The Misty Mountains: Goblin-town (Patreon)

• Name: The Misty Mountains; Hithaeglir (Sindarin: line of misty peaks) / Goblin-town

• Synopsis: Morgoth erects the Misty Mountains to thwart the Valar. Dwarves and elves latter settle in the mountains, establishing the realms of Moria and Rivendell. Goblins also live in the mountains in the underground establishment of Goblin-town, while the Eyrie of Eagles rests on its peaks.

• Location: Lindis Pass, Central Otago, South Island / Stone Street Studios

South of Gundabad, the Misty Mountains divide Middle-earth in half. Wilderland and Eriador sit out of each other’s view, guarded by the gargantuan mountain range. Meeting the Grey Mountains at a geologically impossible right angle (Tolkien’s favorite position for mountain ranges), the Misty Mountains are perhaps Middle-earth’s single longest contiguous geographic feature, even surpassing Mirkwood, running 900 miles from north to south. 

The Misty Mountains’ companion, The Anduin, or Great River, runs parallel to the Misty Mountain, flowing south from the Grey ones in the north, past Mirkwood, through east Gondor, and then ultimately to the sea. Like the Misty Mountains, it is geographically improbable, the “frontier of the west-lands of Middle-earth[1].” Together, the Anduin and the Misty Mountains split Middle-earth, carving one of its most important valleys.

The Misty Mountains date to the Years of the Trees, prior to the First Age, when Morgoth rules Middle-earth in darkness. Morgoth erects the “Towers of Mist” to “hinder the riding of Oromë”, the Vala who hunts Morgoth’s corrupt creatures. The Elves find the mountains “were taller and more terrible in those days.” 

Even Sauron only manages to corrupt Mirkwood. The forest predates him. The Misty Mountains are Morgoth’s own craftwork (if not strictly his creation — he has to raise them from the earth). In Tolkien’s “only God creates” Catholic ethos, Morgoth raising the Misty Mountains is an aberration. Morgoth has to corrupt elves to breed orcs. The slight eugenics there pales next to Morgoth raising a mountain range. In context, the mountains are intrinsically blasphemous.

In this light, the Misty Mountains read oddly in The Hobbit. In The Hobbit, the divine only echoes in the mountain passes. Stone giants wage battles, hurling rocks at each other while travellers try to avoid getting crushed to death. Goblins scurry in tunnels like rats, while Gollum lives at the bottom, picking off the goblins.

It’s fitting, then, that Lindis Pass, where some of Peter Jackson’s Misty Mountain sequences were shot, is a terrifying valley that has no cell phone service for 57 kilometers. According to local paper the Otago Daily Times, the pass in New Zealand’s South Island “a scenic mountain road littered with signs about slippery surfaces, sharp corners, steep descents and high crashes.”

The Lindis Pass echoes The Hobbit’s description of the “many paths that led up into those mountains, and many passes over them. But most of the paths were cheats and deceptions and led nowhere or to bad ends.”[2] 

An Unexpected Journey’s classic dwarf ballad, “far over the Misty Mountains cold,” falls into the same ethos. The back of the movie is largely spent on crossing the mountains. “Dangerous adventures over the Edge of the Wild.”

The classic bit where Balin shouts “it’s not a thunderstorm — it’s a thunder-battle! — realized brilliantly in the movie — is wonderfully realized as a match between “stone-giants,” who “were hurling rocks at one another for a game, and catching them, and tossing them down into the darkness where they smashed among the trees far below, or splintered into little bits with a bang.” It’s an awe-inspiring bit of cosmic horror, where even the mountains the characters walk on are gods indifferent to their existence.

The venture of setting out for lost treasures is a Victorian aim. Landscapes that are mysterious to adventurers are usually quite familiar to their inhabitants. By extension, the inhabitants become aliens, little nightmares from the abyss. 

Goblin-town largely takes this form. The Hobbit refers to “goblins [that] had spread in secret after the battle of the Mines of Moria.” The goblins’ first appearance is like a nightmare. Bilbo awakens to find the wall opening and swallowing his ponies. A friend once told me this bit terrified him so much as a kid that he never finished the book. While The Hobbit’s Golden Age of Children Literatureness sometimes renders its prose twee, it enhances the nursery horror of the goblins: “that, of course, is the dangerous part about caves: you don’t know how far they go back, sometimes, or where a passage may lead to, or what is waiting for you inside.” 

Bilbo Baggins’ perspective of the goblins appearing also uplifts the goblins, starting with “he dreamed that a crack in the wall at the back of the cave got bigger and bigger,” and “the floor of the cave was giving way, and he was slipping—beginning to fall down, down, goodness knows where to.”

The corruption of English culture is a classic literary trope. The goblins, remnants of Morgoth’s perversions, embody this thoroughly, crawling into The Hobbit like ravenous vermin. Gollum is a more parasitic form of life, a bottom feeder who eats the goblins and sings about it. He’s at the bottom of the social ladder, transforming the Misty Mountains into its own stratified class society.

Even the Great Goblin is another one of The Hobbit’s capricious aristocrats. He’s a twisted parody of monarchism, another example of the repressed taking power. Writing this the day after Queen Elizabeth II’s death, I find myself feeling affection for the Great Goblin. He’s so gloriously unsuited to the role that his lack of pretense to proper monarchism makes him one of The Hobbit’s minor delights. He’s king on his terms, not Tolkien’s.

And so our first trip to the Misty Mountains shows us a debased expression of power. The repressed ever thrives in Middle-earth. Let’s now take a visit to the more regal life-forms of the mountains, animals for whom its slopes are a more comfortable abode.

[1] The Silmarillion, “Of the Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor”

[2] The Hobbit, “Over Hill and Under Hill”