BATTLES From the creation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s world of Arda until the end of the War of the Ring—some 37,0001 years later—cataclysmic wars punctuated by crucial battles have determined the course of that world’s evolution and history. In the recording of these events upon Middle-earth and the Undying Lands, Tolkien takes a similar approach to that of a real-world historian.
Like those of their real-life historic counterparts, the annals of Tolkien’s races and nations record each civilization’s achievements in the creative arts, the architecture of its great cities and the genius of its technologies, but they also give weight to the pivotal role of great battles that result in the rise and fall of empires.
For undeniably it is in battles and wars that the fates of nations and races are finally determined. And for all nations (both real and imaginary), it is in these crucial battles that the courage and wisdom of their most celebrated heroes are ultimately tested. Furthermore, these wars are also the crucial themes of all the great civilizations’ national epics: Greece’s Iliad, Germany’s Nibelungenlied, Norway and Iceland’s Poetic Edda, India’s Mahabharata, Mesopotamia’s Epic of Gilgamesh.
In Tolkien’s Middle-earth, The Lord of the Rings is certainly comparable to Greece’s Iliad. However, the difference is that Homer—unlike Tolkien—did not have to invent an entire world’s evolution, geography, history, and mythology before even beginning his tale of the Trojan War.
BATTLE OF DAGORLAD The single greatest battle of the Second Age was fought in Sauron’s War with the Last Alliance of Elves and Men on a treeless stony plain between the Dead Marshes and the Gates of Mordor. It was a battle fought over months, rather than days, with hundreds of thousands of casualties. Tolkien’s fictional Battle of Dagorlad was authentically informed by his own experience as a soldier in the equally bloody real-world Battle of the Somme during the First World War. When the Last Alliance of Elves and Men marched on Mordor in 3434 of the Second Age, Tolkien framed the conflict in Arthurian terms.
In 2013 Tolkien’s unfinished poem The Fall of Arthur was published, illuminating similarities between his conception of the Arthurian legends and the battles of the Second and Third Ages of Middle-earth. Many stanzas are strongly redolent of the threat of Sauron: “The endless East in anger woke / and black thunder born in dungeons / under mountains of menace moved above them.” For the Battle of Dagorlad and the Siege of the Dark Tower, Tolkien seems to have drawn particularly on the legend of the Last Battle of Camlann. At Camlann, Arthur destroyed the forces arrayed against him, only for he and Mordred to slay each other in climactic single combat; the Alliance experienced a similarly pyrrhic victory as their armies triumphed but Gil-galad and Elendil received mortal wounds as they finally overcame Sauron.
After Arthur’s death, it was the duty of one surviving knight to retrieve the king’s sword. In Tolkien’s Middle-earth, it was left to Elendil’s son Isildur to retrieve (the shards of) the king’s sword and with it cut the One Ring from Sauron’s hand.
Battle of Dagorlad. This is an artist’s impression of the Battle of Dagorlad and the Siege of the Dark Tower. For Tolkien’s account of the battle, see The Silmarillion, “Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age.”
BATTLE OF FIVE ARMIES This climactic battle in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was fought over the treasure of the Lonely Mountain after the slaying of its guardian, Smaug the Golden Dragon. As Tolkien readily acknowledged, the basic plot of The Hobbit—complete with Dragon and treasure horde—was largely informed and inspired by his lifelong study of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf.
The huge Northman Beorn, Chieftain of the Beornings, is a “skin-changer”: Tolkien’s fairy-tale version of the bear-cult hero of the real-life berserker warrior cult of the Germanic and Norse peoples. Although the historical berserkers felt possessed by the ferocious spirit of the enraged bear, these states were only rituals attempting to imitate the core miracle of the cult: the incarnate transformation of man to bear. Yet Tolkien provides the real thing when Beorn has a battlefield transformation from fierce warrior into an enraged were-bear (though Tolkien never uses that word)—an event that turns the tide of battle.
Tolkien’s Dwarves resembled the warriors of Norse myth in their fighting style. For example, in Thorin Oakenshield’s sudden entry into the Battle of the Five Armies, the Dwarf-king employed an ancient Norse shock tactic in a formation known as the svinfylking, or “swine array.” This was a wedge-shaped shield-wall formation frequently used by heavily armed Viking warriors to break through enemy lines and create panic among the closed ranks of an army with superior numbers. It could be extremely effective, but it entirely depended on the initial monumental shock. If this flying wedge did not immediately break through enemy lines, the formation would soon collapse. Like many shield-wall tactics, it could often be outflanked and entirely encircled. And, indeed, this would likely have been the fate of Thorin Oakenshield and his warriors had it not been for the sudden arrival of an unexpected ally.
The Eagles of Middle-earth are generally not prominent players in Tolkien’s narratives, but their intervention is nearly always crucial—as in the Battle of the Five Armies—and they arrive at times of desperate need, frequently when rescue can be achieved only by the power of flight. They are part of a tradition of eagle-emissaries in myth, leading from the birds of the Greek god Zeus (the Roman Jupiter) to the vassals of Manwë, the Lord of the Winds of Arda.
Battle of the Five Armies. This is an artist’s impression of the Battle of Five Armies. For Tolkien’s account of the conflict, see The Hobbit, Chapters XI and XVII, and Unfi nished Tales, Part Three, Chapter III.
BATTLE OF HORNBURG This was one of the most decisive battles in the War of the Ring. Here the army of the White Hand of Saruman the Wizard was set against Théoden the King of Rohan’s defenders of the Hornburg. Also known as the Battle of Helm’s Deep, the Hornburg’s impressive earthwork walls and trench—known as Helms Dike—was defended two centuries earlier by Helm Hammerhand, the Ninth King of Rohan in the first Dunlending–Rohirrim war. That mighty Rohan king was modeled on the historic eighth century Anglo-Saxon King Offa of Mercia: the architect of Offa’s Dyke, a massive earthwork wall and trench that marked (and still marks) the border between England and Wales. However, in the War of the Ring, Helm’s Dike was breached by Saruman’s hordes of Dunlendings, Orcs, Half-Orcs, and Uruk-hai that then stormed the Deeping Wall and smashing the gates of the Hornburg fortress itself. While a faction of Rohirrim retreated into Helm’s Deep, the tide of battle was turned by the unexpected charge of King Théoden’s cavalry that drove the invaders from the high walls of Hornburg out onto the battleground of Deeping-comb. There the fleeing enemy forces were driven directly into the path of a second charging army of Rohirrim led by Gandalf the Wizard and Erkenbrand the Lord of Westfold. In the crush of battle, the Dunlendings either fought to the death or surrendered; while the Orcs and Uruks were driven into the forest where they were slaughtered by a legion of those wild giant tree spirits known as Huorns.
Battle of the Hornburg. This is an artist’s impression of the Battle of the Hornburg. For Tolkien’s account of the battle, see The Lord of the Rings, Book III, Chapter VII.
MARCH OF THE ENTS ON ISENGARD Beyond ent being an Anglo-Saxon name for “giant,” the inspiration for Tolkien’s March of the Ents came about in a rather negative way: through his dislike and, indeed, disapproval of William Shakespeare’s treatment of myths and legends. His greatest abuse was heaped on one of the playwright’s most popular plays, Macbeth. The creation of the Ents, Tolkien explained, “is due, I think, to my bitter disappointment and disgust from schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of ‘Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill’: I longed to devise a setting in which the trees might really march to war.” Tolkien felt Shakespeare had trivialized and misinterpreted an authentic myth, providing a cheap, simplistic interpretation of the prophecy of this march of the wood upon the hill. So in The Lord of the Rings Tolkien did indeed devise such a setting. And certainly, in his own March of the Ents, the fundamental opposition between the spirits of the forest and of the mountain was revealed and portrayed in a way that lends power and dignity to the archetypal miracle of a wood marching on a hill.
To find beings of myth who do correspond directly to the Ents, Tolkien had only to look back into English folklore, where the Green Man plays a distinctive part. Green Man stories and carvings were common in Tolkien’s beloved West Midlands and the Welsh Marches just beyond. He was a Celtic nature spirit and tree god who represented the coming of new growth in victory over the powers of ice and frost. Essentially benevolent, he could also be powerful and destructive.
The semi-sentient Huorns represent the wilder, more dangerous aspect of the Green Man: an inhuman power tapping the deepest sources of the natural world where fowls, animals, and even children were sacrificed to placate the demonic spirit of certain trees.
The appearance of Huorns brought terror to their foes. They may have been Ents who in time had grown treeish, or perhaps trees that had grown Entish, but they were certainly wrathful, dangerous, and merciless. In the Huorns, we have a dramatization of an avenging army of “Green Men” making an attack on all creatures who are hostile to the spirits of forests.
March of the Ents on Isengard. This is an artist’s impression of the March of the Ents on Isengard. For Tolkien’s account of the fall of Isengard, see The Lord of the Rings, Book III, Chapters IX and X.
THE BATTLE OF THE PELENNOR FIELDS This is the most richly described conflict in the annals of Middle-earth, and the most dramatic, if not the final, battle of the War of the Ring. As such, it draws on many aspects of real-world military history, ranging over a thousand years of European warfare.
In his chronicles of Gondor and Arnor, Tolkien links the history of the Dúnedain kingdoms to many comparable aspects in the history of the ancient Roman Empire. However, by the time of the War of the Ring, in Aragorn’s attempt at restoration of the Reunited Dúnedain Kingdom of Arnor and Gondor, Tolkien has drawn on the historical precedent of the warrior king Charlemagne, who reunited and restored the Roman Empire to its former glory in the form of the Holy Roman Empire in the eighth century.
In a letter to a publisher, Tolkien makes direct reference to this Carolingian motif in The Lord of the Rings: “The progress of the tale ends in what is far more like the reestablishment of an effective Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome.”
And certainly, in its physical geography, Tolkien saw the Reunited Kingdom as an expanse of land comparable to Charlemagne’s empire. The action of The Lord of the Rings takes place in the northwest of Middle-earth, in a region roughly equivalent to the Western European landmass. Hobbiton and Rivendell, as Tolkien often acknowledged, were roughly intended to be at the latitude of Oxford.
By his own estimation, this put Gondor and Minas Tirith some 600 miles to the south in a location that might be equivalent to Florence. This would suggest that Mordor might be approximately comparable to the mountainous regions of Romania or Bulgaria and the basin of the Black Sea.
In terms of enemies as well as allies, Charlemagne and Aragorn have much in common. At the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, the Gondor and Rohan cavalry encounters an enemy in the form of the Southron cavalry of Harad. This is comparable to battles in which Charlemagne’s cavalry fought their historic enemies: the Moors of Spain and the Saracens of North Africa. Other foes of Gondor and Rohan were the ancient, rebellious Dunlending tribesmen who had their historical counterparts in the rebellious Basque tribesmen who ambushed Charlemagne’s chevalier, Roland, in Roncesvalles Pass in the Pyrenees.
However, with the appearance on the Pelennor Fields of the warriors mounted on Mûmakil—equivalent to Hannibal’s Carthaginian war elephants—and companies of Easterlings bearded like Dwarves and armed with great two-handed axes—equivalent to the late Byzantine axe-bearing infantries—Tolkien introduces troops and weaponry drawn from both much earlier (third century BC) and much later periods (twelfth century AD) of European warfare.
And, as already noted, Tolkien’s dramatic charge of the Rohirrim in the Battle of the Pelennor Fields has parallels with the fifth-century AD Roman account of an historical Gothic cavalry action in the Battle of Châlons in AD 451. This was an alliance between the Roman general Flavius Aetius and the Gothic King Theodoric that proved to be the salvation of Western Europe from the seemingly unstoppable invading hordes of Attila the Hun.
Similarly, among earlier allies of Mordor, we are told, there were the Easterlings of Rhûn who were perhaps inspired by the twelfth-century Seljuk Turks of Rhum (Anatolia). Meanwhile, among those fighting on Gondor’s eastern borders were the Variags of Khand; these were perhaps inspired by the tenth-or eleventh-century Variangians of the Khanate of Kiev, who were also known as the Rus—and, later, the Russians.
Siege of Minas Tirith. This is an artist’s impression of the Siege of Minas Tirith. For Tolkien’s account of the siege, see The Lord of the Rings, Book V, Chapter IV.
Battle of Pelennor Fields. This is an artist’s impression of the Battle of Pelennor Fields. For Tolkien’s account of the battle, see The Lord of the Rings, Book V, Chapters V and VI.
BATTLE OF THE BLACK GATE Morannon the Black Gate was not only the entrance of that cursed and hellish realm of Mordor, but it was specifically the entrance to the region known as Udûn, meaning “black pit, hell.” Certainly, Tolkien meant the Black Gate to be Middle-earth’s equivalent to the Gate of Hell in Dante’s inferno with its motto: “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” Tolkien may have been inspired by the medieval images in his conception of a massive iron gate with its two mighty “Towers of the Teeth.” This would certainly be in keeping with the ancient Anglo-Saxon vision of the “Hellmouth”: the entrance of hell as the gaping the jaws of a huge monster.
In the War of the Ring, the Black Gate was the site of the final last stand of Sauron the Ring Lord against the Army of the Captains of the West. Victory for the evil forces of Sauron appeared certain as the few thousand Gondor men-at-arms were outnumbered by “forces ten times, and more than ten times their match.” However, the battle at the Black Gate proved to be a tactical distraction; while others worked secretly to bring about the Necromancer’s downfall by destroying the One Ring of Power. In German Romance, there was one named Janibas the Necromancer who, like Sauron, lived in a mountain kingdom where he commanded demonic armies of giants, men, and monsters. And just as Sauron’s power was invested in a ring, Janibas’s power was invested in a black tablet. Janibas’s downfall came in the midst of battle, when suddenly his tablet was snatched from his grasp and smashed. The destruction of Janibas’s tablet not only destroyed his necromancer’s power, but also caused all his demonic armies of giants, men, and monsters to become like him a mere phantom dispelled by the wind. This was the fate he shared with Sauron the Ring Lord. The mighty foundations of his palaces cracked and the very mountains of his realm collapsed in ruin.
Battle of the Black Gate. This is an artist’s impression of the Battle of the Black Gate. For Tolkien’s account of the conflict, see The Lord of the Rings, Book VI, Chapter X.
Battle of Azanulbizar. Dwarves make dangerously persistent enemies, as proved by this battle—a conflict with echoes in various mining cultures, where goblins or demons have been said to sabotage miners in tunnels, hindering their work out of sheer malice and spite.
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1This estimation of 37,000 years is based on one early version of Tolkien’s own chronology. However, there is another (and possibly earlier) account by Tolkien that suggests a 57,000-year history. That said, the disputed 20,000 years occur so early in Arda’s history that virtually no specific events take place. Consequently, I have chosen to stick with Tolkien’s first published time span.
