Mordor

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Mordor is the realm of the Dark Lord Sauron in J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional continent of Middle-earth. It lay to the east of Gondor and the great river Anduin, and to the south of Mirkwood. Three mountain ranges sealed it on three sides, a geography that worked in two directions at once: keeping invaders out and keeping those within from ever leaving.

  At the heart of this enclosed land stood Mount Doom, a volcano so central to the story of The Lord of the Rings that its destruction ends an entire Age of the world. To walk into Mordor is to move toward something that most characters in Tolkien's fiction regard as impossible and suicidal. One does not simply walk into Mordor, as Boromir famously declares in Peter Jackson's film. And yet two hobbits did exactly that.

  What made Tolkien conceive of a place so comprehensively hostile to life? The answer runs through an Old English poem about a monster, through the smog-filled blast furnaces of the English Midlands, and through the mud and fire of the Western Front. Mordor is not merely a setting. It is a document of one man's experience of the industrial age and of war, pressed into the shape of a fantasy landscape.

• 2. A Land Sealed on Three Sides

  ›

  The Ered Lithui, or Ash Mountains, ran along Mordor's northern edge. The Ephel Dúath, the Mountains of Shadow, defended the west and south. Together these three ranges gave Mordor its roughly rectangular outline, with the longer sides on the north and south. Estimates place the lengths of the Ered Lithui and the two arms of the Ephel Dúath at roughly 498, 283, and 501 miles respectively, yielding a total interior area of around 140,000 square miles.

  These were not merely dramatic backdrops. They were functioning military barriers. The main western pass was guarded by Minas Morgul, a city that Gondor had originally built as Minas Ithil. Higher up, the pass of Cirith Ungol offered a more difficult route, its summit tower also constructed by Gondor, and its approach running through Torech Ungol, the lair of the giant spider Shelob. In the northwest, the pass of Cirith Gorgor led into the enclosed plain of Udûn, where Sauron erected the Black Gate of Mordor, the Morannon, across the pass. Flanking the Morannon stood the Towers of the Teeth, Carchost to the east and Narchost to the west, guard towers that Gondor itself had originally built to watch that same entrance.

  Inside the Ephel Dúath ran a lower parallel ridge called the Morgai, separated from the mountains by a narrow valley that Tolkien described as a dying land not yet dead. Sparse, grey grass-tussocks, withered mosses, and briars with long stabbing thorns filled that valley. The landscape punished travelers before they even reached the volcanic interior.

• 3. The Interior: Gorgoroth, Núrn, Lithlad

  ›

  Gorgoroth occupied the northwest of Mordor's interior, an arid volcanic plateau with Mount Doom at its center. On the north side of Gorgoroth, at the end of a spur of the Ash Mountains, stood Barad-dûr, Sauron's chief fortress. Gorgoroth was hostile to life but not empty: Sauron's mines, forges, and garrisons filled it.

  Southward, Mordor changed character. Núrn was less arid, genuinely fertile, and streams fed a body of water called the Sea of Núrnen. Sauron's slaves worked this region as farmland to supply his armies. After Sauron's final defeat, the land of Núrn was given to those freed slaves, one of the few concrete acts of post-war settlement Tolkien describes.

  To the east of Gorgoroth lay Lithlad, a dry plain. The three regions together formed a self-sufficient military state: an industrial and garrison heartland in Gorgoroth, an agricultural base in Núrn, and a flat eastern expanse in Lithlad. Outside Mordor's mountain walls, the Dead Marshes stretched to the northwest, with a separate swamp called the Nindalf or Wetwang lying beside the Emyn Muil hills.

• 4. Mount Doom and Its Names

  ›

  Mount Doom carried three names in Tolkien's world. In Sindarin it was Amon Amarth, a name later taken by a Swedish melodic death metal band. In older Elvish it was Orodruin, meaning Mountain of Blazing Fire. The common English name, Mount Doom, carries a meaning Tolkien went to some length to explain.

  In his Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings, written to help translators, Tolkien traced the phrase Crack of Doom to William Shakespeare's play Macbeth, Act 4 scene 1. He explained that Doom in its original sense meant judgement, and that through its use in the word doomsday the word had accumulated the additional senses of death, finality, and fate. He even cited specific lines from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, lines 116 and 1166, to illustrate the use of crack to mean the sound of a trumpet.

  Tolkien and the Tolkien scholar Jared Lobdell also discussed a possible debt to two tales by the English novelist Algernon Blackwood: The Willows and The Glamour of the Snow.

  The volcano is not passive in Tolkien's fiction. It responds to Sauron's presence, going dormant when he is away from Mordor and erupting when he returns. The One Ring was forged in its fires and could only be destroyed there. When the Ring was destroyed at the end of the Third Age, the eruption was violent enough to shake the surrounding landscape. According to the fanzine Niekas, Tolkien himself said he more or less found Mordor on a Mediterranean cruise in September 1966, when sailing past the volcano of Stromboli at night and saying he had never seen anything that looked so much like Mount Doom.

• 5. Barad-dûr: The Dark Tower

  ›

  Barad-dûr meant Dark Tower in Sindarin, built from barad for tower and dûr for dark. In the Black Speech of Mordor, the language Sauron himself devised, the fortress was called Lugbúrz, from lug and búrz carrying the same meanings. The soldiers who garrisoned it used a debased form of the Black Speech; within its upper ranks and among the Ringwraiths, the full language was maintained.

  Sauron began building Barad-dûr in the Second Age, and the fortress drew part of its strength directly from the One Ring. Gandalf described the Ring as the foundation of Barad-dûr, meaning its physical survival was tied to the Ring's existence. Once the Ring was destroyed, the tower fell.

  Tolkien's own painting of the Dark Tower depicted walls of grey stone and brick without visible battlements, gates, or towers, a quieter image than the prose descriptions. The text of The Two Towers called it a vast fortress, armoury, prison, furnace of great power, hidden in shadows that Sauron generated around himself. From the summit, a look-out station called the Window of the Eye gave direct visual access to Mount Doom. It was from there that Frodo and Sam caught their terrible glimpse of the Eye of Sauron.

  Barad-dûr fell on the 25th of March, a date Tolkien loaded with deliberate symbolism: it was a traditional Anglo-Saxon date for the crucifixion. The quest to destroy the Ring had begun at Rivendell on the 25th of December, the date of Christmas. For Peter Jackson's film trilogy, Richard Taylor's design team built an 18-foot miniature of Barad-dûr, which Jackson portrayed in an exaggerated Gothic fashion with a black metallic appearance, differing both from the book's text and from Tolkien's own painting.

• 6. Beowulf, the Black Country, and the Somme

  ›

  Tolkien called Beowulf one of his most valued sources for Middle-earth. The medievalists Stuart D. Lee and Elizabeth Solopova compared Frodo and Sam's crossing of the Dead Marshes, with what Gollum called its tricksy lights, to the Beowulf passage describing fire on the water. The parched, thorn-filled Morgai they compared to Grendel's dangerous moors. Both the Beowulf poet and Tolkien, Lee and Solopova argued, combine realistic natural description with an element of fantasy and a persistent sense of unease.

  The industrial dimension came closer to home. A 2014 art exhibition at the Wolverhampton Art Gallery, titled The Making of Mordor, argued that the steelworks and blast furnaces of the West Midlands near Tolkien's childhood home inspired both the vision and the name. The area has long been called the Black Country. Philip Womack, writing in The Independent, likened Tolkien's move from rural Warwickshire to urban Birmingham to exile from a rural idyll to Mordor-like forges and fires. The critic Chris Baratta read the contrast between the well-tended Shire and the industrial wastelands of Isengard and Mordor as a deliberate invitation to think about environmental destruction and the corrupting effects of industrial expansion.

  Tolkien wrote in one of his letters in 1960 that the Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to northern France after the Battle of the Somme. Jane Ciabattari, writing on the BBC culture website, called the hobbits' struggle toward Mordor a cracked mirror reflection of young soldiers caught in the blasted landscape and slaughter of trench warfare on the Western Front.

• 7. Names, Languages, and Legacy

  ›

  Within Tolkien's fiction, Mordor carried two meanings: Black Land in Sindarin and Land of Shadow in Quenya. The root mor, meaning dark or black, also appeared in Moria, which meant Black Pit, and in Morgoth, the first Dark Lord. Popular sources have suggested Mordor derives from Old English morðor, meaning mortal sin or murder, but the philologist Helge Fauskanger argued against that reading. Tolkien had been using the components mor and dor independently for decades before combining them, and Fauskanger traced the dark resonance of the mor syllable through Italian moro, Greek mauros, Norse myrk, and the Arthurian names Morgana, Morgause, and Mordred.

  Sauron's forces at the time of the War of the Ring included Easterlings and Haradrim speaking a variety of tongues, alongside Orcs and Trolls using debased Common Speech. Sauron had also bred specialist soldiers: the Uruk-hai, a more powerful strain of Orcs, and the Olog-hai, Trolls strong enough to endure sunlight. The Olog-hai knew only the Black Speech.

  Led Zeppelin's 1969 song Ramble On, written by Jimmy Page, places a meeting with a girl so fair in the darkest depths of Mordor. The International Astronomical Union named a mountain on Saturn's moon Titan Doom Mons after Mount Doom in 2012. In Warsaw, Poland, a district of Mokotów is commonly called Mordor, and two streets nearby are named J. R. R. Tolkiena Street and Gandalfa Street. The heavy metal bands Cirith Ungol, Amon Amarth, and Orodruin all take their names from specific features of Mordor's geography, carrying the place from Tolkien's fiction into contemporary music.