Here Be Dragons (37 page)

Mordor

Sauron is of the lesser order of the Ainur, the angelic beings once involved in the creation of the world who entered it as its stewards. Along with many others, he was swayed by the evil Melkor; and when his master was defeated, Sauron assumed the position of supreme evil being in Middle-earth. The dead lands of Mordor have obvious precursors in Tolkien's earlier work, most plainly in the Desolation of Smaug in
The Hobbit
, a “bleak and barren” land with “neither bush nor tree, and only broken and blackened stumps to speak of ones long vanished.”
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But even before he began writing about Mr. Baggins's adventures, Tolkien had included a burned, desolate plain outside Morgoth's stronghold. In
The Silmarillion
(1977), the plain is called Anfauglith, the Gasping Dust, “full of a choking dust, barren and lifeless”;
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but it is mentioned in a previous synopsis (“Sketch of Mythology”) from the late 1920s, as well as in the even earlier
Lay of the Children of Húrin
(early 1920s), under the name Dor-na-Fauglith, the Plain of Thirst.
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To what extent the landscapes surrounding the antagonists of Tolkien's previous writing actually influenced Mordor is impossible to determine, but Sauron's Dark Land certainly outdoes its precursors in terms of barren gloominess.

It is unclear at what point Sam and Frodo enter Sauron's realm. The Dead Marshes, with their slimy ooze, clammy mists, and spirits of the dead visible in the treacherous pools, are an obvious contender. Gollum, however, claims not to know whether the visages of the dead are Sauron's doing (TT, IV, ii, 614); and as the barrow wights demonstrate in
The Fellowship of the Ring
, old graves, no matter whose, can become the haunt of evil spirits far away from the Dark Land. Randel Helms suggests that the hobbits pass into Sauron's realm once they have traversed the Marshes,
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but I would argue that they must walk for two more nights, through the Noman-lands and into Dagorlad, the desolation that lies before the Black Gates, before they truly experience the Dark Lord's land.
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Dagorlad's desolate plain is clearly related to Anfauglith and the Desolation of Smaug, and the description of it is among Tolkien's most chilling:

Here nothing lived, not even the leprous growths that feed on rottenness. The gasping pools were choked with ash and crawling muds, sickly white and grey, as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails upon the lands about. High mounds of crushed and powdered rock, great cones of earth fire-blasted and poison-stained, stood like an obscene graveyard in endless rows, slowly revealed in the reluctant light. […] [T]he lasting monument to the dark labor of [Mordor's] slaves that should endure when all their purposes were made void; a land defiled, diseased beyond all healing—unless the Great Sea should enter in and wash it with oblivion. (TT, IV, ii, 617)

Despite the added details, the dead land before Childe Roland's Dark Tower is clearly recognizable, down to the need for a cleansing cataclysm in order to cure the land—by fire in Browning's case, by flood in Tolkien's. Sauron's forecourt displays the Dark Lord's complete disregard for any sanctity of life or beauty. The totality of the ecocide brings into sharp focus how the pits and forges of Isengard are indeed “only a little copy, a child's model or a slave's flattery” of the evil that Sauron is capable of inflicting on the land itself (FR, II, ii, 254; TT, III, viii, 542). The first encounter, for the hobbits as well as the reader, with the Dark Lord's realm illustrates the three main ways in which his evil is portrayed as affecting the land: mediated through the actions of others, as a force of decay or destruction, and through emotive language. These ways interlace with and amplify one another but are covered separately in the discussion that follows.

John Garth calls the description of Dagorlad an expression of Tolkien's “anti-industrial animus,”
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which he also finds in Tolkien's notes for the description of the Marshes. (“Describe the pools as they get nearer to Mordor as like green pools and rivers fouled by modern chemical works.”
⁶⁹
) “Anti-industrial animus,” if anything, puts it mildly: Dagorlad is the most striking image of industrial environmental degradation in
The Lord of the Rings
.
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That the evil of Mordor lies in environmental destruction and lack of respect for the natural world is obvious from the chapter “The Scouring of the Shire” (RK, VI, viii). When the hobbits return to find the Shire tyrannized and ravaged by Saruman, Sam and Frodo see how Saruman has simply done Sauron's work, although the devastation feels much worse “because it is home, and you remember it before it was all ruined” (RK, VI, viii, 994). Ann Swinfen briefly notes the destruction and exploitation of nature carried out by “Sauron and
his imitator Saruman” through machinery and slaves;
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and that is indeed one of the three ways in which the Dark Lord's evil affects the land. Through minions (including “his imitator Saruman”) and other agents, such as the volcano, Mount Doom, and even weather, Sauron affects the world; and in his own realm, these agents can carry out his evil deeds unopposed and unfettered by any regard for the natural environment.

This mediated evil, clearly visible in the poisonous slag heaps and waste pits of Dagorlad, is most conspicuously expressed through the random felling of trees. That misdeed enrages the ents of Fangorn and brings Sam to tears on his return to the Shire, and it is the first sign of Sauron's evil power in the recently conquered Ithilien. Despite the loveliness of the land, Sam and Frodo come across “trees hewn down wantonly and left to die,” which reminds them that they are in enemy territory (TT, IV, iv, 637).
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However, although industrial production and the environmental destruction associated with it might lie wholly within the purview of evil, the Dagorlad waste is not totally gratuitous. Apparently, advanced mining and chemical operations are going on in Mordor, suggested by the slag heaps with their noxious fumes, the poisoned soil, and the multicolored ooze in the pits (TT, IV, ii, 618). From the passage quoted before, the reader can tell that slave labor is used in this industry, and the origin of the slag heaps is hinted at later, when the narrator explains that Mordor's mines and forges are found in the northern parts of the country—conveniently located close to the Black Gates and Dagorlad (RK, VI, ii, 902).

The location is convenient because depositing these dangerous by-products outside the entrance to Mordor gives Sauron a strategic advantage. The presence of a vast, lifeless area greatly strengthens the defense of the Black Gates, preventing any invading army, such as Aragorn's, from foraging for food, water, or firewood. As Dagorlad was the “battle plain” where Sauron was previously defeated (FR, II, ii, 236–37; see also Appx B, 1059), improving its defensive qualities makes sense.

The Dark Lord does not rely solely on a poisoned and desolate wasteland for his defense, however, nor does he rely only on agents to exert his influence on the land. The second way in which his evil affects the land is more direct: as a destructive force, an invisible energy that works on living things, perverting and ultimately killing them. This falls under what Helms refers to as the fourth internal law of Middle-earth: “[w]ill and states of mind, both evil and good, can have objective reality and physical energy.”
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He illustrates this law with the terror spread by the
Ringwraiths. Sauron's evil similarly affects people, but it also affects the very land. Like an invisible poison or ionizing radiation, it slowly destroys life in his realm without the need for any agents. When the hobbits leave Dagorlad and move south into Ithilien, it becomes clear to the reader how Sauron's evil takes effect over time. A night's walk away from the Black Gates, they find themselves “in a land that had only been for a few years under the dominion of the Dark Lord and was not yet fallen wholly into decay” (TT, IV, iv, 635). While not as verdant as Ithilien (which has been under Sauron's control for an even briefer period of time), it is by no means as horrifying as Dagorlad. It is important to note how being “under the dominion of the Dark Lord” is enough to cause a land to fall into decay, but also that this process occurs over time—his evil corrupts vegetation slowly. This point is corroborated by the glens of the Morgai, on the outer edges of the Dark Land, where “Mordor was a dying land, but it was not yet dead” (RK, VI, ii, 900). What grows there is “harsh, twisted, bitter, struggling for life”—stunted, gray, withered—but apparently not even it has been under the dominion of Sauron long enough to have died.

Not only time but also distance determines the effect of Sauron's evil force. As Sam and Frodo journey through Mordor toward the Dark Tower, they find the land to be completely dead. It is a dark, arid, lifeless place of sharp rocks, dry riverbeds, and broken plains, where what little water they find is as bitter as the air. In their chapter on “The Three Faces of Mordor,” Dickerson and Evans point out how Sauron's evil kills even the memory of living nature in Frodo.
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Other parts of Mordor, farther away from the Dark Tower and the volcano, are comparatively fertile, however. The narrator tells the reader about “the great slave-worked fields away south in this wide realm […] by the dark sad waters of Lake Núrnen,” an area that Aragorn later bestows upon Sauron's freed slaves and that apparently cannot be too dreadful (RK, VI, ii, 902; v, 947).
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The force of Sauron's evil does not necessarily kill vegetation; it may only stunt or corrupt it. In some cases, the plants themselves are portrayed as turning to evil, like the brambles of Mordor, with their long, piercing thorns and hooked, sharp barbs (RK, VI, ii, 896; 900). While annoying and painful, they are not dangerous, as contrasted with the flowers of the meadows in Morgul Vale. These pale, luminous flowers are “beautiful and yet horrible of shape,” with a sickening, corpselike odor (TT, IV, viii, 689). The juxtaposition of
beautiful
and
horrible
signals the perverting effect of evil, just as the juxtaposing of
beautiful
and
terrible
does (twice) when Galadriel warns Frodo of the consequences were she to take the Ring (FR, II, vii, 356). The wrongness of something both beautiful and horrible is made plain by the description of the flowers' shapes as “like the demented forms in an uneasy dream” (TT, IV, viii, 689).

The nightmarish quality of the evil landscape is emphasized even more strongly with the Dagorlad desolation. Frodo and Sam find themselves at the edge of the dead land “like men on the edge of a sleep where nightmare lurks,” and some of Aragorn's troops suffer from the same sensation on their arrival; they walk “like men in a hideous dream made true” (TT, IV, ii, 617; RK, V, x, 868). The dream similes illustrate the third way in which a landscape becomes that of evil: through a language that warps the reader's impression of the landscape. Returning to the Dagorlad quotation, we find a number of attributes that intensify the image of the dead landscape, for instance “gasping pools,” “sickly white,” “reluctant light.” Together with another pair of striking similes (“as if the mountains had vomited the filth of their entrails” and “like an obscene graveyard”), they associate the landscape with sickness and death so forcefully that the reader easily accepts that the land is “diseased beyond all healing.”

Imagery is used to tie the evil landscape to certain concepts. Nightmares and darkness, disease and death are all typical, but more active characteristics occur as well, which personify the landscape and turn the realm into an extension of its ruler: it is a tormented land of shadows and blind darkness where mountains and cliff faces loom and frown. When Sauron broods, so does the land (iii, 914). In the three chapters in which the hobbits travel through the Dark Land (RK, VI, i–iii), there are numerous examples of anything from dead metaphors to vivid similes: when Sam first gazes out over Mordor, he sees a hard, cruel, and bitter land (i, 879), and toward the end of their trek, the landscape is “rough and hostile,” even evil (iii, 917; 914). The Morgai mountain ridge is “grim,” with “crags like fangs,” air and water are “sad,” and roads and pinnacles are “cruel” (i, 879; ii, 900, 902; iii, 914, 921). Mount Doom vomits lava and belches fumes, the entrance in its side gazing toward the Dark Tower, and although it sleeps, it does so “uneasily” (i, 879; ii, 899; iii, 921–22; 918). Despite the personifying imagery, the land remains lifeless; it is a barren landscape, constantly stressing that the Dark Lord's power is never one of life. To enter the wasteland of Dagorlad is to leave “the living lands” (RK, V, x, 868), and the wind that blows into Mordor
from the West comes “out of the living world” (RK, VI, ii, 898). Although not a land of the dead, it is a land that has died.

The Spoiled Plains and Ridjeck Thome
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Lord Foul is a spiritual being and the enemy of the world's Creator. His attempts to destroy the world in which he is imprisoned stem from his desire to escape it and confront his enemy. In
The Power That Preserves
, the third book in Donaldson's first trilogy about Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, the final confrontation between Covenant and the Dark Lord takes place in Foul's Creche. Before Covenant makes his way there, Foul's realm is described to him and his Giant friend, Foamfollower: “There the Landrider [River] becomes the Ruinwash, and flows polluted toward the Sea. It is a murky and repelling water, unfit for use by any but its own unfit denizens” (390). The land is then described in more detail:

[T]he Spoiled Plains form a wide deadland around the promontory of Ridjeck Thome, where Foul's Creche juts into the Sea. Within that deadland lies Kurash Qwellinir, the Shattered Hills. Some say that these Hills were formed by the breaking of a mountain—others, that they were shaped from the slag and refuse of [Foul's] war caverns, furnaces, breeding dens. However they were made, they are a maze to bewilder the approach of any foe. And within them lies Gorak Krembal—Hotash Slay. From Sea-cliff to Sea-cliff about the promontory, it defends [Foul's] seat with lava, so that none may pass that way to gain the one gateless maw of the Creche. (390)