outside the intention of the person holding it — is settled in a single unwilled moment. The contrast with what the country represents elsewhere is deliberate: a realm organised entirely around one will proves unable to imagine the possibility of someone walking into it to give up power rather than to seize it, and that failure of imagination is precisely the gap the plan exploits. Sam's brief look at a star above the mountains, and the two hobbits waiting on the hillside afterwards for a death that does not come, are the passages by which the book measures the place against everything outside it.

The manuscripts printed in The History of Middle-earth show the country assembled in layers rather than invented whole, and some of its material was older than the story it ended up serving. The element that names the central plateau had already been in use in the Beleriandic writings, where Gorgorath, the Mountains of Terror, stood north of Doriath long before any land east of Anduin was thought of; the transfer of so charged a name to Sauron's ash-plain is of a piece with the reuse of Utumno in the naming of the valley behind the gate. The drafts also preserve Tolkien's own orthography, which his published text later smoothed away: the pass and its tower appear throughout as Kirith Ungol, with k for the hard c, and the field of the victory feast as Kormallen. These are spellings of the workshop, not variant places, and Christopher Tolkien is careful to present them as such.

The interior of the realm was among the last parts of the narrative to be written, and the drafting of it was slow and much revised, with the route, the water, the distances and the day-by-day timing worked out on maps and schemes while the chapters themselves were in progress. More striking are the outlines Tolkien set down in advance of the writing, in which the end at the fire-mountain was not yet settled. Several sketches turn on a Gollum who acts deliberately rather than by accident, repenting at the last and casting himself with the Ring into the fire, and others rearrange which of the two hobbits carries the burden to the chasm and what becomes of them afterwards. The published resolution, in which the bearer claims the Ring and loses it only through a struggle he does not intend, emerged from that sequence of attempts rather than standing at the head of it.

Because Ralph Bakshi's animated film breaks off after Helm's Deep, Mordor never becomes a setting in it at all: the realm is present only as the place the Black Riders come from and as the location of the Ring's making in the film's opening sequence, which is handled in traced silhouette rather than as a depicted country. The Rankin/Bass television film of 1980 takes up the last part of the story and is therefore the earliest screen version to show the crossing of the land, though ninety minutes reduce the passage to a few episodes, and a large part of the interior journey is carried by a marching song given to the orcs — a musical device with no counterpart in the narrative. Neither film has room for the watered south or for the distinction between the ash-plain and the valley behind the inner ridge. The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of 1981, in twenty-six half-hour parts, has no pictures to supply and builds the country out of narration and the acoustics of tunnels, stairs and enclosed towers; being the most complete of the older adaptations, it keeps more of the stages of the approach and the crossing than the film versions attempt, with Ian Holm as Frodo and Bill Nighy as Sam.

Peter Jackson's trilogy, shot in New Zealand, built the fire-mountain from the volcanic landscape of the central North Island and made two changes to the realm that are regularly noted. Barad-dûr is crowned with a visibly burning Eye that sweeps the country like a beam, giving Sauron a physical presence on the skyline that the book withholds; and the fall of the tower is followed by the ground opening before the northern gate to swallow his armies, where the histories have them merely scatter or surrender. The interior journey is much shortened, the Mouth of Sauron appears only in the extended version of the third film and is killed at the parley, and at the mountain's chamber Frodo does not lose the Ring to a struggle he stands apart from but grapples with Gollum over the edge himself.