Moria: East-gate, Bridge of Khazad-dûm (Patreon)

Middle-earth has a fraught relationship with doors. They’re usually katabatic, leading underground, like the Shire’s iconic hobbit-holes or Erebor’s secret door. Passing through a door can grant a traveler wisdom or instant death. Conversely, exiting through one be liberating, such as when Bilbo leaves his hobbit-hole and discovers the larger world. Direction is everything in a quest-narrative: luckily for us, Middle-earth gives us more paths than we can ever tread.

Moria has doors at its east and west ends. Gandalf estimates that Moria “cannot be less than forty miles from West-door to East-gate in a direct line, and the road may wind much.” And we’ll take advantage of that winding road. The East-gate connects Moria to Wilderland, so we’ll begin there, and then work our way to the West-door (though we can’t pass through it, as that would take us too close to Eriador).

As noted previously, the East-gate is a place of death. It’s where the Fellowship mourns Gandalf after his apparent death fighting the Balrog, the place where Dwarves futilely win their war against Moria’s orcs, and the site of Thrór’s and Azog’s killings. The East-gate is not a tomb, or even a traditional battlefield: it’s where death goes to claim its victims.

When death claims its victims, Moria gets to be a tomb. It’s easy to call Moria a great mine that becomes a necropolis: in essence, it is that. Moria’s last miners languish and die in agony in its pits and chasms. But the dwarvish kingdom isn’t a purposeful mortuary superstructure like the Giza Necropolis or Naqsh-e Rostam in southwestern Iran. Moria is a ruin: its transformation into a necropolis is a civilization-breaking failure.

Most importantly, it’s a failure that benefits nobody. The Dwarves become a diasporic race when they lose Khazad-dûm, and by the late Third Age “the Orcs have plundered Moria; there is nothing left in the upper halls.” Its riches, while beneficial in the short-term, turn out to be an exhausted scarcity.

Yet Moria’s lasting value, weirdly, is as a ruin. Its destruction shapes Middle-earth’s history more than its success could. The Dwarves’ settlements in Erebor and the Iron Hills ensure that Wilderland has a prominent dwarvish population, rather than one that simply languishes under the hills. Despite Gandalf’s death, Moria saves the Fellowship and the One Ring from Saruman. And even Gandalf’s temporary demise helps him ascend as a leader. As always, tragedy and death are redemptive forces in Middle-earth.

Tolkien’s cynical optimism defines Moria. It’s death that drives and preserves history. The Bridge of Khazad-dûm, at Moria’s end, is a fatal design. The “slender bridge of stone, without herb or rail” spans Moria’s last abyss, serving as a “defence of the Dwarves against any enemy that might capture the First Hall and the outer passages.” It seems to work for a while. When a bridge can only be crossed in single file, it’s hard for a phalanx of orcs to swarm it without tumbling into the chasm below.

Like much of Moria, the Bridge of Khazad-dûm also works in reverse. The Fellowship’s journey spans Moria from west to eat, thus making the bridge an escape for them. It’s this dilapidated state that helps distinguish the bridge from much of its surroundings. The Bridge is one of The Lord of the Rings’ legacy locations, earmarked as much by Howard Shore’s roaring motif for it in Jackson’s Fellowship as the bridge’s famous duel between Gandalf and the Balrog.

The bridge scene is of course Tolkien at his most quotable and evocative. The Balrog, a “great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of man-shape maybe, yet greater,” is one of Middle-earth’s great monsters, a demon that is both tangibly scary and physically absent. It’s a relic of the ancient world, a sign that history can still vanquish the present. And when you have a wizard shout lines at the Balrog like:

“You cannot pass. […] I am a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor. The dark fire will not avail you, flame of Udûn. Go back to the shadow! You cannot pass.”

You’re just hitting genre-birthing levels of badass. (And that’s not even factoring in Ian McKellen’s Oscar-nominated delivery of that line, nor Walsh, Boyens, and Jackson’s rewrite of the last sentence into the more assertive “you shall not pass.”)

Gandalf’s temporary death on the bridge operates similarly. Throughout The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf is embarking on his last quest, securing Middle-earth from Sauron before returning to the Undying Lands. The Fellowship of the Ring sees Gandalf stumbling in that quest, inadvisably trusting Saruman and getting imprisoned for his troubles, and failing to show up for the hobbits in Bree. Gandalf’s arc in the book is failing to keep up with world of accelerated darkness, one where the past comes back to vanquish the inheritors of its enemies.

So Gandalf’s death really is one of Tolkien’s great scenes. The Moria trip encapsulates this descent into noble history failing to preserve itself.  Gandalf sees his companions through Moria, but he’s the one last bit of history that Moria has to claim for itself. The Fellowship of the Ring is The Hobbit through a glass darkly, taking the familiar comforts of home and injecting into them a sense of wrongness. With Gandalf’s death, Moria finally defeats The Hobbit, showing that The Lord of the Rings refuses to be comforting or a sequel.

Which isn’t to say that Gandalf’s resurrection is a betrayal of these themes. George R. R. Martin’s insistence that “Gandalf should have stayed dead” is a cynical misreading of The Lord of the Rings’ themes. Death causes rebirth in Middle-earth: Gandalf’s return isn’t a contrivance; it’s the most Catholic goddamn thing in The Lord of the Rings, an logical conclusion of the book’s themes.