Sauron and the Fall of Mordor
by Gimli a Dwarf
Lost amid the drama of the military struggles between Sauron and the free peoples of Middle-Earth is story of Sauron's power and influence over the entire land of Mordor. With his power, Sauron shaped the cities, sprawling suburbs and economy of one of the largest lands of Middle-Earth - and, to and extent that would have shocked analysts, influenced the destiny of all the cities of thirtieth-century Middle Earth.
The land in which the shaping by his hand is most evident is Mordor, the Dark Realm, colossal synthesis of ancient ground works, industrialisation and urban renewal. It had become a cliché by the mid-twenty-ninth century to say that Mordor was "unlivable," and this meant, since its rugged terrain and harsh environment could not sustain a stable population, that a stable, operational civil system could not exist within its boundaries. In such a context, the cliché was valid. No civil system shaped Morder; no authority - not even the Númenóreans - left upon its roiling surface more than the faintest of lasting fingerprints.
But Sauron shaped Morder.
Physically, any map of the land proves it. The very landscape of land was different before Sauron came to power. He rammed bulkheads of iron deep into the muck beneath rivers and lakes and crammed into the space between bulkheads and rivers edge and lakes edge immensities of earth and stone, that hardened into thousands of acres of arable land and thus altered the physical geography of the land.
Standing out from the map's delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the cities or slashing across its expanses. These line denote major roads on which wagons and machinery move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a land's people live and work. Without exception, Sauron built every one of these roads. He built the Barad-dúr Expressway, the Lithlad Expressway and the Angren Expressway. He built the Gorgoroth Expressway, the Durthang Expressway, the Udún Expressway, the Narchost Expressway and the Ephel Dúath Expressway. He built the Cross-Núrn Expressway, the Cross-Glamhoth Expressway and the Ungol Expressway. He built the Morgul Drive and the Morannon Highway.
In the South and East of Mordor the Sea of Núrnen dominates the landscape. The four massive tributaries of this inland sea quarter Nurn into four separate boroughs and bridges link these boroughs to the industrial and administrative metropolises in the northwest. Seven bridges were built, immense structures, some of them anchored by towers as tall as any in Barad-dúr, supported by cables made up of enough wire to drop a noose around the earth. Those bridges are the Duath, the Cross-Nurn, the Cross-Glamhoth, the Eastway, the Southern Span, the Northborough and the Midway. Sauron built every one of those bridges.
And no enumeration of the streets, roads and bridges that Sauron himself built in Mordor does more than suggest the immensity of his physical influence on the land. For the seventy years between 2942 and 3012, seventy years of plenty in civil and military construction, seventy years marked by the most intensive such construction in its history, no improvement of any type -not factory or residence, street or sewer, ditch or fortification - was built unless Sauron approved its design and location. To clear the land for these improvements, he evicted the land's people, not thousands of them or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, from their homes and tore the homes down. Neighbourhoods were obliterated by his edict to make room for new neighbourhoods reared at his command.
Away from the heart of Barad-dúr in the South and East smaller roads trace like ribbons out from the ramrod straight Expressways. These roads connect the arable land of the scantly populated regions to the over-populated industrial centres around the capital. This arable land provides all the food for the Sauron's armies of workers and soldiers. Sauron created every acre of this arable land. Sauron ordered millions of tonnes of earth to be displaced, thousands of miles of ditch and tunnel to be scraped from the earth in order to channel the waters of the Núrnen into the arid wastelands of Mordor. In doing so he changed the physical geography of Mordor and with it the economic geography as well.
The physical works of Sauron are not confined to the cities or inland plains of Morder. The largest of them are over one hundred miles from Barad-dúr, stretched along the frontier where the Ered Lithui and the Ephel Duath mountain ranges reach towards each other.
North of Carach Angren the land rolls barren and empty. The land is a flat bottomed bowl, hemmed in on all sides by towering mountains and only an occasional outpost interrupts the expanse of bare plains and scraggly woods. But reach the end of the road and there is Cirith Gorgor - and stretched across it, one of the most colossal single works of man, a structure of black stone and iron 60 feet high and 250 feet long. Morannon, the Black Gate, is 90 feet wide and only a thin pale line down the centre, barely visible against its dull-black massiveness gives a hint as to its purpose. Twin doors are mounted on huge stone wheels and rolled, by the power of a small army of mountain-trolls, inwards along tracks built into the circular ramparts. No where in Middle-Earth would such a structure, greater in mass than the White Tower of Ecthelion, have been conceived. No one, other than Sauron, could have demanded that it be built. No one, other than Sauron, could have achieved it.
How then do we regard Sauron's legacy? In one of the least populated and most inhospitable corners of Middle-Earth - in a land deemed unlivable - Sauron created, by force of will, an economic and military powerhouse that threatened to take over all of Middle-Earth.
Sauron was Middle-Earth's greatest builder. He was the shaper of one of the most powerful lands of Middle-Earth.
But what did he build? What was the shape into which he pounded the Black Land? Can we say that Mordor would have been a better place if Sauron had never built anything? Would it have been a better place if the man who shaped it had never lived?
To build his highways, Sauron threw out the homes and townships of the indigenous population. He tore out the hearts of a score of neighbourhoods, communities that had scraped a living off the hostile land for centuries.
By building his highways, Sauron flooded the cities with people looking for jobs and amenities. The suburbs across Gorgoroth, once rural and empty, were filled with sprawling, low-density developments filled with straight, dreary streets and long, low, drab housing. The challenge of feeding this over-populated urban sprawl was the concern of the newly industrialised farmland in the south-east. By irrigating the vast expanse of Nurn, he allowed the cities to be supplied and fed. But the feeding and supplying of those cities was the back-breaking work of hundreds of thousands of low-paid or slave labourers.
Sauron believes that his work will endure, that his programs have fed and housed hundreds of thousands of people, that his developments have brought order and prosperity to a land that beat a meagre existence before his arrival. Perhaps he is right. It is impossible to say that Mordor would have been a better land if Sauron had never lived.
It is possible to say only that it would have been a different land.
