Nowhere and Back Again: Barad-dur (Part 2) (Patreon)

We’re nearly 1000 words into this essay and I’ve only just started to talk about Barad-dûr, despite it being the blog post’s eponymous location. This was intentional on my part. Barad-dûr is less a building where concrete events happen than it is a paragon of evil in Middle-earth. Tolkien’s only consistent descriptions of it are broad political ones in The Silmarillion and visions of epochal horror in The Lord of the Rings. There are no sequences of events that take place inside Tolkien’s legendarium, and adaptations of it largely follow suit (with the partial exception of a fleeting moment in Peter Jackson’s The Fellowship of the Ring, which we’ll get to later). Gollum’s experience of Barad-dûr is only mentioned, a feature both of Barad-dûr’s evasion of material reality and Gollum’s inability at coherent communication.

And yet for its recondite nature, Barad-dûr is the culturally defining architectural piece in The Lord of the Rings. The Eye of Sauron, which festoons the earliest hardback editions of the trilogy, sits atop the Dark Tower, an eldritch monstrosity too awful for stories of its own to permeate the larger narrative of Middle-earth. Its presence is at the center of some of Tolkien’s most memorable passages. Take for instance the moment at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring where Frodo, shaken by Boromir’s attempt to murder him, succumbs to temptation and dons the Ring, an event in which he is greeted by a terrifying vision of Barad-dûr:

Thither, eastward, unwilling [Frodo’s] eye was drawn. It passed the ruined bridges of Osgiliath, the grinning gates of Minas Morgul, and the haunted Mountains, and it looked upon Gorgoroth, the valley of terror in the Land of Mordor. Darkness lay there under the Sun. Fire glowed amid the smoke. Mount Doom was burning, and a great reek rising. Then at last his gaze was held: wall upon wall, battlement upon battlement, black, immeasurably strong, mountain of iron, gate of steel, tower of adamant, he saw it: Barad-dûr, Fortress of Sauron. All hope left him.And suddenly he felt the Eye. There was an eye in the Dark Tower that did not sleep. He knew that it had become aware of his gaze. A fierce eager will was there. It leaped towards him; almost like a finger he felt it, searching for him. Very soon it would nail him down, know just exactly where he was.

Tolkien doesn’t give us an in-depth description of Barad-dûr as a place; he’s normally disinclined to give such pedantic treatments to the appearances of his characters and locations. Rather he conveys the presence of Barad-dûr, the essence of total awfulness in Mordor. The Dark Tower is the stuff of apocalyptic visions, a marker of changing times. Indeed, the most explicit appearances of Barad-dûr in The Lord of the Rings are harbingers of massive changes in the narrative. In The Fellowship of the Ring, it signifies an end to the first part of Frodo’s quest and his departure from the Company that set out from Rivendell. A similar passage occurs after the One Ring is destroyed, this time from the perspective of Sam Gamgee, witnessing the Tower’s downfall through a traumatized haze:

A brief vision [Sam] had of swirling cloud, and in the midst of it towers and battlements, tall as hills, founded upon a mighty mountain-throne above immeasurable pits; great courts and dungeons, eyeless prisons sheer as cliffs, and gaping gates of steel and adamant: and then all passed. Towers fell and mountains slid: walls crumbled and melted, crashing down; vast spires of smoke and spouting steams went billowing up, up, until they toppled like an overwhelming wave, and its wild crest curled and came foaming down upon the land.

Even in defeat, Barad-dûr signifies power and excess, its destruction seeming to last for eons as the gargantuan fortress collapses onto the Plateau of Gorgoroth. As the distance between Barad-dûr and Mount Doom, where Sam stands when he witnesses Barad-dûr’s fall, is no small one, we’re left with a sense of geography and apocalypse, where the death of societies is observable and concrete yet distant and hostile. Sauron’s fall can be witnessed by those who look for it, but it’s abstruse to those who haven’t been subsumed into his empire.

In Peter Jackson’s film trilogy, Barad-dûr’s presence is more ubiquitous than its literary counterpart. Part of this is down to the medium — an offstage protagonist is more manageable in prose than on film. Having montages conclude with shots of the Eye of Sauron is an effective way of conveying menace, and appropriately festoons the movies. Peter Jackson’s stylistic heavy-handedness is also a major fact in the pronunciation of Sauron’s presence in the films: would The Lord of the Rings have been a major Hollywood blockbuster with an 8-minute prologue featuring Sauron coming out in proto-Dark Soulsesque armor and beating the shit out of armored elves and men? From there Sauron’s presence is reduced to his (ultimately more memorable) Eye, glaring out over Middle-earth while retaining a physical presence. In The Return of the King, Jackson’s tendency for literalism manifests in the Eye casting a literal spotlight on the land around it, and that’s the extent of Sauron as a physical presence (barring a rightly deleted scene where Aragorn has a one-on-one sword battle with Sauron).

Barad-dûr is a stunning feat of design in the movies; one of the most alarmingly solid creations in it. A spiraling gothic mass of towers and spires, it’s crowned by Sauron’s Eye flaming above it watching the landscape. Yet we never get an interior shot of Barad-dûr, save a glimpse of Gollum on the torture table. Jackson’s Barad-dûr is ostentatious in its recondity, towering over the film, too evil to be explored in anything but its effects. The cast of The Lord of the Rings spend their lives responding to Mordor; the War for the Ring is ultimately waged on Mordor’s terms. Whoever tells the story, Tolkien or Jackson, none can escape the Dark Tower’s ubiquitous void.