Battle of the Morannon

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of the Morannon sent 7,000 soldiers to the Black Gate of Mordor on the 25th of March. The forces that met them were at least ten times larger. This is the final confrontation in J. R. R. Tolkien's War of the Ring. Every soldier who stood there knew the army's real purpose was not to break through the Gate.

  Two hobbits, Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamgee, were somewhere inside Mordor, carrying the One Ring toward Mount Doom to destroy it. The entire army existed to hold Sauron's attention away from them. What this documentary will trace is the architecture of that gamble. Who made up that army, what it faced at the Gate, and why Tolkien set the whole event on that particular date.

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• 2. The King Elessar Gambit

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  Aragorn marched to the Black Gate under a new title. His heralds proclaimed him openly as "the King Elessar" throughout the advance. The proclamation was deliberate provocation. Sauron was expected to believe that Aragorn had the One Ring and meant to use it against him. The entire hope of the strategy rested on that belief.

  The army that accompanied Aragorn was notable beyond its size. King Eomer of Rohan rode with it. So did Prince Imrahil of Dol Amroth. The twin sons of Elrond, Elladan and Elrohir, were there, as was Beregond, a Guard of the Citadel of Minas Tirith. Five of the eight surviving members of the Company of the Ring marched together: Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli, and Pippin.

  On the march, the army was ambushed by Orcs and Easterlings. The attack fell on the same spot where the Rangers of Ithilien had ambushed a Haradrim company roughly two weeks earlier. The enemy was beaten back with few losses. Aragorn recognized this as an intentional feint. Sauron wanted him to think the Mordor forces were exhausted. Some soldiers, whose fear overcame them, were sent to retake the island of Cair Andros instead. By the time the army reached the Gate, it numbered less than 6,000.

  Before the battle began, a lone figure rode out from the gate, and he had something to show the Captains of the West.

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• 3. The Mouth of Sauron

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  A Black Numenorean called the Mouth of Sauron came to speak with the Captains of the West. His real name was unknown; he went only by this title. He carried Sam's sword, an Elven cloak, and the mithril shirt that Frodo had worn.

  These were displayed as evidence that Sauron held Frodo captive. The Mouth of Sauron threatened that Frodo would be tortured if the West refused to agree to Sauron's terms of surrender. Gandalf took the items and dismissed him. That refusal left no alternative path.

  Sauron's forces advanced and surrounded the Army of the West.

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• 4. The Field at the Gate

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  The Army of the West positioned itself on two hills of rubble facing the gate. Aragorn, Gandalf, and the twin sons of Elrond, with the Dunedain around them, held the left. Eomer, Imrahil, and the Knights of Dol Amroth held the right. The Olog-hai, an improved variety of Troll, appeared in open battle for the first time.

  The Nazgul circled above and spread fear through the ranks. The giant Eagles of the Misty Mountains arrived under Gwaihir the Windlord and attacked the Ringwraiths. The hobbit Pippin Took, serving as a Guard of the Citadel of Minas Tirith, killed a Troll.

  Orcs, Trolls, and Men from the East and South pressed in from every direction. No relief was coming from outside the battle. Everything now depended on what was happening far away, inside a mountain.

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• 5. The Ring Destroyed

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  Inside Mount Doom, at the edge of the Crack of Doom, Frodo put on the One Ring. The act revealed his location to Sauron instantly. Sauron pulled the Nazgul from the battlefield to intercept Frodo. His forces, suddenly without direction, fell into disarray.

  What followed was not Frodo's choice. Gollum bit the Ring from Frodo's finger and fell into the Crack of Doom with it. The Ring was unmade. Mount Doom erupted. Barad-dur, the Black Gate, and the Towers of the Teeth all fell. Each had been built with the power of the Ring, and that power was now gone. In the sky, a massive shadow formed and reached out in fury, but was blown away. Sauron's spirit was left bodiless and powerless forever. The Nazgul perished.

  The Orcs and other creatures lost all direction. Some fled. Some killed themselves. The Easterlings and Haradrim fought on bravely for a time. Eventually most surrendered. Aragorn sent them home in peace as he moved to establish the renewed kingdoms of Gondor and Arnor.

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• 6. The Date and the Eagle

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  Tom Shippey, a scholar of Tolkien's work, has written about the significance of the battle's timing. The 25th of March carried three distinct layers of meaning for the Anglo-Saxons. It was the date of Christ's Crucifixion, the Annunciation, and the last day of Creation. Tolkien's choice of that date for the War's end, Shippey argues, was not accidental.

  "And the Black Gate is broken," an eagle sang after the battle, and the line carried a meaning that reached beyond the Morannon. The eagle's song, Shippey notes, echoes the language of Psalms 24 and 33 in the Bible. Words from the Authorised Version, such as "ye" and "hath," appear in it. Shippey writes that the same words could apply just as easily to "Death and Hell," as in Matthew 16:18.

  Tolkien was a Roman Catholic. He spoke of moments of what he called "eucatastrophe": the sudden, unexpected turn toward joy in an otherwise tragic story. Shippey concludes the double meaning in the eagle's song was "deliberate." A second critic, Paul Kocher, focused not on the date but on the army itself, arguing that its sacrifice had barely been acknowledged.

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• 7. The Army's Courage

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  Paul H. Kocher, writing about Tolkien's fiction, noticed an imbalance in how critics discussed the battle's courage. Commentators praised Frodo and Sam but said almost nothing about the men who marched to the Black Gate. He described this overlooked bravery as "equal if less solitary unselfish daring." The hobbits crossed Mordor alone. The army's situation was different but no less desperate.

  Kocher's arithmetic was precise: if Frodo and Sam had completed their mission even one hour later, the entire army would have been destroyed. The hobbits saved the army. The army, by drawing Sauron's eye, saved the hobbits. The logic ran in both directions, and it left neither sacrifice diminished by the other.

  Gregory Bassham and Eric Bronson, in The Hobbit and Philosophy, found the same theme working at a smaller scale in Pippin. He had started the quest as a playful and childish companion. His killing of a Troll at the Morannon was, in their reading, proof that the journey had fundamentally changed him. The figure who delivered the surrender ultimatum before the battle drew its own historical comparisons in the decades after the books appeared.

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• 8. Historical Echoes and Adaptations

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  Daniel Timmons drew a direct comparison between Gandalf's refusal to negotiate with the Mouth of Sauron and Winston Churchill's refusal to negotiate with Nazi Germany. Tom Shippey offered a different parallel. He compared the Mouth of Sauron's proposed terms to the arrangement that produced Vichy France. Both offered peace in exchange for surrender into effective occupation.

  In 1957, Morton Grady Zimmerman and colleagues submitted a screenplay to Tolkien for a film that would combine animation, miniatures, and live action. Their version of the battle's final scene had Gandalf turning each of the Ringwraiths to stone before the watching armies. Tolkien was strongly opposed to this approach. Nothing came of the proposal.

  Peter Jackson's The Return of the King used some hundreds of New Zealand's soldiers to convey the battle's scale. Jackson had originally intended Aragorn to fight Sauron in person, but reduced this to a fight with a Troll. The Mouth of Sauron appears only in the extended edition of the film, played by Bruce Spence. A helmet covers Spence's entire face except the mouth, which was digitally enlarged and disfigured. According to the director's commentary on the extended edition, the idea was that Sauron's messages had so corrupted the character that they warped his body. What Tolkien wrote was simpler: the Mouth of Sauron was a nameless figure, known only by the messages he carried.

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